BEEF AND EMPIRE TRADE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 12

BEEF AND EMPIRE TRADE.

The great problem in agriculture, as in all other industries, is how best to widen the margin between costs of production and market prices. Over the latter, despite what is said by the Home opponents of Control Boards, farmers have little or no control, and must, therefore, coniine their attention to reducing costs, increasing production, and helping the development of Empire trade in every possible way. The setting up in London of an Empire Marketing Board, representative of the Empire, is a sign of the times. Although boards cannot control prices, they can improve and widen the channels of distribution, and generally encourage the use of Empire-grown foodstuffs to the advantage- of both producers and consumers. It seems that 'n the interests of all concerned in the shipping of foodstuffs to markets thousands of miles away from the countries of origin, haphazard marketing should give way to co-operative methods. It is a gamble at best, and one in which, without decided protection against foreign importations to Homeland, outlying Empire producers would very likely suffer, and no one, we opine, wishes to see the price of Empire-grown foodstuffs, made dearer to consumers by means of tariff adjustments. In this connection one might point out that this Dominion is, together with Australia, essentially a supplier of foodstuffs, and has success - fully and profitably marketed meat, dairy produce, fruit, honey, etc., and there is room to increase the quantity and value of that produce, with the exception, possibly, of beef, which is np against the Argentine’s chilled beef.

This matter touches both Australia and New Zealand. According to Captain Ross Grant, the Commonwealth veterinary officer in London, there are not sufficient cattle or a sufficiently long cattle-treating season in Australia to furnish the' regular supplies that Britain would require to make the trade a success in competition with the Argentine business, while, according to a report in the Australian Meat Trade Journal, Mr R. S. Forsyth, the London manager of the New Zealand Meat Producers’ Board, also doubted whether such a trade would be profitable to New Zealand when there was the oonstant possibility of the recurrence of such low prices, owing to competition as they had seen recently at Smithfield, where good chilled beef from the River Plate had been selling at 2id per lb and less. According to Dr T. Moran, one of the research scientists engaged in connection with the Food Investigation Board on meat freezing research, there seems to be no hope of the immediate or even early discovery of the full solution of the entirely safe carriage and marketing of meat under refrigeration. He saw grave problems ahead in the way of successful chilled meat carriage from Australia, and considers that after all freezing was the better method of preservation, worthy of further research in order to eliminate those difficulties bound up with the injury to the meat tissue and the consequent drip following upon refrigeration. Dr Moran, who is said to be the author of one of the most informative and suggestive papers of recent years, “Science and the Future of the Frozen Meat Industry,” is of opinion that low temperature brine freezing ii not a practical solution to the problem of beef freezing, as, when applied to a hlndquarter of beef, the latent heat of freezing cannot be removed from the carcase with sufficient rapidity to prevent drip on defrosting. “This," zayz Dr Moran, “ia certainly unfortunate, because it forces us to the conclusion that any great improvement in the frozen meat industry will only result from a complete understanding of the structure of muscle, particularly of how the water in It is held, its postmortem changes, and the various physical ehangei which take place during the frceehif and thawing cycle,” Dr Moran

is emphatic about the necessity of defrosting being made a slow, gradual process, and he adds that “defrosting ie only half the problem, and cannot atone for injury done in freezing.”