POULTRY INDUSTRY

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 5, 1 October 1929, Page 12

POULTRY INDUSTRY

Sir, —I was very interested to read Mr. J. H. Kissling’s report to the Massey Agricultural College Council on the poultry industry, but I should like to know upon what he bases his statement that “feeding costs are far less than the average.” As a poultry specialist, with experience spread over a number of years in England, Australia, and this country, it has been my experience that the feeding cost per bird in New Zealand is about 1 jd. more per week than in England, and id. more than in Australia. Moreover, the quality of fowls feed is very poor in comparison with that of the other two countries, especially in the case of wheat offals.

I think, too, that it will be many years before this country has any stock worth exporting if one may judge by the trouble experienced in obtaining birds with four generation pedigrees such as can be obtained in England. It is not merely a matter of one or two outstanding individual records, but it is wholesale trap-nesting that counts with individual records of the birds from the egg-stage and at least two generations before. How can Mr. Kissling claim, then, that “this export trade could easily be worked up” when there is not, I believe, a single poultry farmer in the Dominion who has the foggiest notion of what exact trap-nesting means—trapnesting, that is, of all pullets on the farm, or at least of. those that may be used for breeding purposes.—l am, etc.,

H. de ORELLANA. Masterton, September 27.