FARM AND DAIRY.

Taranaki Daily News, 4 August 1921, Page 6

FARM AND DAIRY.

TAKING SKINS. SO AS TO ENSURE TOP PRICES. New Zealand farmers generally have a fair knowledge of how to take skins off calves, but a considerable proportion of New Zealand skins are graded second quality or meaty, because of the lack of care in curing, or because too much meat is left on the skin. Also a great number go slippy through being improperly cured, and by coming into contact with mud and dirt. The best method to follow, which of course will give you the best prices, is as follows: When you have skinned the calves, salt the skins well and stack them either pelt to pelt or by folding down the backbone, but make sure that the salt is well rubbed into the pelt before stacking. This ensures a good cure, and by keeping the hair side away from the pelt side the pelt is kept clean and white; this makes your skin more attractive, and consequently of more value. Be careful to keep mud and fclirt right away from the skin. A slippy skin° is practically valueless, and a dirty skin, even if not slippy, has a very low value. Stack your skins where the weather will not get at them.

Leave your skin in salt for at least seven days. These are times when it is going to pay you to look after your calf skins carefully, so that you will get more money for them.

Several interesting schemes have' been sot on foot with a view to disposing of New Zealand's meat and wool, says Meat and Wool. One of these is the formation of a concern to convert meat into meat-meal, having a high nutritive value and easily stored and used by the housewife. The- output would not be confined to Australasia, but would extend to foreign countries, particularly the East. It is the Eastern market which is the prime factor in another proposal, which aims to establish a New Zealand woollen mill in China to be worked by Chinese labor and to supply the demand for woollens there. A third proposal is the establishment nf a cooperative woollen mill in New Zealand, so that the grower will receive the full

“cloth” value of his wool. It is proposed to hand on ordinary shares in the concern to farmers in return for wool handed over by the Tatter. This last scheme is certainly a. sound one, as the promoters intend to manufacture every class of woollen goods, as against the blankets and tweedy that are the chief manufactures of the existing mills. Freight saving is an important point, and the proposal is certainly worth the deepest consideration.