THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9163, 19 September 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1888.

As might be expected, the enterprise of the Messrs. Chaffey has given us heart on the subject of fruit production. In face of what those gentlemen have undertaken in Australia, people here begin to see that something like a great future must be possible for the enterprise in North New Zealand also, where the natural conditions for varied fruit culture are certainly more favourable than in the Murray River region of Victoria and South Australia. As a regular article of diet, instead of a mere occasional luxury, the consumption of fruit would soon increase a hundredfold if there were proper arrangements for the supply and distribution. It is such an agreeable and refreshing variety of food that it would be in daily request, and at particular seasons several times a day, if it were obtained at reasonable rates. But perhaps there was little use in pointing to the fact, as we have often done, that a huge local demand and paying market could be thus called up, or in pointing to the other fact that outside markets could also be made available. Example is worth any amount of verbal advice, and when a couple of Canadians, after their experience in California, have invested their capital in the gigantic enterprise of transforming half a million of Australian acres into, for the most part, small fruit farms, and taking the risk themselves of disposing of the produce, such a circumstance naturally inspires confidence as to the future that can be developed for fruit-growing in these colonies.

The Messrs. Chaffey assert, from their own knowledge of what has been effected by California in this line, that the consumption of fruit in all countries is bound to undergo immense expansion whenever the want is satisfactorily met. And as they have backed their opinion in such very practical fashion, it cannot but be encouraging to our orchardists

and other fruit raisers, and influential with those who would like to become so. Thus, as was stated on Monday in this journal, several gentlemen have purchased a thousand acres near Henderson with the object of fruit-growing, and as they intend to also erect a factory for preserving it, others having land in the neighbourhood propose to similarly commence fruit growing. In an excellent lecture at Cambridge, reported in Saturday's Herald, Mr. Alderton remarked that irrigation would give a new and real value to certain level, sandy tracts in the Waikato and Thames Valley, where the summer heat is stronger and the rain lighter than on the coast, and which require water because the porous soil retains little moisture; and he showed that the irrigation could be accomplished at small expense. Then, as lie added, " Cheap fruit finds a ready consumption. Fruit can be produced at the price of potatoes, and if sold at anything like the same price, the consumption of the one would be as large as the other."

The existing system of distribution strangles the supply. Quantities of fruit are destroyed to keep up prices. This checks a growing demand—effectually bars the creation of any considerable marketand so, however it may meet the views of the middleman, it frustrates the interests of the producer as well as of the consuming public. How the demand enlarges with enlarged facilities for the supply is illustrated in the United Kingdom, where great and increasing as is the quantity of fruit locally raised, it is stated that the amount put upon the market does not now suffice for a third of the year, the consumption of the remaining two-thirds having to be met by consignments from outside. And it seems that in 1845, when the import began, the value of the fruit imported there amounted in round numbers to £886,000, while in 1865 it had swelled to almost four times as much, namely £3,185,000 ; and in 1885 the amount readied £7,587,000, or nearly double what it was twenty years before. Of American apples alone it is said that as much as 50,000 barrels are often sold in a single week in the London markets. The absorption in large towns of so much of the population is of course one great cause of the enhanced demand for fruit j nowadays in the world chief markets. The requirements in this way of the many huge cities of the United States have enabled California to figure as a ■dossal fruit-grower. She is not the only State of the Union which has gone in for the extensive production. For instance, Florida has also acquired a reputation for oranges, and Alabama for figs, while the orchards of New York, -sachusetts, and Maine, besides catering for local wants, head the apple expo: ito England. But California, with a fine, half-tropical climate, raises, in perfection, the widest variety of fruits, and though years since she established a sale for them on the European Continent as well as in England, it is believed that the everprogressing call in the Atlantic and inland American cities for this produce of the Pacific Slope must ere long absorb all that is not wanted within California itself. For this same reason, although many of the vintages of that State have acquired a high character, they are not found in the European market, because there is no occasion to send them there. Like the fruits, they are disposed of in the eastern cities of the Union, for America asweljas Europe has now her epicures and connoisseurs.

Ami if California has obtained east of the Rocky Mountains an inexhaustible demand for her fruits and wines, it will be New Zealand's own fault if she too does not find, in certain lands and cities not far from the Pacific, everexpanding markets for her fruits and fruit drinks—cider and perry for instance. These islands, with their diversities of climate- and therefore opportunities of diversified production, are natural purveyors for the tables of European residents in the tropical countries to which we have ready access through Torres Strait. The shipment of horses to India now commenced is, we trust, the beginning of a regular trade between New Zealand and Hindostan, and which will include, besides chargers and coursers for the soldier or civilian, a long list of other commodities that will be also heartily welcomed by our Anglo-Indian friends— among them our fruits, fresh, preserved, and dried, and the cool wholesome drinks prepared from them, all the more refreshing in the airs of the torrid zone. And these are but important items of the large general trade for which there is occasion between New Zealand and India. Not only for Hindostan are we the natural purveyors in this particular way, but for Batavia and the ports of the Indian Archipelago, and Singapore and Hongkong ; and more than that, for Tropical Australia and New Guinea, where the white man's colonisation must in some form soon rear its head. In fine, New Zealand is endowed with a peculiarly favourable mercantile position, admitting of easy intercourse with a variety of outside markets. Our settlers, like the Californian, should yet find fruitgrowing a golden branch or their industry.