DAIRYING IN TARANAKI

Taranaki Daily News, 11 September 1934, Page 17 (Supplement)

DAIRYING IN TARANAKI

FIRST CHAPTER IN HISTORY METHODS OF THE PIONEERS. INDIVIDUALISM IN EVERY PHASE, e Sixty years ago the exports of dairy produce from New Zealand came mostly from two portions of the Dominion, Taranaki and Banks Peninsula. Nor was this sui-prising. The European pioneer settlers of both those districts had dairying in their bones. Taranaki, as most people know, drew most of her first settlers from the south-west of England, where butter and cream have been famous for many generations. The Akaroa settlement held many emigrants from Normandy at its foundation, and had the Fates been less capricious might have become the nucleus of another French province within a British Dominion. Normandy butter, Dorsetshire cheese and bacon, and Devonshire butter and cream have been at the top of the English markets ever since transport was sufficiently rapid and regular to supply the increasing demand for those commodities. It was no wonder therefore that ,as soon as cattle became available in Taranaki the folk from the west of England began to make butter, and later on, to produce enough to supply the local mar- ; ket.' Of c'ourse, the wars with the ‘ Maoris hindered development for ten years or more, but by the time it was over the children of the pre-war days had become hardy and active young settlers. Many of them had shared in military duties that had taken them far from the principal settlement at New Plymouth; they had seen for themselves in the isolated military camps and soldier settlements the marvellous pasturage that followed the clearing-away of the forest in almost any portion of the province; they wanted homes of their own; and they had lost any fear of the forest or of the-Maori through constant association with both of them. The close of the war enabled the Government of the day to offer large blocks for clearing and settlement; the troops engaged and the volunteers from other districts were offered special terms if they would take up holdings and land settlement in the province received a fresh impetus. And no soonei' had a small clearing been made and a bush track cut from the

nearest neighbour or township than some brave woman was ready to share in the home-making. It was to the farmers’ wives and daughters that the development of dairying in those early years was very largely due. The men were too busy with bushwacking, clearing and all the rest of the heavy work of the pioneer. Money was scarce and provisions cost a lot in cash and in time that could be ill-spared. But with a cow or two there was something in the larder, and as the herds expanded something to bring to the storekeeper in return for the food and clothing required. By the year 1874, the earliest statistics available, the total exports of dairy produce from the Dominion were valued at £350,000. Ten years were to pass before the first dairy factory was erected, but in 1876, according to Mr. Richard Cock, trading at New Plymouth, there was more butter being brought into the town than it could absorb. The handling of butter had become an important addition to the ordinary business of a merchant. Naturally, the butter from individual farms varied a good deal in appearance and quality. It was graded as far as was possible, washed, reworked and put into troughs of brine. Later it was packed in kegs containing about 601 b., the salting being the only preservative used. In the year 1878 Mr. Cock found himself with 3000 kegs of butter on hand and no chance of selling it locally. The marketing problems were stern facts in those far-off days, and there was only one way of solving them. The merchant set out to find new markets. Thames, then in tire flush of goldmining activities, Gisborne, Wellington, Nelson, Hokitika and thd other townships of the “Golden West” were visited and outlets for Taranaki dairy produce established. Later came exports to Australia, and even to Great Britain, but only of “salted” butter. Prices to the farmer fluctuated in the ten years 1874 to 1884 from as low as 3Jd lb. to as high as 7d lb., and during that period manufacture on the individual farm and sale by the individual seemed the only method feasible. So continued for* ten years the first chapter in Taranaki’s dairy history.