THE FREEZING INDUSTRY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19032, 9 June 1924, Page 4

THE FREEZING INDUSTRY

Figures published by the Agricultural Department disclose that during the five and one-third years iu which the Imperial meat requisition was in operation there was a total of 16,804,353 lambs killed in this Dominion. Of this number South Canterbury freezing works accounted for no less than 7,158,149 roughly, within a million of being half the killings for the whole Dominion. The number of Canterbury freezing works, nor the magnitude of flocks, would lend credence to such figures, nevertheless, departmental statistics leave no doubt about their accuracy. The Year Book informs us that there are fifty loading freezing and meat preserving works in this country, distributed as follows: Auckland 10, Taranaki 3, Hawke’s Bay 5, Wellington 10; a total of 28 in the North Island. In the South Island there is one works each in Marlborough and Nelson, 7 in Canterbury, 8 in Otago, and 5 in Southland, a total of 32, Iq Westland there are not more than 34,000 sheep, which do not constitute sufficient for making that province a meat-freezing centre. All Canterbury has one million sheep less than either the Wellington, or the Hawke’s Bay province, yet in South Canterbury freezing works alone thereare slaughtered over seven millions of lambs, as against over eight millions in the whole of the rest of New Zealand. In its current issue the Farmers’ Weekly suggests that the only apparent explanation of this remarkable disproportion is that Canterbury is better equipped financially, and has been more enterprising than other provinces in its stock-buying and meatfreezing operations. Its buyers of fat stock, it says, could only have acquired getting well on for half the fat lambs of the whole country by systematically scouring not only their own province, but, to a large extent, the whole South Island, if they did not actually operate largely in the North Island. If this view is approximately correct the explanation of South Canterbury’s lamb slaughtering coup is that its buyers raided the country in the vicinity of other freezing works, drawing largely upon lambs that should have gone to works probably erected for the convenience of those sheep-farmers who were induced to sell to South Canterbury, leaving the j works ereeted for them to become unprofitable. As a result, Canterbury .holds the pride of place in the fat .lamb export trade. In faet, Canteribqry may be. fairly regarded as the jhub of the fat lamb killing and freezing industry.