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.