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.
CHAPTER XXXIV
SOME FREAKS OF NATURE