A PILL FOR THE FARMERS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 1018, 31 December 1881, Page 3

A PILL FOR THE FARMERS.

Farmers will do well to find the answer to the question asked by the Oamaru, Mail in the following para) graph : —“ It is an extraordinary and startling fact that, while our dairy farmers in New Zealand are complaining of the want of a profitable market for cheese, there is imported from the other hemisphere for the use of the, colonists cheese of such a superior quality that it can command the extraordinary price of Is 6d per lb. No unusual means are taken for its safe transport across the ocean, and still it looks fresh and tempting to the palates of connoisseurs. We are forced to ask this question—-How is this thus? Surely we have every element and material for the manufacture of equally good cheese here, if only the requisite skill and care be exercised by the makers. Our farmers should never utter a mariner of complaint about bad times or poor prices for dairy products so long as there is imported a single foreign cheese that can be made in England with high rents, at a distance of 16,000 miles, and brought and sold here in good condition with profit to the exporter and importer, and consumed with relish by the unpampered stomach of a colonial.”

Unless producers will really strive after excellence it is of little use keeping up the cry about the prejudice against colonial manufacturers. It is the opinion of those who have given the subject of cheese-making most thought that the productive cause of failure is carelessness. Careless about the breed of his cattle, careless about their feed, their water, their stables, and their general well being, careless about the manufacture and storing of the article, the cheese-maker in the colonies differs from the cheesemaker at Home or in Amerrica as darkness differs from light. It is a disgrace to New Zealand that her farmers should be sending cheese to the English market, there to be sold for fivepence or sixpence a lb, while consumers of that article are paying in some instances three times that price for cheese of English make. New Zealand should be an exporter of cheese that would fetch top prices at home and top prices in the colony. The article has no legitimate place on our list of imports.