Culling Fish

DESCRIPTION: In August the crew took its dried codfish to Monroe. There was no one at the plant to cull [grade] the fish. The new rules make grading more strict. "According to instructions and the outline in view, There's no 'number one' so [it] must go 'number two'"
AUTHOR: Chris Cobb
EARLIEST DATE: 1952 (Peacock)
KEYWORDS: commerce fishing
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Peacock, pp. 118-119, "Culling Fish" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #9961
NOTES [299 words]: Newfoundland's economy was almost entirely dependent on cod. It's why the island was settled, and it was the island's largest export for most of its history. The "cull" was the process by which the dried fish was sorted based on quality. In early days, this was a hand operation. But as described on pp. 151-152 of James Hiller and Peter Neary, editors, Newfoundland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Essays in Interpretation, University of Toronto Press, 1980:
"During the last quarter of the 19th century, technological advances and the charging commercial patterns of the fishery seriously undercut the quality of Newfoundland's saltfish and helped to render its marketing system almost chaotic. As the productivity and profitability of the cod fishery declined in the latter half of the 19th century, specialist shore crews, whose job was to cure the fish, became uneconomic and disappeared. Their function was assumed by untrained women and children with a predictable drop in the quality of fish produced. The invention of the cod trap and increasing use of seines exacerbated the problem by producing large catches that left insufficient time for curing....
"Since the first fish to reach the foreign markets received a premium price, exporters on the Labrador coast began buying fish by the qual (that is, ungraded and at a flat price for later grading) in order to speed up the process by which it could be handled and raced to market. The fisherman was therefore deprived of the critical incentive to devote extra time producing superior quality, because he no longer received a price difference to reward his efforts. Quality and price dropped accordingly." The result was a decline in the codfish industry, and probably a worse decline in respect for Newfoundland fish. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.0
File: Pea118

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography