OPPOSITION EXPRESSED TO DELIVERY OF MILK IN CITY IN AFTERNOON

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27092, 28 May 1949, Page 8

OPPOSITION EXPRESSED TO DELIVERY OF MILK IN CITY IN AFTERNOON

The suggestion that milk might be delivered in Dunedin in the afternoons, which was placed before the Dunedin Metropolitan Milk Board on Thursday night, has not been well received by vendors in the city, producer-vendors, or farmers engaged producing milk for the city supply. . . .

Inquiries made by the Daily Times yesterday disclosed that the vendors were against the proposal because it would entail delivering milk when the traffic in the streets of Dunedin was at its height.

The vendors will hold a meeting early next week to discuss the proposal, but early reports indicate that they will not favour the adoption of afternoon deliveries.

. The producer-vendors, who deliver milk from their own farms, are “ dead against” the proposal, in the words of one of them. He explained that it would be impossible for a producervendor to deliver milk in the afternoon and return to his farm in sufficient time to begin milking again at 3.30 p.m. The cows, he said, could not change their lifelong habits overnight to suit the requirements of the milk board or the consumers. Apart from this, however, the whole routine of milking in the early morning would have to be advanced so as to give the producer-vendors an opportunity to accustom their herds to the change, and to permit them to carry out their normal farm work. Farmers told the Daily Times that a change in milking times to half an hour earlier in the morning would not make a great deal of difference to them, except that they would have to rise that much earlier in the mornings. They said that they got up early enough as it was, and if an hour or so more were required to fit in with any plans the milk board might have, they would be strongly opposed to afternoon deliveries of milk. The deliveries of milk from farms for the city supply arrive in Dunedin from about 9.30 a.m. onwards. The opinion was expressed to the Daily Times by a supplier that the afternoon delivery of milk would have the advantage to the public that the previous night’s milk and the morning’s production could be delivered to households that afternoon. The delivery times from the suppliers would have to be advanced, however, to permit the milk to be handled at the treatment station in sufficient time for deliveries to be made by vendors comparatively early in the afternoon.