THE DAIRYING INDUSTRY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 583, 9 July 1913, Page 9

THE DAIRYING INDUSTRY.

HOME-SEPARATION v. CREAMERY. A representative gathering of milk suppliers met Mr Wesley Spragg and Mr H. E. Pacey, chairman of directors and general manager respectively of the New Zealand Dairy Association, on Thursday last in the Papakura public library. During hiß address Mr Pacey produced a letter by Mr Goodfellow, which appeared in the Waikato Times of June 30t!), and made some comment thereon. He said he did not wish to reciprocate the spirit of this letter, nor did he desire toweary the audience by dealing with a number of fallacies of a minor kind which had been published. He, however, said he wished to refer briefly to the competition which existed on the Auckland market during the past season, and to the statement which he had previously made that the Goodi'elluw Company's butter had been offered at lower rates or subject to bigger deductions than had the standard brands of butter sold by the principal companies carrying on business in the Waikato. Instead of meeting this charge, Mr Goodfellow had offered to put up £SO to be paid to the Waikato Hospital if he, the speaker, would prove something which had not any bearing on the subject. This appeared to be part of a settled policy of the company in question. The Goodfellow Company had, at their suppliers' "party," which was held at Hamilton in June, 1912, ridiculed a statement which h*, the speaker, made to the fact that the Waikato Dairy Company had arranged with the Onewhero creamery to supply the cream with which to make butter intended for the Hamilton Show. Mr Shirley, the manager of that company, had then offered to put up £2O to support an altogether different statement. This was a clever means of evading the issue, but on the speaker having offered to furnish the proof of this statement, Mr Shirley by advertisement in the Herald on June 22nd, 1912, admitted that the statement was corect. Mr Pacey said Mr Goodfellow had recently been confronted by the following proposition:—His company claimed to sell their butter at higher rates, to run their company at much less expense, and to pay all j

the profits to the suppliers. If this were bo Mr Goorifellow was asked to explain how it wag that their payments to suppliers for butter-fat were so much smaller than the payments by most of the other companies. Mr Goodfellow clearly could not explain this problem, nor did he attempt to show that his company's payments were nearly equal to those of the other companies—indeed, h 9 siught to justify the fact that they were smaller on the ground that they were uniformly so. Mr Pacey said he thought they had not even that redeeming virtue; certainly they had not if the statements made by some of the Goodfellow suppliers were correct, and in Onewhero the suppliers to the Goodfellow Company were looking for a concession payment which was aaid to have been promised them, and which was entirely agar.ist the suggestion of uniformity. The speaker further said that it should not be necessary for inquiry to be directed to a company's auditor for information concerning its own affairs, and in quired whether it would not be better for the Goodfellow Company to follow the practice which usually obtained amongst co-operative dairy companies of publishing an audited balance-sheet with a report as to a means of demonstrating the point at issue a published list of their shareholders would also be instructive. Referring to the reference in Mr Goodfellow's letter to the question of tests, Mr Pacey said under the creamery system the supplier received payment for all the butter fat in the milk, whereas everywhere under the home-separation system the supplier was only paid for the butter fat which he succeeded in getting out of the milk by means of the separator, there always being a greater or lesser loss through the separator. It was, therefore, the height of absurdity for anyone to say that a bigger average of butter fat per cow was secured under the home-separation system. Assuming exactly the same quality herd and accurate testing, the creamery system must necessarily give the best average, and the speaker said Mr Goodfellow could not produce either recognised authority or practice to disprove that statement. The innuendo, however, was clear, and had been repeated on many occasions, that the creamery companies did not sample and test correctly. Mr Pacey said the directors and officers of the Te Aroha, Eureka, Thames Valley and Cambridge companies, and the New Zealand Dairy Association, were competent and honourable men, and the testing operations of those companies had always been beyond reproach. Tb»e action of the representatives of the Goodfellow Company repeatedly insinuating inaccuracy or fraud in connection with testing work was the meanest bit of business rivalry ever exhibited in the Waikato, and would certainly recoil upon themselves. Confidence in the test is a first essential in dairying, and in seeking to undermine that confidence the Goodellow people had helped towards their own undoing, although their testing was probably as correct aB that of the other companies. :