THE KING COUNTRY.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 56, 2 November 1914, Page 4

THE KING COUNTRY.

The King Country is winning a name in the world at any rate in thejieaceful art of butter-making. The cable message from London a few days ago which recorded the success of Piopio at tho National Dairy Show has given high satisfaction to a little back-blocks community in the Rohepotae; .its exhibit' of factory butter was awarded a first prize for salted and a second for unsalted, says the | "Lyttelton Times." There were no other New Zealand competitors, but the King Country product appears to have won its way against the all-comers outride this Dominion. Many reading that cablegram would have wondered where Piopio was, for it is a name quite new to fame, even in New Zealand. Until a very few years ago it was but a tiny straggling Maori settlement, and its fine undulating lands that now make a civilised oasis in the limbstone country between Te Kuiti and the Upper Mokau, were given up to the mobs of wild horses and the fern-root-hunting wild pig. Now it is a busy, prosperous little township, with its school, stores, and dairy factory, a type of half-a-hundred other hardworking, money-making communities in the back country of the once savage Rohepotae how being •■effectually tamed by the men of the axe and the plough, the i milking-machine and the sheep-shears. Its settlers' are ■ cboperating on sound and progressive lines, and that they have pluck and plenty of confidence in themselves is shown by their enterprise in sending samples of their output to the great British show .in competition against the world, although their dairy factory was established only three years ago.