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Country-Wide Northern | Livestock
Waihora moves on
The greatest sheep-breeding scheme in the world owes its beginnings to one man annoying another. Rotorua Lands and Survey Superintendent Alf Tinkham was so annoyed by Dr Doug Lang's ravings about twinning ewes, he called in his deputy to listen to him instead. If he hadn't, the Waihora Romney scheme might never have got off the ground. At that time, in 1966, Doug was superintendent at the Whatawhata Hill Country Research Station and he wanted some twinning ewes for reproduction research. There were precious few on the Raglan hills. When he and the late Graeme Hight were driving home from a Massey sheep farmers conference, it dawned on them that the large sheep flocks on the Lands and Survey blocks around Taupo were an obvious source - if Doug dared go and ask. A few days later he entered the Rotorua lion's den. Alf was nearing retirement so didn't want any boats rocked between government departments. Passing Doug to Lloyd Bedford was therefore the best way to get rid of him and his crazy idea. Screening twinning two-tooths for Whatawhata was not so bad, but to suggest that Lands and Survey could do the same to form a nucleus flock to breed rams for surrounding department blocks was sacrilege. However, Lloyd Bedford was fascinated by the idea, and he got Doug all he wanted and more - without a scrap of letterhead paper passing over any desk. The rest is history, and it was celebrated in a quiet way at the Goudies block in April this year when Dr Geoff Nicoll, head of the Landcorp Genetics and Nutrition Unit, rounded up some of the old founding members of the Romney breeding scheme. The scheme was eventually set up on the Waihora, Kakaho and Otutira blocks - all of which have now been sold. Goudies Station in the middle of Kaingaroa forest will now be the home for the Waihora Romney breeding programme, which over 40 years has provided rams for the now Landcorp sheep population of 455,000 ewes, and also for outside commercial sources. Geoff presented a historical and technical update of what had been achieved in the past 40 years. The real heroes in getting the Romney breeding scheme going were the Lands and Survey supervisors and farm staff, and the Whatawhata technicians. They loved to hear that something would be difficult to do - and relished anything anyone from head office told them was impossible. They developed things like numbered neck tags for ewes, all-weather field recording books, one-man handling races, weighing facilities, walkie-talkies for recording, the first computers in sheep yards, and many other innovations. Everybody worked as if the organisation was their own. The handling of data by Ruakura biometrics staff led by Rachel Blick, then by Lands and Survey's Maureen Alderton, was an integral part of the exercise. The reason for this determined drive and commitment to make things work came from the top, when Eric Gibson was appointed as superintendent at Rotorua in 1967. He had the full support of Duncan McIntyre, the then Minister of Lands. He immediately became a visionary of the scheme and drove it though the minefield of administrative and political hurdles. When Geoff Nicoll surveyed world breeding schemes he found nothing of this size - and nothing which has demonstrated such genetic gains. Genetic gains were slow in the first years, but with modern genetic and computing power the sheep in the Waihora programme have genetically improved in the past 10 years by: + 20 lambs weaned per 100 ewes + 1.8 kg in weaning weight + 0.4 kg in liveweight at eight months + 11% in FE resistance
Footnote: The full story can be read in "Labcoats to Gumboots", NZ Society of Animal Production, Occasional Publication No 13, 1994. This publication may now be hard to source, but you can find the story on Clive Dalton's personal blog . Click on "Lands & Survey" in the index to find it. |
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