FREEZING INDUSTRY

Southland Times, Issue 24547, 23 September 1941, Page 6

FREEZING INDUSTRY

ADDRESS TO ROTARIANS The freezing industry in Southland and New Zealand as a whole was the subject of an address given to the Gore Rotary Club yesterday by Mr Robert Hutton, works manager of the Southland Frozen Meat Company at Mataura, who gave interesting facts and figures about the industry. Mr Hutton paid a tribute to the pioneers of the industry and referred to the first attempt to ship meat in the year 1881, with Dunedin as the port of shipment. A decade later the works at Mataura were under way. Progress in the early years was slow compared with what had been accomplished in recent years, Mr Hutton said. The rapid development of the industry in Southland came after the Great War, and from 1924 to the present time some phenomenal figures had been set up. Giving examples Mr Hutton said that the killings at Mataura in 1924 totalled 150,000, while last season the total was 450,000. While the rest of New Zealand had doubled its output in this period, Southland had trebled its figures. Mr Hutton said that there were 38 freezing works in the Dominion, the value of the land, buildings, plant and machinery being about £6,000,000. The employees totalled 8282, and the salaries and wages, paid for seasonal work as well as to the permanent hands, came to about £3,000,000. The cost of the materials operated on was more than £19,000,000, and other expenses £1,220,000, the value of the products being £23,803,000, and the added value about £5,000,000. In Southland the sheep population in 1924 was 1,500,000, while at the present time it was 3,250,000. In New Zealand the sheep population was about 32,000,000, one-tenth of which was found in the southern province.