THE AUCKLAND BUTCHERS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2770, 15 April 1890, Page 2

THE AUCKLAND BUTCHERS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sin,—On Monday last Auckland awoke, and before breakfasting bitterly found out that beef was raised by the butchers Id per lb. It had been raised the same sum two months before, so now it costs 2d more, exactly doubled in price. We rushed to the papers to examine the market reports, and strange as it may be, we saw that no appreciable rise in value had taken place in the price of stock. We are mostly sprung from the farming class, many of us would fain go back to our early pursuits had we only the means, or were the village settlement scheme put in force again. Your readers cannot be fleeced, as we are attempted to bo by the butchers, but they suffer nevertheless. I will show how : Costly freezing works wero run up here, built on the sea, capable of freezing hundreds of thousands of animals per year in a province where] nut 400,000 animals existed altogether. They would not pay the cost of working, not to mention interest on an outlay of some £100,000, but they saw butchers could be money-lenders, racers, etc., and they started the retail trade, and then offered to sell out to the butchers who complained that their action had brought down the price of dead meat. The simple butchers swallowed the bait, and bargained, it is said, to take 75 animals per week from them at a fixed price, before they bought an animal from our own saleyards. To these yards most of your animals are sent, and you are thus forestalled. If yon come in at all, you come in last. We, the working men of Auckland, will not pay 5d for ribs and rounds, and 8d for rump steak, while you get lid per lb all round. I have written a letter to the Star, calling on the butchers to relax. As many of your readers will see it, I ask them, if it is published, to take it in connection with this, with a view to an arrangement being entered upon whereby the Waikato farmers may have a prospect of rearing, instead of destroying, their calves, a source of wealth at a time when their butter prospects are so bright. I am eating your factory butter at a cost of Is 4d per lb, and I am glad to see that Messrs Reynolds and Co. have more conscience than our beef vendors—l cannot call them all butchers—who, acted on first by the freezing company, ran meat up a penny, and, emboldened by success, they have now doubled it, and left you, the producers, to your stereotyped £4 to £0 a head for fat cattle without a hope, substituting Taranaki beef for yours. 1< lax is suffering a temporary depression. In one case I see a mill lessee here is gazetted a bankrupt in yesterday's paper. But his bargain was reckless; he could not bear such a fall, as he was paying a sharp weekly rate and no output. If the butchers of Auckland succeed in imposing this last penny per lb. on meat without giving producers a fair and full corresponding incramentof increase for live weight, they will hopelessly ruin Auckland by leaving your cattle unsold on your hands, driving us, with famished looks and tottering gait, to Napier, Taranaki or Canterbury, where beef is cheap. Hoping the Association that is so manfully spreading out its branches to Cambridge, etc., will discuss the position.—l am, etc., 1 Paterfamilias. Ponsonby, April sth.