A Revolution in Dairy Farming: What Miss Maidment is Achieving at Sherburn Hall
Transcript of Auckland Chronicle article
Work of National Importance
A few days ago I was permitted a glimpse of a revolutionary movement growing in our midst. It is not noisy, and therefore little known; but it’s influence will be felt in every farmhouse in Durham, while its effect will be to raise the county to a high place among English dairy farming districts. The County Council supplies the motive power, and the principal is Miss Maidment, who has wide experience as a lecturer in dairying and poultry-keeping, and has done much pioneer work in connection with education in dairying and poultry-keeping in many parts of not only England, but further afield.
The headquarters of the revolution is Sherburn Hall, a large mansion situated at the end of a colliery village three miles from the City of Durham, which is no longer desirable as a residence for the wealthy, but makes an excellent dairy farming school for the County Council. Here there is accommodation for 20 to 30 girl student boarders, who take a course of up-to-date dairy work, which includes butter and cheese making on scientific lines, milk testing and another course of poultry-keeping.
The Old Order Changeth
In normal times the girls come from north-country farms, chiefly in Durham, but during the past months a new type of student has been received through the Board of Agriculture Scholarships, the town girl who has been attracted to this kind of work by patriotic reasons or in search of a career.
It does not require much imagination to see what effect the college is going to have upon dairy farming, but merely locally, but throughout the north, and I do not exaggerate when I assert that it will be revolutionary when the students go back to the farms, the old haphazard methods are no longer good enough; they have had their eyes opened to great possibilities, and have learned the way by which they can be realised.
Just one instance of this effect. In the good old rule of thumb days, when tradition kept enterprise in chains, Durham was not a cheese-making county. Probably none of the old-fashioned people who hate new methods could have told you why. It was simply a fact – a law of nature, if you like – like the rotation of the seasons, and must be accepted unquestionably. And very little, if any, cheese was made within the county.
This did not satisfy the revolutionaries of Sherburn Hall. Cheese manufacture from spare milk, for Durham county, students was made an important branch of the curriculum. The result is apparent. Durham farmers now make cheese, and Miss Maidment assured me, when I visited the college that the industry was growing most satisfactorily.
Another Tradition Going
This fearless revolutionary – or pioneer is beginning an attack on another tradition, which will probably be harder to overcome than that I have just recorded. She believes that dairy produce should be marketed in a form calculated to please the customer. Why should farmers and market women be content to display butter as their grandmothers did, open to the air and dust, and with no other adornment than the criss-cross made with a wooden pat, when at an infinitesimal cost it can be retailed as attractively and as cleanly as its present day rival, margarine? Much of the butter now sent out from the college is done up nicely in an attractive cover, and the custom will be spread-probably slowly, but still surely – by pupils who will see the advantages of such little attentions to detail.
In these days, when eggs are not merely eggs, but luxuries, when every third man we meet confesses to be a poultry farmer on a backyard scale, and the unassuming pullet becomes the subject of Government orders, the poultry section of the college is doubtless the most interesting to the visitor.
Egg Production
This department, I learned, has a dual object, existing to teach students the best methods of poultry farming, and also to breed good stock, and distribute it all over the country. That it succeeds in the latter work is proved by the fact that during the last 10 weeks nearly 1,500 eggs for hatching have been distributed, and over 500 day old chicks of the best strains have been supplied to customers, and before the hatching season finishes the total will exceed 3,000.
Show birds are excluded here, and table birds are not a feature, Miss Maidment’s object being to raise and distribute to customers utility fowls – birds to justify their existence by egg production.
And she is achieving it. I was supplied with figures which would have made the person who declares poultry – keeping cannot pay simply gasp in amazement. Here are a few. A pen of White Wyandottes were trap-nested, and from October to April three birds laid 150, 147 and 147 eggs respectively; while a pen of ten Black Leghorns laid sufficient eggs to realise £17.17s.3d during one laying season, valuing the eggs at market prices. It need hardly be added that neither these nor any of the 180 or so birds the farm contains received a particle of food fit for human use. There is no need here to outline the systems adopted at the College; poultry farmers will recognise them by their names – the Intensive and the Semi-intensive.
The effect of the tuition given must be widespread. Comparatively few farmers will acknowledge the possibilities of poultry-keeping. As with cheese-making, the old idea is good enough, with the result that what might be one of the most profitable side lines in their establishment is neglected. But their daughters, who have seen at the College what can be done, may be entrusted with their education in this respect. By so doing they will be performing a work of national importance, and they will be instruments in the revolution directed from Sherburn.
Date: 31 May 1917
Where to find this: Durham County Record Office
Contributed by Judith
