MUTTON AND BUTTER FOR LONDON TABLES
New Zealand is one of the leading sheep countries of the world, and
Christchurch is its mutton metropolis. It is a South Island city
of more than seventy thousand people, situated near the sea on the
Canterbury Plains, the breeding ground of the sheep that have made New
Zealand mutton famous.
Though so small, the Dominion ranks sixth in the number of its sheep.
Thousands of carcasses are frozen in this country every year and a
fleet of steamers is always moving over the oceans carrying delicious
mutton chops and roasts to the tables of England. The distance to
London via the Panama Canal is more than eleven thousand miles. It
is even farther by the Cape of Good Hope or the Suez Canal, but
nevertheless both the cost of rearing the sheep and the freight charges
are so low that New Zealand mutton can be sold in London for less than
that raised in England itself.
Let me give you some idea of New Zealand’s sheep industry. It is the
one out of which the country makes the most money, though dairying
is now a close second. There are in the Dominion about twenty-two
million sheep, or enough to give every man, woman, and child a flock of
eighteen. Although only one thirtieth the size of the United States,
New Zealand has nearly half as many sheep as we have, and its wool
production is proportionately much greater than ours. It exports
annually fifty-five million dollars’ worth of frozen mutton, five
million dollars’ worth of tallow, and fifty-five million dollars’ worth
of wool.
There are sheep farms everywhere. I have visited many of them and have
found them much better kept than similar properties in the United
States. They are divided into large fields fenced with wire. This
is primarily a grazing country, and its future seems to be in sheep
raising and dairying. The New Zealand farmer does not have to house his
stock. The soil is fertile, and there is abundant rainfall, so that
he can produce meat at much less cost than if he lived in a land of
droughts, scanty grass, and more severe winters. Sixteen million acres
have been sown in grasses and the greater part of the crops grown is
fed to sheep and cattle.
In Australia sheep are reared chiefly for their wool. Here they are
bred for their meat as well. The discovery that Canterbury mutton
could be frozen and shipped to England where, because of its delicate
flavour, it commanded high prices, revolutionized farming in the
Dominion. Formerly sheep had been fed on wild grasses and raised for
their wool and tallow. When it was realized that native mutton could
be marketed abroad at a profit, special studies were made of the kinds
of food producing the best meat and the grazing lands were intensively
cultivated for fodder. The absence of sour swamp grasses and weeds in
the pasturage of the country has been suggested as a reason for the
fine flavour of its mutton.
New Zealand mutton won its reputation as Canterbury mutton, though by
no means all of it was even then raised on the Canterbury Plains. The
South Island was, it is true, the cradle of the industry, which now
flourishes over the whole of the Dominion, but there is said to be no
finer sheep country in the world than the limestone downs of Hawke’s
Bay on the North Island. Many of the sheep stations are very large, for
it has been found that it is best to have only two or three animals to
an acre of pasture land, and some of the flocks number five thousand,
ten thousand, and even twenty thousand head. The size of the average
flock from year to year is about one thousand.
The chief breeds of sheep are the Lincolns, the Leicesters, the
Corriedales, the Southdowns, and the Romneys. The Lincolns thrive best
on the wild lands and hills of the North Island, the Romney Marsh on
moist soil, and the Merinos on the dry plains. The best mutton sheep
are cross-breds, which are known as freezers.
There is an old saying that you can’t get blood out of turnips, but the
New Zealanders do it by feeding them to sheep. In fact, practically
every good chop I eat here is mostly turnips, and the people tell me
that turnip-fed sheep produce the best mutton. In buying a sheep farm
the first question asked is whether the land will raise turnips, and if
so the price is much higher than it would be otherwise. Turnip fields
are to be seen on every landscape, of which they often form a striking
feature. The crop grows luxuriantly and forms a carpet of bright green.
Later on, when the sheep have had their first chance at it, the green
has all disappeared and in its place there is a great bed of black soil
covered with white balls in rows. The field looks as though it had
been ploughed and sown with billiard balls. I have watched the sheep
biting these balls. They eat them out of the ground, digging away
until even the roots have disappeared. Sometimes the farmers dig up the
turnips and feed them to their flocks. Alfalfa and mangel-wurzels, a
coarse kind of beet, are also grown for fattening sheep.
[Illustration: Most of New Zealand’s butter is sold abroad on the
coöperative basis, the farmers and the creameries dividing the profits.
None can be exported until it has been graded by a government expert.]
[Illustration: The tattooed chieftain has almost entirely disappeared,
but in the past the Maori men used to cover most of their faces and
bodies with ornamental spirals. The women were tattooed only on lips
and chin.]
On the larger estates the sheep are kept in enormous fields, and a
few hands suffice to care for a flock of thousands. Like most of the
workers of New Zealand, the shepherds are unionized and their wages
and hours have been established throughout the industry. In some cases
their employers add to the regular wages by paying a bonus at the close
of the season. I met one man who told me he gave each of his hands
fifty dollars when the hardest of the work was done.
The shearing, which usually begins in September and lasts until
January, is done by machinery. A gang of shearers will work through
a district with their machines, going from farm to farm like wheat
harvesters or a threshing crew in the United States. Some of the farms
have their own shearing sheds, but often several sheep stations will
own one in common, to which all the flocks are driven. Occasionally
shearers come over from Australia, where the season is earlier, but
they are more often New Zealand men with small farms of their own or
some other occupation for the rest of the year. They are organized, of
course, and are veritable autocrats, with the power of financial life
or death over the wool growers. If the farmers wait until late summer
for the clip, the fleeces get full of seeds from the grasses on which
the sheep feed, making “seedy wool,” which brings poor prices. It does
not pay the farmer to quarrel with the shearers when the summer suns of
January are ripening the grass seeds.
The wool clips vary greatly according to the breeds of sheep. The
Merino fleeces range all the way from four to seven pounds each, while
the Leicesters will average ten pounds and the Lincolns about eleven
pounds. There are sheep which produce from twenty to thirty pounds of
wool at a clip, but these are exceptional.
Though not so numerous as in Australia, rabbits are among the pests
of the New Zealand sheep districts. They were introduced into the
islands as pets and with the idea also that they might furnish meat.
They increased so rapidly that they threatened to overrun the whole
country and eat up all its pasturage. Millions of dollars have been
spent in killing them or in fencing them out of the sheep lands and
the government distributes poisoned oats from its various agricultural
stations to help the farmers destroy them. Trapping rabbits for their
skins has become an important industry, in which many men are engaged,
and this has tended to make them less of a menace to the sheep runs.
Exports of rabbit skins now bring in between two and three million
dollars annually. Most of them go to Great Britain and the United
States where the fur is manufactured into felt hats. It takes the fur
of six rabbits to make a man’s hat. Considerable numbers of frozen
rabbits are also shipped from Dunedin to the world’s markets.
But let us go to one of the refrigeration plants and see just how
mutton is prepared for London dinner tables. New Zealand has fifty
meat-freezing plants, and the largest and oldest of all is here
at Christchurch. It is known as the Belfast Freezing Works and is
a coöperative institution, the sheep owners being the principal
stockholders.
We take a car and ride out to the works, which are within a few miles
of Christchurch. The buildings consist of great sheds surrounded by
paddocks filled with sheep ready for killing. Near by are drying yards,
which at first sight seem covered with snow, but as we get closer we
see that they are spotted with great piles of newly washed wool. We are
first taken to the sheep yards where we watch the men drive the animals
up a runway to the killing station on the second floor. Several old
sheep are used day after day and year after year as the advance guard
to lead their brothers to slaughter. They start the procession, and the
thousands behind, sheep-like, follow them. Often ten thousand sheep
pass up that roadway in one day.
The sheep are killed at the rate of ten every minute, and it is only
seven minutes from the time the live sheep is seized until it is ready
for freezing. There is a long string of carcasses steadily flowing out
of the killing station into the cooling room and later on from there
down to the freezing chambers, where the temperature is eight degrees
above zero.
In three days the sheep are as hard as stone. Tap one of the carcasses
as we stand in a freezing room. It resounds like a drum. Take one down
and rest it on the floor; it is so stiff that it stands alone. My
fingers feel frost-bitten as I take notes, and we are glad to get out.
After a look at the freezing machinery, which the manager tells us
came from America, we go to the other departments of the works to see
what is being done with the by-products. In one place sheep tongues
are being canned to be shipped all over the world. The cooking is done
in great vats in which the water is kept boiling by steam pipes. The
white tongues bob up and down in the boiling water and from time to
time bare-armed men take some out with pitchforks and put others in
their places.
In another room we see workers rendering fat; in another they are
dressing the sheep heads, and in others they are pulling wool from
the skins and spreading it out to dry. A curious department is that
where the blood and bones are made into fertilizer. The dried blood is
roasted in a great cylinder several hundred feet long. On the floor I
see a pile of blood as big as a small haystack. It smells like ammonia,
and my eyes water as I look.
This blood is very valuable for manure. For a long time it went to
waste in most of the slaughter houses and freezing plants of New
Zealand. Then some Americans came down and made a contract for the
product. The New Zealanders soon saw that the foreigners were making a
good thing out of their blood money, and concluded to take the profit
themselves. When the time came for the renewal of the contract they
refused, and now, I am told, this and the other by-products of the
Christchurch plant pay about all of the expenses of its operation.
As we walk through the works I ask the manager to tell me about his
labour and costs. He replies that the average earnings of the men
are about twenty-five dollars for a forty-four-hour week. Except on
Saturdays the men come to the factory at eight o’clock in the morning
and work until five in the afternoon, taking an hour off for dinner.
They have in addition to this what are called “smoke-o’s.” These are
recesses of ten minutes twice a day for a smoke. The foreman fixes
the times, which are usually ten o’clock in the morning and three in
the afternoon. These smoke recesses are common in all New Zealand
factories. In places where many women are employed, they stop work for
tea every afternoon.
[Illustration: New Zealand will probably remain an agricultural
country, dependent on sea traffic for her manufactured goods. She has
plenty of deep bays and inlets for harbouring even the largest ships.]
[Illustration: To the sheep station owner the rabbit is an unmitigated
evil, but to trappers, freezing works, and skin exporters, it is a
valuable animal.]
[Illustration: The volcanic cone of Mount Egmont looks down on
Taranaki, one of the world’s richest dairy regions. New Zealand’s
climate is so mild and her pasturage so good that stock can feed
outdoors the year round.]
As far as I can see, the men seem contented with their jobs. Many of
them own little cottages near the works, the average working man’s
house costing about twenty-five hundred dollars. The manager tells me
that if a man is ordinarily economical he can pay for his home in five
years, and that most of the men save money. He says that the factory
insures the lives of its employees upon such terms that if they are
killed while on duty their heirs will receive from fifteen hundred to
twenty-five hundred dollars, according to the amount of their policies.
Handling the wool clip of New Zealand is another big business in the
Dominion. As yet only a small proportion is kept at home to be used by
her factories. The mills take around seven million pounds in a total
production of nearly two hundred million pounds. New Zealanders say
that they do not expect they will ever be serious competitors with
the woollen mills of old England. They declare that they prefer to
maintain the present high standard of living for the working classes
rather than bring in cheap foreign labour for factories. There are but
twelve woollen mills in the country and only three of these, the ones
at Petone, Kaiapoi, and Dunedin, are large establishments. The Kaiapoi
mill is near Christchurch and is famous for making the most beautiful
travelling rugs in the world.
The Kaiapoi mills employ many girls. They are healthy, rosy-cheeked,
and well dressed, and hundreds of them ride to and from the factory on
bicycles. They work eight hours a day, their wages being about eleven
dollars a week.
Next to sheep raising, dairying is the great farming industry of the
Dominion. There are in the two islands more than a million dairy
cows and heifers and the government does everything in its power to
encourage the breeding of fine stock and the production of good milk,
butter, and cheese. It advances money to dairy companies for acquiring
land and machinery and setting up buildings. The loans must be repaid
within fifteen years, and the rate charged is five per cent.
There are numerous coöperative butter and cheese factories to which
the farmers take their milk. Here it is inspected for its purity and
tested for its butter fat. The producers are paid on the basis of
the fat content, and dirty milk is, of course, refused. Some of the
plants close for three months every year, but many of those in the best
dairying regions keep going the year round, making either butter or
cheese as season or market demands. New Zealand exports annually in the
neighbourhood of twenty-five thousand tons of butter and sixty thousand
tons of cheese, worth approximately sixty-five million dollars. Most
of this cheese and butter goes, of course, to Great Britain, but
increasing quantities are being shipped to Canada, and in spite of our
high tariff, some of it finds a market in the United States.
All meat and dairy products exported from New Zealand are inspected
and graded by government agents. The official standards are so high,
and the inspectors have done their work so well, that their stamps are
accepted as absolute guarantees of quality and weight in the markets
of the world. In fact, New Zealand butter and cheese now rank with
the output of the famous Danish coöperatives. The meat-export trade
is entirely controlled by a government board, on which the producers
themselves are represented, and no foreign sales or shipments can be
made without its approval. It maintains a permanent agency in London
where the bulk of New Zealand mutton is sold.