INFERIOR BUTTER.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 349, 1 April 1911, Page 5

INFERIOR BUTTER.

Sir, —I read in your issue of the 29th inst. an article upon an advertising campaign in the interests of New Zealand butter, which seems to have been carried out in an overlapping of friendly rivialry. The butter export of New Zealand comes third on the list, and if carried out upon honest lines and sold as the prime article it is advertised to be, bids fair to rival the two first exports—■ wool and frozen meat; for if the dairy industry progresses at the rate it has done for the last five years, large holdings must give way to smaller dairy farms, and wool and meat must likewise go down. New Zealand butter has a big step to jump before it equalises the Dansih price, and packing farmers' butter in Association stamped boxes is nut the way to make that jump nor even to hold its present own. To advertise upon such a gigantic scale, London produce firms should make certain that butter so exported is Association butter, not so much for their own sakes, as for the butter reputation of the Dominion, which is at stake. Farmers' butter does not command locally to within 3d or 4d per lb of factory butter. What then, must be the feelings of duped Britishers, if they pay full Dairy Association price for inferior butter to that advertised butter, which has still further deteriorated on the passage home on account of excessive moisure through hand packing, and which is made from over-ripe cream? A case, if you remember, of Auckland Association butter over the proscribed limit of moisture was heard rather mysteriously at the Police Court some little while ago, when the Agricultural Department quite wrongfy stepped into the breach and gave the order for "prohibition" to such action! The sequel to such action can easily be found in the hand-packed Association stamped cases of inferior butter. It would be criminal to retard the general prosperity of the Dominion by such foui practices in its newlyachieved butter exportation, which also plays so important a factor in opening its long-closed lands and turning its almost impregnable bush lands into homesteads and cultivation. It behoves agents, associations, etc., both here and in England, to see that such a valuable export a;; the butter export in its infancy may not be crowded out of the Home market by such criminal competition as packing i farmers' butter in Association stamped boxes.—l am, etc., i EMILY NICOL.