HOME SEPARATION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 358, 6 May 1911, Page 6

HOME SEPARATION.

AN ADVANCING SYSTEM. However eeffctive may be the arguments advanced against home separation as a principle leading to inferior butter quality the fact remains that it is making rapid headway in certain districts where proprietary and cooperative concerns are in operation. One manufacturing centre in the Wellington province is said to be receiving cream from no less than 125 home separating farm 3, and installations of hand separators are practically proceeding apace. Some of the co-oper-ative butter companies are setting their face against the system, fearing, no doubt, that its adoption would make the working of their smaller creameries unprofitable. This is a

poor argument, as many a creamery in that province is working with such a comparatively small milk supply that the co3t of working them is a drag on the business, and it would be a direct gain to encourage suppliers in such cases to separate on the farm. In any case companies which refuse to accept home separated cream in districts where rival concerns are operating on the principle are inviting trouble, as they run the risk of losing a percentage of their suppliers, and it only requires the retirement of one or two shareholders to make the running of skimming stations show a direct loss, in which event the company will have to consider the question of closing the creamery altogether. Home separation has come to stay and if certain co-operative buttermaking concerns refuse to realise the fact now they will wake up to the true position when it is too* late.