DAIRY FREIGHTS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 71, Issue 219, 15 September 1928, Page 7

DAIRY FREIGHTS

BOARD MAKES SAVING BENEFITS TO THE INDUSTRY (Per Press Association.) MASTERTON, Sept. 14. An address on the policy and activities of the Dairy Board was delivered by the chairman (Mr W. A. lorns) at the largely attended annual meeting of the Masterton Dairy Company to-day. Mr lorns, who was received with hearty applause, ridiculed a statement emanating from Pahiatua that the Dairy Board was paying £lOOO more for shipping services than it ould have got the work done for prior to the last meeting of the board. A committee, set up to go into the whole questic f shipping, had brought down a report which recommended that two members of the board’s headquarters staff should be transferred, one to New Plymouth and one to Auckland, to handle shipping work. It was added that these men could also be utilised for doing a certain amount of the board’s work other than shipping. In advocating this change, the committee had urged that it would facilitate and make more efficient the work of inspection at the ports . Members of the committee were confident that the board could do the work as cheaply as the associations. Mr lorns said he had always favoured this policy. A statement in the press that the board last year had unanimously agreed to give the shipping work to the associations, was absolutely incorrect. This work had been done by the associations to the satisfaction of the board in the past, but there had been discontent on the part of other producers’ organisations and factories, on account of increased production and separate documentation of white and coloured cheese.

Mr lorns observed that the shipping agency work would be much heavier this year than in the past, yet the associations were now prepared to do this work for £2OOO, excluding Wellington, whereas their charges in earlier years had been, 1924-25 (including Wellington) £5750, 1925 26 £2900, 1926-27, £7300 (including work done under absolute control). The first tender put in by the associations for th'e. 1927-28 season was £44.50, but on some members of the board taking exception to this price, an offer was made to do the work for £3535—a saving for that year alone of over £9OO. If the shipping work could be done by the associations for £2OOO, what justification was there, for the difference between this amount and what the board had paid them during the past five ’’ears. It was absolutely imperative, Mr lorns declared, that the board should closely control the handling and shipping of dairy produce. Criticisms of the recent policy of tho board had all come from the factories which had in their directorates members of the associations which suffered the loss of revenue by the decision of the board to do its own shipping work. As showing how an individual company benefitted from the existence of the board, Mr lorns said that the Mas-

terton Dairy Company paid £145 a year to keep the board going, and in 192930 there would be a reduction of £lOO3 per annum in the company’s freights alone (irrespective of other items), since the board had come into existence. He was not going to take credit to the board for the whole of this reduction, but the board was the only authority that had ever been set up in this country to make statutory contracts for the whole of the <l*iry industry. Before the board was brought into existence, producers had no effective means of securing freight and other reductions.

Reductions in insurance rates negotiated by the board represented a saving to the Masterton Company of £ll3 a year. There was a further saving to the company of £lOO a year by the reduction of tho charges for cold storage in London (assuming a week’s storage of its season’, export output). A vote of thanks to Mr lorns, and of confidence in the Dairy Board and in Mr lorns as chairman of that body, was carried unanimously.