Country Life Interests

Waikato Times, Volume 119, Issue 19914, 17 June 1936, Page 3

Country Life Interests

A page devoted to the Interests of the Country Women or the Wanna. end in particular to advancing and recording the activities of thoee two great national organisations, the \Vomen‘s Institutes and the

\Vomen's Division of the Farmers‘ Union.

00-OPERATION AND THE COUNTRVWOMAN. (From a London Correspondent.) Agricultural co—operation started as a man‘s movement; it was on affair of the master or the farm, the head of the household, Joining with his neighbours to obtain cheap credit through a co-opera-tive bank, to put through a Joint order for reliable seed or feed or fertiliser. to build a cresmery or arrange for the marketing of graded and tested eggs. Women were not excluded; a woman. married or single, who was mistress of her own farm was, and is, admitted to membership of every type of society, even those which combine co-operation with land settlement. Many years ago in Ireland it was decided that the con-operative marketing of eggs would improve quality and reliability, out the costs of handling and transform a somewhat unprofitable sideline into a real asset to the farmer. The idea was sound; meetings were held and farmers enrolled; secretaries and collectors were appointed. but strangely few eggs name in the societies‘ doors. In districts where ezgs were so :lhunrlant that they were used as currency and paid over the counter for everything from groceries to postage stamps, suddenly no eggs were obtainable. The mystery. like many mysteries, had a simple solution. Eggs had from time immemorial been the per—quisite of the farmel's' wife and daughters, source of most of their clothes and all their little luxuries. But the members or the egg societies were the farmers, and every penny that the society paid ‘out to its members went, not. to the careful henwife, but to husbands and brothers who never looked at a. hen except to slroo it out of the way. Hence the dearth of eggs. the epidemic of laying-out which so disconcerted the egg societies at. their first attempt.

Since then the lesson has been learnt in most counLries where egg marketing is varriod out on co-operative lines, and the farm woman has been called In to lake- hcr place in the movement. Many a hardpressed housewife indeFd blesses the day the co-operative creamer-y came to save her the drudgery of butter making.