The whey vat may be regarded as a necessary evil, but with
means at hand to relieve ourselves of some of its putrefactive
characteristics. We trust that the day for having this swill tub
harnessed to the factory will soon be an item of the shady past.
Whey is all right in its place, but its place, as soon as it is
drained from the curd, is a long distance from the factory building.
I would place the whey vat ten rods away from the factory, and if
night delivery of milk was the rule, I would move it _twenty_ rods
off. Get it at least beyond contaminating distance, and then have
the whey carried to it in open tin troughs. If the troughs are
thoroughly painted you need not fear rust, and as they are of metal
they cannot dry up, warp and leak. Have the spouts about the factory
perfectly tight so that no whey can fall to the ground, for it is
fearful stuff to generate offensive effluvia. Try and keep the whey
receptacle as neat and clean as possible. Have it roofed, but open
on the sides. Skim the cream from it every morning, and it would be
much better if you would churn it fresh instead of keeping it for
weeks to be rendered out in a kettle by fire. Scrub the vat out every
day with a broom; it will take five minutes’ time and a pailful of
hot water. Make it a rule for each patron to draw away no more than
three pails of whey for every hundred pounds of milk delivered. Also,
make it a rule to yard nobody’s pigs or calves about the premises for
convenient whey slopping. Insist on it that if your patrons insist on
drawing sour whey home in their milk cans they put on extra “elbow
grease” afterward in cleansing them. A cheese maker hardly likes to
make the imputation to patrons that their wives are not neat (only,
perhaps, when they are in a great hurry) about scalding out the sour
whey from milk cans, and yet such insinuations on his part are often
necessary.