A HOSPITAL DAIRY FARM

Evening Post, Volume C, Issue 85, 7 October 1920, Page 6

A HOSPITAL DAIRY FARM

The question of the advisability of the Wellington Hospital Board owning its own dairy farm arises incidentally from the discussion now proceeding concerning the prices of milk and butter, and Mr. W. T. Strand's hospital contract. Mr. Strand, in the course of a letter to the Editor, says:

Roughly speaking, the Hospital Board will pay on the present (reduced) price £3200 per annum for milk. If I took a price based on tho Wellington wholesale price, tho Board would pay about £4000. This is a tremendous amount for siich an institution to pay for milk. I have often, during three or four years, suggested and /advised that the Board should have a farm of its own, to produce the milk required for tho Hospital. I am certain that this course would bo more economical, and the Board would be free of market fluctuations.

Mr. Strand is not an academic Labour politician. He is a farmer who has succeeded. He knows what he is talking about, and lie cannot very well be suspected of having an axe to grind in giving this advice to the Hospital Board, because its acceptance would deprive him of a iustomer. And the more, his critics strive—however unsuccessfully—to prove him to be an exploiter of-hospitals, the less axe they entitled to urge that his advice to the Board is actuated by a selfish motive. To say that, of course, is fcot to say that the case for a hospital farm is proved, but a proposition backed by. such advocacy is well worth examining. The sum of over £3000 expended by the Board yearly on milk would pay the interest on a sum of over £50,000. A hospital farm would not be such an immense undertaking as a number of municipal farms. If the advocates of a big municipal dairy farming venture to supply the city public are on sound lines, they should endeavom first to prove their case by demonstration on a smaller but practical scale. If such an experiment is worth making, a hospital dairy farm appears to be as goot) a .medium as any other.