NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1602, 5 August 1882, Page 7

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

The Chicago quotations for butter may interest some of our dairy farmers. The Prairie Farmer, in its issue of Juno 17th, gives the following as the prices for ' round lots,' or goods sold from first hand. It will be noticed that the creamery butter tops the market, leaving even a good margin between it and choice dairy :— Choice to fancy creamery, 23 to 24 cents per lb ; fair to good do., 21 to 22 cents ; choice to fancy dairy, 18 to 20 cents ; fair to good sweet do., 15 to 17 cents ; fair to choice packing stock, 14 to 1G cents; inferior and low grades, 9 to 11 cents.

The journal quoted from comments upon the difference between creamery and dairy prices in its next issue, attributing the higher prices of tho former to exactly the same cause that Mr Allander pointed out in noting how the Continental butter had taken such a firm stand in the English market— viz., the uniformity in quality .of the product. 'If any reader,' says our "contemporary, which by the way, is a journal that should have a place cm the table of the public libraries in our agricultural districts, ' has access to the reports of the dairy product markets of Boston, ho may notice that Western creamery butter— the butter from the creameries in Wisconsin, lowa, and northern Illinois—is all the time better by .several cents a pound than the very best dairy butter of the East, even the great dairy regions of Vermont, or Orange county, New York. How this matter of Western butter has changed within the past twenty years ! yes the last ten years ! The great reason of this is that the creameries are enabled to give a uniform quality of product while that of the private dairy is seldom uniform for many weeks, or even days together. A few private dairies to bo sure, both east and west, in the vicinity of large towns and cities, who have their regular customers among private families, command as high, yes even higher prices than any creamery can command, but this cannot from the nature of the case be true of a large district where individual dairymen make up their cream and ship it haphazard to the general market. It isto the creamery system that the West owes its prominence, and it will hold this prominence so long as Eastern dairymen do not unite their milk product at the factory, and they of staid New England are slow to adopt Western methods of doing any kind of farming. So we can only look for a very gradual change to the new order of dairying, and hence the West will for years maintain its present advantageous position.'

In this connection we might mention that Mr W. D. Sutherland has still on hand ono of the circular butter- workers exhibited by him at several of this year's agricultural shows, and that he shortly expects an additional halfdozen from America. Mr Sutherland has also a very handy little worker of a much more simple and inexpensive pattern which would be found handy in dairies in which the manufacture of butter is on a limited scale.

The machinery for the Oroua Downs Butter Factory (Wellington) has arrived. The refrigerator is similar to that used on board the ship Dunedin — a Haslam — and is said to have cost £1000. The proprietor (Mr M'Lcnnan) is establishing a herd of Ayrshire cattle.

Vegetables aro very dear at present in Sydney, a cabbage costing Is, and French beans 3s a peck, while " eggs arc eggs" at 3s 3d a dozen. An exchango suggests that these prices afford an opening for New Zealand exporters. •

Laud and Water, of June 10th, commenting on Lord Lamington's motion in the House of Lords, in reference to the importation of frozen meat, says :— One of the arguments brought forward, ia no doubt, quite true. He says the value of New Zealand sheep will be increased by the success of these importations. _ This is exactly tho point the colonials are aiming at. Of course prices will advance, just the same as they have advanced in the States, where it has had the eifect of stopping the export; trade almost entirely, simply because the cost of freight is too much to allow of any profit ; the price in New York and the price in England being not very wide apart The public are no doubt much misled by the Americans as to their power of supplying us with breadstuffs and meat. The facts aro now clearly showing that, with an immigration of a million people a year who cannot possibly produce anything in the shape of food for a long time after their arrival, the home demand must necessarily be so great that it is not at all impossible that the next year or two will show a most alarming decline in the exports from America to this country, of both corn and meat. A population which is fast approaching sixty millions will require an amount of feeding that must not be overlooked. At present tho proportion of live stock to population in America is thirty-two million shoop, about a half sheep per head, and thirteen million bullocks, or one. bullock to four people. England has one sheep per head, and ono bullock to five people. Thus it is that the States cannot keep up her supplies. Canada is coming on to take her place, and our own colonies in tho South, Australia with her 70,000,000 sheep, and New Zealand with her 13,000,000— a proportion ot twenty-six sheep to one inhabitant— theso are the places from which we must look for supplies to feed our workpeople, who eat, we are told, double the meat per head of any population in the mcqM,.