CHAPTER XXXIII
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.
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.
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.
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.
To the sheep station owner the rabbit is an unmitigated evil, but to trappers, freezing works, and skin exporters, it is a valuable animal.
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.