MILK MARKETING

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 3, Issue 711, 11 December 1933, Page 7

MILK MARKETING

("Post" Special Correspond6iit.)

FARM CHEESE INDUSTRY IS NOW ALMOST DEAD. i CHESHIRE FARMIERS.

London, October 27. According t,o the Daily Express agricultural correspondent, the farm cheese-making industry throughout Great Britain is in the worst condition it has ever known. In Cheshire, which normally is responsible or supplying two-thirds of home-produced cheese, the industry is praetically dead. By withholding from farmers advantages which it gives to cheese manufacturers, the milk marketing scheme is foreing farm cheesemakers out of business turning their milk on to the market for sale for liquid consumption. In Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset more than five hundred farmers have given up cheese-making, and their employees, who averaged three to a farm, have been thrown out of work. Mr. J. F. Broughton, of South Petherton, said that in Somerset alone the farmers produced 50,000 gallons of milk a day, most of which they used to turn into cheese. "We got 8d a pound," he said. "Under the milk scheme we shall get no compensation for milk made into cheese, so we have given up the business. The cheese industry will he dead in three months. There are factories for making cheese, but the fame of our counties' produce was built on the cheese made in the farmer's own dairy." Production in Lancashire has fallen by half during the last month'. In Wensleydale 60 per cent. of the cheesemakers have ahandoned the industry. In Cheshire it is expected that more than 5000 people will be affected by the cessation of the cheese-making business. The county federation recently toolc a census of its members, and found that 1350 (about 90 per cent.), employing more than 4000 people, had left the business since the milk scheme came into operation. On of them is Mr. T. C. Goodwin, the chairman. He himself produced an average of thirty tons a year. He has a herd of 110 milking cows, and a large number of pigs, which he was able to feed with the whey from his cheese-making. "The marketing scheme will he wrecked unless provision is made for the cheesemakers before the new contracts are negotiated at the end of March," he said. "With the cheese industry ruined ther.e will he a tre~ mendous flood of milk on the market." Mr. W. H. Hobson, a cheese-maker of Na.ntwich, expressed the opinion that unless the Government took steps to help the cheesemakers the milk scheme would be dead by this time next year. "The worst of it is," he added, "the cheese industry will be stone dead, too." These statements, no doubt, are meant primarily to hasten action on the part of the Government and the milk Marketing Board. ■ f