INTEREST-PAYING GRASS

Northern Advocate, 19 August 1933, Page 8

INTEREST-PAYING GRASS

j The Wellington "Evening Post" makes some interesting observations upon the Dominion's efforts to increase the output of dairy produce in the face of a threatened restriction of markets. A few years ago. it says, the problem was how to increase butter production; today the problem is how to sell butter; in the north huge swamps have disappeared (with their grey duck), and the reclaimed land yields butter-fat. The Hauraki (Piako) Plains provide one instance, and the Rangitaiki Plains provide another and later. At the annual meeting the other day of the Rangitaiki Plains Dairy Company it was recalled that the i company began making butter in f 919, when the output was 60 j tons; during the season 1932-33 the output was 3402 tons. So much for the post-war rise of the Rangitaiki coastal area. Higher up the Rangitaiki is the Govern-ment-purchased Galatea Station, on which the Minister of Lands hopes to place at least one hundred new dairy farmers. Inland again are the pumice plains, largely going under trees, though quite a number of-farmers oppose tree-planting and would add the pumice lands to the grass acreage. And so it goes on. By developing their lands New Zealanders were ' • empire-building (as they understood it). But now, continues the "Post," comes along the type of British agrarian who says that lost oversea markets for British manufactures must compel. diversion of British people to Britain's soil; hence, tariffs and quotas. The change produces a major conflict in high policy. Can a debtor primary country pay in primary produce, or not? The British farmers' emissary should be taken into the field of production, and should be asked whether this form of earth-conquest is to cease. If so, what is to be done? •