Fifty-seven Years Ago

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 11, 8 September 1939, Page 53

Fifty-seven Years Ago

One of the points made in a talk prepared by the Young Farmers’ Club of Westmere was the historical connection between pasture-management and retrigeration. Here are some extracts from the talk, which was delivered trom 2YC, Wellington, on Tuesday, August 22. It is interesting to recall that it was on the 15th February, 1882, that the sailing vessel " Dunedin" put out from Port Chalmers with the first consignment of frozen meat ever shipped from these shores. When. ninety-eight days later, that shipment successfully completed a transit of the long, intervening sea route that connects this country with its principal overseas market, it proved the forerunner of the many thousands of similar consignments that were to follow upon the trail of this pioneering effort. The introduction of refrigeration to shipping transport and the work associated with the production, shipping, and marketing of those " early" consignments of frozen meat, laid the foundation stone sone of New Zealand’s "key" industries, the fat ¥Yrb industry. For that first shipment included four hundred and ninety-nine carcases of lamb, the first products of a trade that has developed far beyond the dreams of pioneering days. During the past two seasons, nine million carcases of New Zealand lamb have been forwarded, annually, to Empire markets, and, for the quantities exported and the quality of these products, New Zealand has set a standard of excellence that has long been the envy and aspiration of exporters of this item of primary production in other countries. The position at present held by New Zealand lamb on the Home market has

been attained by attention to every factor influencing the production, in quantity and quality, of the product concerned, and the challenge that is arising out of the efforts of our overseas competitors can be successfully countered only by maintaining efficiency in all phases of fat lamb production.