FARMERS' CO-OPERATIVE MEAT FREEZING WORKS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9567, 13 August 1909, Page 5

FARMERS' CO-OPERATIVE MEAT FREEZING WORKS.

(To the Ed if or. Sir,—l have followed the fortunes of the promotors of the above Company in your columns with interest. Having had a quarter of a century's experience in both Islands in farming and freezing, I should like to offer a few comments on the position. Firstly, now that the Company is practically assured, the works should toe built on the seaboard, say, Wellington, and be built in such a manner that they can be easily enlarged. Once the Company is in working order there will be no lack of buyers from outside districts, an d what is more a large percentage of the farmers will not only freeze their own stock, compete in the markets for their neighbours, and there will then be every inducement for the farmers to improve the standard of their stock, and they will soon find out that it pays best to do their stock well and turn them out in the primsst condition. But as matters mw there is no such inducement. The prices or stock ere fixed by the buying companies in the office, and U mostly regulated by the state of their balance sheet, each farmer getting the same price irrespective of weight and quality. I am satisfied that no farming district can prosper as it might under such conditions. Contrast the conditions between Canterbury and many parts of the North Island, especially on the West Coast of the latter. In Canterbury, at every country sale one will see buyers of all description, farmers, private speculators, companies' buyers and butchers in competition with one another for the prime lines which will bring every penny they are worth, but in the North Wand during four years 1 have never seen a company buyer either in a pen of sheep, handling them or bidding for them except in the winter. They wanted stock for the shops. My experience has taught me that the buying companies beand New Plymouth care as little for the farmers as an ordinary money-lending Jew does for his clients. They have valuable freeholds and works, large reserve funds, nay goo:i dividend--, and run theii works on too expensive lines They are over staffed, pay absurdly high salaries for the work required, and when we come to think of it. who pays the pipar for all this. There is only one answer: "The Farmer." The companies cannot lose; they regulate the price of stock to cover

any previous loss, and it is a case of heads they win tails the farmers lose. You published a letter in your issue of August 3rd signed "New Chum" in which he states that the farmers in Canterbury know as much about the freezing hnsines3 as the buyers, but he did not explain how they gained this knowledge, which is so valuable to the producers of freezing stock. I will supply the omission. Tlwy have gained their knowledge through practical experience by supporting a farmers' freezing company, which has never bought a sheep, but which freezes and works up the by-products to the best advantage and assists the farmers to dispose of everything at the highest market rate, and they do all this at the lowest possible cost to the proJ ducer. To aum up the position in a few werds—ln Canterbury the buyer has to ask the farmer what he will take for his stock, but in the North Island the farmer has to ask the buyer what he will give. Thanking | you in anticipation, I am., etc., OLD CHUM. \ Kaikoura, August 6tb, 1909. I