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Press, Volume LX, Issue 18234, 19 November 1924, Page 8

A dozen years ago, 8,000,000 pounds of New Zealand butter were landed on the Vancouver market. By 1922 our export of butter to Canada had dropped to 1,600,000 pounds, and there had appeared on the British market a new competitor —Alberta. Newspapers just to hand from the prairie province furnish interesting figures of the rapid and sustained growth of her export trade in this direction. It is practically only in the last couple, of years that direct consignments of Alberta butter have found their way to the London market; but once the connexion was established, the dairy farmers of the West started immediately to consolidate their position. In 1923, not quite 1,000,000 pounds were sent across the Atlantic, in 1923 almost 2,000,000. By the middle of last month, the 1924 figures had passed 3,500,000 pounds, and the total for the year is expected to reach 4,000,000. These figures refer only to butter in bulk; there is, in addition, a smaller export business in pound prints. To New Zealand eyes, the volume of this new supply to the tables of the Old World is not yet impressive—our own export of butter a couple of seasons ago was over 125,000,000 pounds —and the growth of the output is no more marked than in our own case after the war, when the export trade jumped from 35,000,000 pounds in 1920 to 100,000,000 in 1921, and to 125,000,000 in 1922. It will hardly be this season, or next, that Alberta will shoulder us out of our pq&ition in Topley street.

More to the point is a consideration of the methods which the Canadian province is adopting, first to safeguard the local market from a South Seas invasion, and secondly, to fight the world's best in London. It is not altogether displeasing tp find the "Edmonton Journal" saying that not only is Alberta butter appearing on the British market under its own name, "but also it is treading very closely on the heels of the famous Danish and New Zealand product with respect to quality." As far back as 1898, when tho gold rush to tho Klondyke ereated a boom demand for butter, Alberta found that quality was what counted. One get-rich-quick firm, which dumped a big supply of poor quality butter into Dawson City, practically ruined that market for the West. Matters drifted along without any very definite, policy until 1910, when tho annual dairy convention of the province took alarm at the inroads which New Zea? land butter was making on the Pacific Coast. A system of "quality marketing" of cream was inaugurated, and it is claimed that "within four weeks after the dairy convention, the type of butter produced in Alberta was completely changed, and then this export type butter began to oust the New Zealand product from British Columbia."

Quantity rather than quality being the aim during the war years, the standard fell away again. This problem was tackled by the dairy convention in 1922. Farmers were told how to improve their cream, competitive buying-stations were abolished, and Government graders appointed. Since then the industry has not looked back; and now, possibly with an eye still fixed on the New Zealand example, farmers are agitating for the formation of a dairy pooh. To-day there aro only 88 dairy factories in Alberta, with 40,000 suppliers, and the total output last year fell short of 18,000,000 pounds of butter and 2,000,000 pounds of cheese. But the industry is building on the experience of others, dairy land is comparatively cheap, and—this above all else—Edmonton is within ten or twelve days of London. In another ten years the Canadian West may be u power to be reckoned with on tho markets of the world.