CANADIAN BUTTER TARIFF

Waipa Post, Volume 31, Issue 1765, 1 June 1926, Page 2

CANADIAN BUTTER TARIFF

SHORT SUPPLY OP HOME PRODUCT.

POSSIBILITY OF DRY TOAST FOR BREAKFAST. After the storm in regard to the importation of Australian and New Zealand butter has died, down, some of the newspapers, especially in the eastern centres, are discovering that, but for a certain inward movement, of butter from the sister dominions on the other side of the Pacific, there was and is a reasonably good chance of dry toast for breakfast. Butter has usually been fairly plentiful in Canada, but the amount actually on hand at the beginning of the present year, when ,the importation was at its height, was 4200 tons, compared with two and a half times as much at the beginning of 1925, and, an average of 700 tons for five years prior to that.

While the dairying industry in Canada is growing, it is not growing at anything like the relative rate experienced in Australia and New Zealand. One reason is that tlhe prairies, or the western half of them, show the biggest proportionate development in the dairying industry, and it will have always to compete with wheat growing there. The position is much the same as exists in Canterbury or in the Riverina. If wheat is likely to be more profitable, wheat will occupy the attention of tlhe farmer. With the United States becoming a wheat-im-p'ortant unit, in greater measure each year, the prospect of dairying oustingcereals on the prairies is as remote as that fat lambs will oust dairyingin the Waikato or the Richmond, River districts.

Last year the three prairie provinces produced about as much butter as in 1924. The gains in Manitoba and Saskatchewan were off-set by the falling-off in Alberta. Another feature of the present market situation is that an export business is raipidly being built up in Canada to the detriment of home consumption. It is difficult to understand —nevertheless it is a fact —'that while there was a moderately large import of New Zealand butter last season—and Australian butter at the end of it—the ex-

port of Canadian butter grew in the year from 8000 tons to 15,000 tons, or nearly a hundred per cent increase. -