IMPROVING FARM OUTLOOK

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22172, 27 July 1935, Page 12

IMPROVING FARM OUTLOOK

Market prospects in the new production season beginning next week are more encouraging on the whole than for several years past. Farmers can look forward with reasonable confidence to better returns from butter and wool, while the outlook for meat is good, being especially enhanced by the liberal quotas Britain has undertaken to admit. New Zealand butter is being quoted in London at 93s a cwt., the highest price since October, 1933, apart from the temporary spurt to 94s at the beginning of the year caused by American purchases. On the present occasion, however, the appreciation has been slow and steady. One authority assesses it as a genuine improvement, with little likelihood of a setback. Partly it is based on a shortage of consignments from the Southern Hemisphere in recent months, although this comparative scarcity has been made up by increased British imports from Holland, Russia and Ireland. New Zealand stocks in London are only half what they were a year ago, so that .<the statistical position is sound. Australian shipments, which were heavy in mid-season, are at present very light. While the prospects for butter are encouraging, those for cheese remain doubtful. This is directly due, not to any fault of the Dominion—- ! production here has been lower—but Ito the effect of the British milk marketing scheme. A large proportion of the huge excess supplies of milk over liquid requirements is being turned into cheese, much of low quality, and Bold at ruinously low prices. English Cheshire has sold down to 3d. Holland has also been dumping Edam cheese at equally sacrificial prices. In the wool market a much more healthy condition obtains. London prices are verging on what is considered the payable level of 9d a lb. (New Zealand currency) for medium crossbred. If no account be taken of the short-lived flutter early in the 1933-34 season, present values for crossbred are better than at any time since early 1931, and for Merino, since early 1930. The first local wool sales are still four months ahead and in these times it would be unwise to anticipate. The recent appreciation, however, has been steady and appeal's to be soundly based on demand. Moreover, unlike 1933-34, the rise is not an isolated phenomenon, but is part of a general movement. The firmer future for meat completes a much more hopeful review of the Dominion's chief export industries than it has been possible to make for several seasons past.