Copra As Fodder In Nz

TWO thousand tons of copra from Samoa will arrive in New Zealand this month for use as stock feed and for the manufacture of coconut oil.

It has been arranged by the NZ Internal Marketing Department. A second ship ment of 2,000 tons will arrive in May or June and there may be others later.

The chief purnose of the importation is to meet the shortage of stock feed.

The normal price of copra in Samoa is £l2 to £l5 a ton. It will be sold to New Zealand farmers at £B/10 - a ton at wharf. The copra will be used mainly for nigs, but also for cattle and sheen.

Its feed value pound for pound is said to be one and three-ouarter times that of barley or barley meal. An experimental shinment of 100 tons arrived in November and was distributed to farmers through out the North Island. Reports are that it has been satisfactorv.

It is recommended that copra should be fed dry at the rate of from I lb. a day for young nigs to lh lb. a day for large pigs, in addition to the usual skim milk or other feeds. Experiments are now being conducted to find whether the feeding of copra right up to the time of killing has any effect on the quality of the bacon.

In the meantime it is not recommended that it should be fed during the last four or six weeks before killing.

Some of the copra will also be used in the manufacture of coconut oil. A plant for the extraction of the oil was established in Auckland early this year.

EDITORIAL NOTE—The foregoing is from a report published in several New Zealand papers by the NZ Press Asso ciation. It is surprising to note that there Are no warnings concerning the effect of feeding raw copra to stock. Experiments in Australia indicated that the NZ method of feeding copra to stock caused much trouble and some deaths among the animals. The correct method seems to be to thoroughly mill or break up the copra, and supply it with about an equal proportion of other, and recognised food.