GO FOR CHEESE.

Wairarapa Age, 10 December 1921, Page 3

GO FOR CHEESE.

RIMUTAKA DEY’ ATION. DEVELOPMENT OF OUR PRODUCE (By Coleman Phillips) Future dairy factory co-operative settlement cannot depend npOn butter making alone, as cheese is our surest and best standby. The European nations have blown forty thousand millions of money into the air durin;' the late war, the interest upon which has to be paid. We cannot pay our interest of a live to six point butterfat Jersey test, but we can do so On a three to four point Friesian or Ayrshire test easily. In my opinion, there are as many years of bad times ahead of us, as I had between 1877 and 1894, in thwool and meat industry. Europe cannot afford luxuries, and butter is one. I eople there will eat margarine. Directly matters settle in Russia, Siberian butter will pour into England, and down will go the price. (At the present moment cheese is worth 50 per cent, more than butter in London). Canada and New Zealand are the only two countries that can make and ex port cheese, which for forty years has been the best friend New Zealand farmers have had. The fashion now is to go in for butter. But I must still be pardoned for keeping to my old love, the cheese factory, for Wellington -s East Coast hinterland, which will be found safer than the butter factory. It has proved itself so for forty years, and it will be so for the next forty years. The cheese factory is the fanner’s sheet-anchor, and not the butter factory. We have already to face the immense, fall in the piiee of soldier settlement lands. But settlement r..ust still go on until we touch bedrock prices again. There cannot be that settlement now without a main trunk line of railway on the East Coast, and I contend that that settlement must depend upon the Wainui railway deviation, so far as this province is concerned. Make that deviation; start the great development —the Wellington-Auckland-East Coast line—and New Zealand will easily meet whatever bad times are in store for her.

If any engineer, or politician, therefore, is prepared to now say that the Tauherenikau saddle route will settle one single acre of the wide stretch of

our unsettled East Coast lands, let him say it, and stop thereby the future settlement of the province for a quarter of a century or more. As I have said above, there is no bush now to fall, and our whole future safety lies in keeping to the cheese factories. Ninepence to a shilling a pound is all we may reasonably expect to see for cur cheese soon. But we can do as well upon that, as the 4d a pound I got for it when starting- the industry. Our railway policy must absolutely conform to this cheese production at 9d to Is a lb, and the lines I have suggested .carried through, ‘as the factories must have railway service. It also means replacing our North Island sheep with two or three million dairy cows, with an average return of £l2 10s a head, if the factories cease paying out on butter-fat, and Friesian or Ayrshire cows are used. It is the solids in the milk that must be paid for, not the butter-fat. At present the Jersey is simply robbing the cheese cow every time). We shall then become the Empire’s

cheese farm, my Lady Friesian—and she is a lady—being used by as sturdv and prosperous a race of daily farmers as anywhere on earth. The present price of land will drop to about halt, but the margarine bogey will no. trouble us. There will always be a sure market for all the cheese New Zealand can produce, as the working class in Europe will be too poor, fox many a year now, to buy much cutter wool, or mutton. There will be hardship, I admit, here too during the readjustment of land values, but that will not last long. We have a solid and prosperous foundation to rest upon, if no foolish Tauherenikau saddle rail routes are chosen to mar our cheese production. PROPER FACILITIES NEEDED. I think Featherston already owns the largest cheese factory in the Empire—l remember giving two to three years’ hard advocacy to get- it established in the ’eighties. To sidetrack that great dairy factory by the Tauherenikau rail deviation is absolutely unthinkable. Let any engineer try it, and he will sc the storm of indignation that will be raised. Besides, the city requires that factory’s milk delivered fresh daily into town,

which can only be done by the Wainui deviation. The health of all the city children for the future absolutely depends upon the Wainui deviation, in order to run into the city a fresh and ample milk supply cheaply. I have had the initiation and guidance of our dairy production for fortyone years, and there has nev<er boon a trace of politics in it; only, the safe and sure progress of New Zealand. I have always felt pleased to think that the matter upon which our prosperity almost entirely depends now has been with out political interference or bitter ness, and trust that it will always remain so. Let Parliament only provide proper railway facilities wh.cn it can see its way to do so, and the different dairy factory committees will pull the Dominion through any difficulty. They are the yeoman backbone of'New Zea land, and their vrives as admirable a race of hard-working women as the Empire contains. It will be a curious •foe who attempts to land in the North Island against the will of the young men bred on our dairy farms. Even the Jersey milker is a good man. but not quite as good, in my opinion, as the Friesian milker. (The Jersey

people will pardon, I hope, my little joke). Jersey breeders know quite well that I am dead against them, and shall always remain so; it being' unsafe ror New Zealand to compete in the world’s butter market, which has only boomed during the war. As I have said above, our cheese production is worth 50 per cent more in London than butter, at the present moment of writing, the advance being lid on butter and 6d on cheese. Parliament need only construct the East Coast Trunk line, right through, and the people themselves will do the rest, nearly every large sheep-farmer being ready now to put on a couple of hundred of my once despised dairy cows.