The Feilding Star. Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette. MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1908. The Farmer and the Cow.

Feilding Star, Volume III, Issue 759, 21 December 1908, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Oroua and Kiwitea Counties Gazette. MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1908. The Farmer and the Cow.

Anyone who is hurt by his own people experiences something in the nature of an insult being added to injury. Some of the farmers in the Feilding district are feeling that way towards The Farmer, a journal which they look upon as a sympathiser rather than as being against them. But here is the gravamen of the offence, as complainants have stated the case to us. An article on the cementing of 'the floor of cow-bails which originally appeared in the Times was reprinted by The Farmer as though it stated the case accurately. The writer, dealing with the dairy regulations, claimed that the concreting and cementing 4 inches thick could bo done for £11 for ten bails, whilst a race 30ft long and 6;ft wide could be constructed at a coilt of only £6. And this critic of cow-bail economies concludes that "the farmer who cannot afford £17 for such a purpose must be in a very poor way indeed." This latter jibe was quite uncalled for. The writer surely does not know much about a large class of men on the land or he would know that £17 would be a heavy handicap during the hard times and monej*-tightnet« recently experienced. But it is the writer's estimates that, we desire to correct. A race 6ft by 30ft costing £*i would be 6b per superficial yard. Now, a single shed to contain ten bails would have a floor space of 72 yards; that is, a ehed 13ft by 50ft. S) that the cost for (cementing it< would be £21 12s. Then the race oould not stop at the comer of a

■ingle shed, but would have to go right along the front of the shed, and would th«refor« b« 80ft long, instead of 80ft, having an area of 58J yards, which, at 6s per yard (or £16) gives & total cost for cementing the shed and race of £37 12s. Yet the writer says £17 1 The above estimates are based on those of the writer in the Times, 8s per yard ; but in most dairying districts the cost would be from 6s to 10s per yard, and in some even higher than that.