LARDAS AN. EXPORT.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume I, Issue 24, 22 March 1845, Page 3

LARD AS AN. EXPORT.

[From a Correspondent of the Sydney Morning HeraldJ] Gentlemen, — I was told the other day that, encouraged by your journal, more than one person (whose names were mentioned) intended to embark their capital in rearing and fattening pigs for the sake of the lard. I have the following observations to make for the guidance of such persons :—: — 1. The climate is arid. The seasons in all respects are most irregular : no two years are alike. Hence the cultivation of vegetables, particularly of turnips, on which the agriculture of England now chiefly depends, is in New South Wales a most uncertain crop. The same quantity of rain may fall here as in other parts of the world, but, if so, it comes in floods, and the benefits are amazingly reduced, 2. Maize is a less uncertain crop than either potatoes, turnips, wheat, or barley; because it may be plarfted any week from September" to the first week in December ; and it is hard to say, owing to the irregularity of our seasons, which planting may turn out the best crop. 3. It will not pay any settler to grow maize except on rich land, either made rich or naturally so ; nor unless after it be grown, it be kept perfectly clean, by being hoed as often as the weeds spring up. 4. I can conceive, that to deal largely in breeding and fattening pigs, and curing and packing the lard, buying maize, in a rich maize district, by paying for the same in goods, might be as cheap as growing it. The plan would certainly require less capital, and enable the pig feeder to devote his whole time to that particular branch bf trade or calling. 5. Of potatoes, turnips, and cabbages, I consider the first and last rather safer than turnips, and cabbages somewhat safer than potatoes ; but none is as safe as in England. Potatoes, when the planting fails, cannot be re-planted. By sowing cabbage seeds every month in the year, save the last winter months, (when they would go to seed,-) cabbage plants may be always had to replenish the cabbage field or garden, if the last planting have failed. But no one should attempt cabbages, unless the soil be a foot deep, and very rich, either by nature or by manure. After cutting the stump will throw out half a crop more before they need be dug up, if the season be showery. 6. In breeding pigs, grain, if dear, need not be exclusively used. But there is in this colony at times plenty of -grain, when there is not a potatoe, cabbage, or turnip, in the garden. Meal, whether of maize, or barley, or wheat meal mixed with bran or chaff, may then be used. Let the wash be thick or thin, according to the condition of the pigs. 7. To keep pigs, or any other animals, in a standing state, that is neither getting bigger nor fatter, is a waste of all the food they may consume during such a period of non-improvement. 8. The chief profit of pigs in England, is their manure. To raise as much of this as possible, they must be well littered with straw, fern, or rushes. The floor of the stye must be of pavement or slabs. If the latter they mustbe strongly braced together to prevent rooting up. 9. Warmth is as necessary to the thriving of pigs little or big, fat or lean, as food. Bryness is the same ; the back part of the pig-styes, should face the south; the southeast rains, where they penetrate the styes, put back fatting pigs ; a pig-stye should be as closely slabbed as a hut; under the roof part, the stye should be as well sheltered from the rain and summer sun, as the hut of the settler is. The pig-styes of our settlers are often pictures of waste, as to profit, and of cruelty as to their miserable inhabitants ; their pigs up to their knees in mire and in winter, eat four times the corn that is needed to fatten them. 10. Pigs over-fed will take a surfeit ; they should be fed at given hours, three or four times a day, a little at a time. If the last meal was not eaten up cleanly, miss the next meal. I have seen pigs with their troughs so loaded with corn as to take' surfeit, and become sickly ; when killed, their fat was loose and yellow ; therefore, either to underfeed or over-feed a pig is wasteful. The punctual and careful feeding of a fatting pig, so that he be always kept with a good appetite, is a nice operation, and requires great punctuality and care in the feeder of pigs on a large scale. (Old brine should be thrown into the wash."), 11. When pigs cease to get any fatter, they should be forthwith slaughtered. All food thereafter is waste. 12. Those who have boiled down the whole pig, have found the lard produced was inferior. The best way to procure good lard, is to flinch the loin ; that is, to cut off the fat, save half or three-quarters of an inch. A pig that is really fat, will produce above half its weight in lard, when the pork is thus treated. 13. Those who do not undeistand curing bacon, should cure their pork in casks. One ounce of saltpetre to every 50 or 100 lbs. of Liverpool salt, is necessary to give the inett

a good colour. A piece of Irish pork fed on potatoes, will come out of the pot half the size it went in. SA. piece of pork fed on dry meal, never surfeited in feeding, will come out of the pot half as big again. Thus a piece of Irish pork put into the pot with a piece of meal-fed pork, the former being twice the weight, will not come out so large as the latter. The difference of flavour is equally great, being in favour of the meai-fed pork. Dry meal forces the saliva, which is healthy and fattening. 14. Pig-skins are used for saddles ; but, t believe, the pigs must be very old, and of a particular breed, in order to their skins being fit for this purpose, - But the skins of pigs a year old, would be good enough when dried, to sew up, and then to be filled with bladders of lard. And the odour of such skins would perhaps be more favourable to the smell of lard on being unpacked in a foreign market, than if packed in sheep skins,' or bullock hides. In England,, the skin of a pig is always sold, or cured along with the meat. But the settler who converts as much of the pig into lard as he possibly can, may skin them for the purpose of packing his lard in them. Cobbett says, that the pork or bacon of pigs, whose bristles have been removed by fire, in lieu of boiling water, keeps better. But he that used pig-skins for packing cases, may, (as they use bullock-hides in South America), leave the bristles on them as a preservation and a strengthened Bristles I believe, are not saleable unless taken from pigs of a great age, and of a particular hairy large breed, like the Hampshire hogs. Our settlers should pay no»attention to bristles. 1 5. If any individual, or company, choose to establish a manufactory in Sydney or elsewhere, for the production of oil and stearine | from lard, they can do so. But let our settlers give themselves no trouble on this head. All they have to do, is, to sen i down during the colder months «of the year, their drays loaded with pigs' lard, packed in pigs' skins, or sheep skins, or bullock hides, with the hair on, and they will find no want of customers, any more than they would for their tallow. Their pork or bacon had better be used for their own families, and among their neighbours, in lieu of beef or mutton : for if lard become as extensive an export as tallow, pork, bacon, pigs' cheeks, and hams, will hardly be worth carriage, for mere consumption in Sydney, they will be so very cheap. A thorough pig farmer should never eat beef or mutton, except at Chiistmas, or on birthdays. Let him use up his fat wethers and bullocks at the boiling establishments. 16. The soup and offal of boiling establishments, if carefully used up in feeding pigs, previously to their being, on their arrival at full growth, fattened on dry maize meal, would be a great profit to the proprietors of. such establishments. And when cleanliness order, and economy, 0 have full play at such establishments, they will be able to reduce their present charges ong-half, by the profit they will gain by their pigs. 17. The pig farmer in the neighbourhood of such establishments, could probably buy growing pigs at them cheaper than he could rear them : and, on the other hand, the boiling-down people should never "trouble themselves mth fattening pigs. It will be enough for them, to breed and rear them. This division of labour will be found to be attended with an increase of profits to both parties. 18. The blood and offal of boiling establishments should be converted either into food for growing pigs, or manure, by being poured on straw, fern, or rushes, in pits under sheds. And the growers of food for fattening pigs should buy this manure to enrich their maize crops. If their be any bad smell in a boiling establishment, it shows a waste of Manure. 19. When wheat is 2s. a bushel, it should be ground and given to fatting pigs, dry, but mixed with bran or chaff; it will be found quite as fattening as maize meal. For breeding sows and growing pigs, meal of any kind may be thrown into a cistern and allowed to remain till a little sour. This wash is excellent stuff for young pigs. 20. Potatoes, turnips, and cabbages, should all be boiled or steamed for sows' litters and growing pigs, this food goes much further than when raw.] Raw potatoes, &c, are a wasteful mode x>f using them. But oeware of giving pigs this kind of food hot. Cold food is not healthy. A little warm perhaps may be of no consequence. 21. It is supposed that pigs sent out in a large herd to feed in lagoons or the forest, pay for the expense of the swine-herd. It would be well to consider how far the food which swine gather this way in a day, is equal to the expense of their keeper. The acorns of England, the beech mast of America, and the chestnuts of Spain, do supply a great deal of wholesome food for growing pigs in the proper season. But it may be a question In . this country, whether the swine-herd's

keep and wages wouli not buy or raise more food than what is to be gathered in our lagoons, &c. The grass mown from a field of lucern, would perhaps be more nourishing than all that can be gathered in an Australian lagoon or forest, unless the forest be very rich land, and traversed by a chain of ponds. If a man be kept tilling, manuring, mowing, and carrying the grass of a field of lucerne to the pig yard, would he in the course of a year, produce more food than the pigs could get by depasturing ? This is the question for the pig farmer of New South Wales, and it depends on. the nature of his pig run. Mr. Rhodes of Islington used to keep 999 milking cows for the supply of the northern quarter of London. They were fed in their byers with brewers' grains, turnips, &c. In the daytime they depastured on the adjoining fields on the richest grass. But a cow-keeper at Glasgow, in the neighbourhood of which there are no grass fields, keeps his cows tied up in a large stone built shed, day and night, having plenty of room to lie down. The skin of animals, as well as of men, require to be clean. These cows, therefore, were cleaned daily, with curry-combe and brush, like horses. The proprietor produced good milk, and the price it fetched him wholesale, repayed him for all his expences, including rent, food, and attendance. 22. A pig-stye being open at one end, the skin of the animal, token well littered, keeps clean without needing man's assistance. Growing pigs when not sent out to depasture, should have a paddock to range in, close fenced, where there are ponds of water, and a shed erected, boarded in on three sides, to shelter them from the summer sun and the cold rains. Sows, with their litters, should not be allowed to leave their styes too early. 23. Nine times in ten our settlers have bought their pigs too soon, and the season blighting their crops, their pigs have often died .qL starvation. See therefore that your crops be safe first of all, then buy your pigs, and mind that you buy too few, rather than too many. » 24. From experience I know that the irregularity of the seasons of this colony renders the breeding and fattening of pigs, whether on a large scale or a small, a matter of much greater risk than in England, In England, you can calculate with some degree of certainty on the crops, and distance to market ; and when at last, your ltter of young pigs, id the shape of lard and pork, are arrived safely to market, you can depend pretty much on the price, in cash, you will obtain. But in this country, your crops aie uncertain, your servants unskilful and inexperieuced, (yourself probably the same,) the distance to market ten times as great as in England, the roads worse; and when at last your drays have arrived at Sydney, your agent may, either by his carelessness or worse failing, disappoint you. In dry seasons pigs die by hundreds for waut of wells having been previously sunk ; therefore the breeding and fattening of pigs in New South Wales is, after all, a serious affair ; but so is farming in general; (sheep and cattle die for want of water as well as pigs.) And so is shopkeeping in the present times. In short, the colony in all its aspects, at present, is uninviting. But are the colonists to stand still ? No. The people must create an export other than those of wool, fish, oils, and tallow. And the sooner the settlers learn the trade of lard making, the better for themselves and. the colony at large. It will pay them better than maize at a shilling a bushel, ar wheat at holf-a-crown, or potatoes at the same price per ton. 25. Before any one embark capital in pigfattening and the production of lard, he should calculate the amount required to produce a given quantity of lard annually. The expenses will be — 1. Fig-styes large enough to contain four fattening pigs, and no more. They must be built of brick or slabs, and if slabs, groved into sleepers as securely as the settler's own slab hut. The roof to be of b.ark or shingles, well sloped. The caving not higher from the ground than three feet. The floor of large heavy stones or slabs of timber well tied or dove-tailed into each other. Unless the floor be firm, you can never prevent the pigs from rooting up the earth ; and in wet weather, being up to their middle in mud. 2. A paddock close fenced, which is expensive. A shed in it of slabs, enclosed on three sides. A never-failing pond in it, or a well, dug very deep to fill troughs. 3. A shed to protect from the weather your coppers for boiling food, and cisterns full of wash. 4. A hut under the same roof to contain bins to be filled with meal, chaff, &c. The mill to be put up in this hut* Unless there be a pnblic mill within 30 miles. 5. Another hat or store under the same roof, to contain casks, dried skins, and the pork casks -and lard when packed. 6. A deep well close at hand.

The above hints will give a new settler some idea of the expense of buildings, to be erected expressly for the fattening of swine, and of the expense of labour, to keep them all full, and the whole system in profitable operation, 26. In selecting a farm for the above purposes, it should contain rich low land, and the closer it is to a sheep, boiling-down establishment, the better. The banks of the Hunter is perhaps the most eligible district for a farm for pigs and lard. I have no doubt that rich low farms close to the Hunter, and near the boiling down establishments on the same river, with pig runs, among lagoons and marches, would yield a good profit for an outlay of capital from £300 to £1000. A little farmer with" only one or two hundred pounds capital, must do all his business in his own hut, making the river his well of water, building the pig-styes with his own hands, being his own butcher, salter, and packer, and hiring his neighbour's dray to take his lard to market. Instead of a great copper, he must set fire to a stump, and pop his iron pot on it filled with turnips or potatoes, or both, maize meal being added if he can. I have observed in a former letter, that sheeps and bullocks bladders for the lard, and skins for packing them for Sydney, can only be had at the boiling down establishments. And I have noticed in this, that if the proprietors of the latter would sell tbeir growing pigs, which they feed on soup, to the little settlers, the latter would be eased of the outlay of breeding pigs, and so confine his capital and labour, to fattening and making lard. 27. Until our settlers learn to consume their maize on their own farms, by breeding and fattening swine, all boiling-down establishments would, I imagine, find it to their interest to invest a sufficiency of extra capital in purchasing maize, grinding it into fine meal, and giving it dry to their soup-fed hogs as soon as they have arrived at their full growth. Such hogs having been well fed from the time they were littered, would on being finished with hard food, produce from 150 to 250 lbs. of lard each, such lard being of the very hardest, whitest, and best odoured quality, and consequently, fetching in London 6d. a Ibt, being salted and packed in bladders, and then in sheep skins. 28. I do not know any mode more effectual of encouraging tenant settlers to consume their maize on their own farms, than their landlords, one and all throughout the colony, agreeing fo receive lard in payment for their rents ; allowing a fixed price, say for maize fed lard 4d. a lb., packed in bladders, and 2§ for potatoe-fed lard, on condition that it be sweet, not burnt, and properly salted. 29. And lastly. Wool will only pay when gathered from pasture land, which pays no rent to any amount worth the name. If all the laud in New South Wales, depastured by our present stock of sheep and cattle, were estimated in acres do the owners pay as much as a penny an acre for it ? I imagine not. The wool of this country is supposed by many to be unlimited in amount, as to_ what it will become as sheep continue to increase. But wool, I think, will be limited by several circumstances, First, horned cattle flee before sheep ; and when they get to a certain distance, they cannot be driven to Sydney in a marketable state. When this comes to pass, they must be kept nearer at home, aud the sheep must be depastured beyondj.hera. This distance must not extend to such a latitude as to cause the expense of carriage to Sydney to swallow up the profits of the wool. When it does so, such sheep will feed and clothe the owners, but the wool will not be exported. Wool at present provides us with foreign clothes, tools, and other necessaries, for 170,000 souls. But nations are composed of millions. Will our wool be ever exported to such an amount, so as to provide as well for five or six millions, as it does for 170,000 1 Certainly not. We must, then, look to other things besides wool. These at present, are fish oils, tallow, a few hides and sheepskins, a little bark, bones, treenails, &c, &c. The whole amount, save that of fish oils, is paltry. Shall we ever make wine enough for our own consumption, and to export ? A hundred years hence we may, for the greater part of Cumberland is fit for grapes, and also Huntei River. But wine must be made from trenched ground. And in this colony, it cannot be trenched under £15 or £20 an acxe ; and it cannot he trenched at all except in moist weather. The land holders and men of property in | this colony who intend their families to inherit it, should therefore, do all they can to add to the number of our exports. Let ihem not ; despise £100,000 a-year, which may be got for lard, and very speedily too. But they, must no longer exact money in letting their ■ lsnds to little settlers. They must in future take produce of some sort, if they would have a tenantry somewhat better off than gipsies.