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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9139, 22 August 1888, Page 4

The valuable information contained in our London correspondent's letter, published in yesterday's issue, respecting the dairy industry, is singularly opportune. The pitiful whine to which we are treated from time to time, that " farming will not pay" in the colony, has its answer in that letter, in its showing at once the practically boundless market there is for dairy produce in England, and the conditions under which that market is available. Last year, in addition to its own production, England received no less than 139,400 tons of ■ butter and 91,700 tons of cheese from over seas to the value of £16,387,000, and during the last five years the value of dairy produce imported has averaged £16,230,000 a —over eighty millions sterling in Stive years. When we know that the feasibility of sending such dairy produce from these islands to England at a paying price has been established, the causes of failure being recognised and preventible, one can scarcely exaggerate the importance of such an industry in the circumstances of New Zealand. The mutton fed on our succulent herbage holds its own in England against England and the world, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the inevitable conditions of success being duly attended to, our cheese and butter will ultimately do the same. But what those conditions of success in the home market are, appear very plain, and science and brains hold the fort in butter and cheese as in every thing else. That it is not by the study of the fifth and sixth standards of our public school system that we are to get a share in the sixteen millions a year offered by England for cheese and butter goes without saying, nor if our young people are to be turned into a miserable race of struggling, starving-quill-drivers are we likely for many a year to come to cease to hear the wretched burthen of the colonist's song that "farming will not pay?" "The great success of the dairy industry in Denmark," says our correspondent, " is attributed by the experts to the excellence of the technical education given in that country, and to the way in which it is carried to the farmers' doors. Five years ago the export of Danish butter amounted to between eighty and ninety thousand barrels. This has now nearly doubled, whilst the export of cheese has trebled, having grown from 200,000 to 600,000 pounds, and the increase is said to be due to the co-operative system of dairying, and the spread of technical teaching. Denmark is permeated with agricultural and dairy farming schools, and its superiority as the model State in dairy farming has been achieved by the constant co-operation of science and practice." Similarly in Sweden, where the growth of the export lias been enormous, "there are many Government travelling teachers. If a

dairymaid wants to improve herself the travelling teacher goes to the farm and tells her what to do." In Germany, in France, everywhere where the English market is drawing its supplies of sixteen millions' worth of cheese and butter from, dairying forms part of the technical instruction provided. We can fancy the sneer with which our educationalists, big and little, ■ who swear by the standards, would hear of a suggestion that dairying would be better than the knowledge ot Lake Balklash, or making butter than grammatical analysis. > Our system of education is altogether so perfect that " it must not be touched" nor its .funds applied to any branch of education but that of the sixth standard. But it is very evident that if New Zealand is to hold its own in the race with the rest of the world, and our highly-cultured sixth standard young people are not to drift away to where they can live by their wits, our rising generation must be trained on lines that are found requisite by larger and wiser communities, and which are rendered compulsory by the advance of the age, while our pedagogues and demagogues slumber and sleep.