About the time of World War I, truck transport made it more economic to collect milk from the many small dairy farms and take it to a new, larger factory in Dunedin. The small creameries closed. Farmers who had taken the skim milk back to their farms and raised pigs with it could no longer do so. Some of them moved to richer land down the Taieri, and the rural population on the peninsula started to decline. Dairying started to be replaced by sheep farming. Since World War II, commuters and tour­ists have kept the peninsula going.