MILK TESTING FOR CHEESE.

Franklin Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 99, 25 August 1933, Page 4

MILK TESTING FOR CHEESE.

WE published recently Mr P. 0. Veale’s criticism of the Dairy Division of the Department of Agriculture, and to-day we print the reply by the Minister of Agriculture, the Hon, C. E. Macmillan. The answer leaves out the most important point in the controversy. It says nothing about the common habit of calling together commissions and committees for advisory purposes and treating their recommendations as things of nought. In the present instance, if the knowledge of the four gentlemen mentioned by the Minister was so great as to justify the overriding of the recommendations of the scientific specialists, it was clearly sufficient to decide the points in question without first going through the useless preliminary of taking the opinions of the specialists. To call them in and then publicly to tlout them is neither common sense nor common manners, and results only in disgust and annoyance. We cannot expect experts to bring the benefit of their studies and experience to our scientific manufacturing- processes, if they arc to lie ignored and finally overruled by the possessors of mere empirical information. The Minister uses the names of men of real scientific training, hut be admits that lie himself and the director of the Dairy Division are not scientists, as Mr Veale pointed out, and yet it Is obvious that their votes overruled lhe votes of the experts. This was the head and front of the complaint made by Mr Veale, and the cause of his peremptory refusal to stultify himself by continuing to sit, on the Special Dairy Committee. it is not the first time that this has happened in the history of New Zealand. We are a small community and we are not accustomed to the value of the scientist in business. In other countries liis services are prized at their true worth, hut not here. This explains, partly, who our best experts are so often lost to us. They find greater recognition elsewhere, and their motherland knows them no more. Maybe those whom we place in power are so obsessed with our comparative unimportance when measured by the great populations of the earth that they- do not realise that our dairy busi-

ness is one of the biggest things of its kind in the world. It is so big Unit it is entitled to the best aid that knowledge can give it. There is no room in it for non-seientific leaders who “do not accept" the results of the work of the scientists appointed to advise them.