Welfare angles among Ruakura work

But animal welfare issues cross all boundaries, as a Central North Island discussion group found out on a recent

visit to AgResearch's Ruakura site.

Jim Webster, AgResearch's team leader for farm systems north, explains welfare organisations around the world spend $US200 million a year promoting their causes.

Meanwhile public perception of what can be seen as ethical food can move faster than the legal processes to back them up, he warns.

"New Zealand has huge advantage in this area, with its promotion of sustainability, environmental issues and animal welfare rules, but supermarkets around the world are now setting private standards, and we have to be seen to meet these."

Webster says it's firmly established that sentience (or possession of feelings) applies to animals too, and their quality of life is seen through the eye of the beholder: increasingly welfare's not just about animal health, but feelings and naturalness.

Welfare issues for sheep and beef farmers to consider include: use of analgesia for castration; body condition; docking, he suggests.

Facial eczema is another area where Ruakura's work is relevant to sheep and beef, with three strategies underway to minimise the fungal spore-induced disease.

In conjunction with DairyNZ, a group of farmers, and some MAF Sustainable Farming Fund support, AgResearch is looking at liming as a tool to deter spore development; using architecturally loose pasture species to minimise dead material and consequent fungal build up; and variation and reliability of current methods of spore counts supplied to farmers.

AgResearch executive officer, Simon Lovatt, outlined some of the different work being carried out elsewhere by the CRI's scientists which will be relevant to the non-dairy sector, including genomics and resultant tools such as MyoMax.

An interesting sideline he mentioned is AgResearch's new wool/polyester fabric for martial arts garments. It's just as robust as the old double weave cotton fabric, but much more comfortable to wear and doesn't absorb moisture/sweat.

AgResearch is also involved in the Pastoral 21 project; multi-faceted research focused on areas associated with environmental decline, such as emissions to water, extinction of species and erosion.

The day wound up with a rousing presentation by Christine Couldrey, who grew up in the Waikato, went overseas and learned a lot, and has returned to give back her skills to her home territory. She works in epigenetics, things which alter the expression of genes, and even the DNA sequence itself.

"The phenotype is the recognised shape and qualities of an animal, and has to date been seen as a combination of the genotype plus its environment. With the assistance of the recently developed SNP chips (which can now measure anywhere between 50,000 and 1 million genetic traits), we can now spot changes in gene sequences caused by environmental factors or nutrition in individual animals. While most of these changes remain with an individual, some can be inherited."

The work is still at an early stage and may take another decade to be sufficiently refined for widespread use.