1 UPBEAT MUSIC Captions by Pippa Jefferies. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. Maximising dairy production in NZ will require a highly fertile national cow herd combined with effective on-farm management strategies. It's been estimated that improving these factors alone could add over a billion dollars a year to the dairy industry. This week ` we find out about a significant multiparty fertility and productivity study involving Dairy NZ and many other organisations. We meet specialist ram breeder Ike Williams of Waidale Rams, one of the pioneers of online auctions. And we spend time with Mathew and Rachael Thomson, who are building a uniquely NZ brand of whisky. By improving the fertility and lifetime productivity of dairy cows, there's potential to increase returns to the dairy industry by large margin. Dairy NZ is halfway through a seven-year-long study to unlock this potential. AgResearch, MBIE, science teams from Victoria and Queensland universities and animal health and genetics research companies Cognosco and AbacusBio are also involved. We've got a tremendous opportunity in that we've got industry partnering with government to produce a programme of work that runs over seven years, so it's long-term, has large funding to improve the lifetime productivity of animals. Now, the modelling that has been done indicate that the dairy industry is losing approximately $1.5 billion a year through poor productivity. Approximately half a billion of that is through poor fertility, so obviously fertility is a significant chunk of it. Um, but metabolic diseases, infectious diseases and early lactation, um, and` and just animals not performing as well as they should be is the other billion as well. So the entire programme encompasses that. What this programme will allow us to do is understand what is a negative impact that milk production is having on reproduction and come up with either strategies, either genetic strategies or nutritional or management strategies, that will allow us to get cows pregnant as well as improve their productivity through increased production. Everything is a compromise. Our breeding index is actually a mixture of selecting for things that are important, so cow health and well-being are important. They're a component. The body condition score of the animal ` we don't want animals producing a lot of milk and being too thin, so body condition score is a component of what we genetically select for. And we select for milk production, of course, as well. Our intention is from this programme we will develop technologies that will allow us to increase the six-week in-calf rate by 5%. So that's approximately a third of the target being achieved out of this programme. Score ` 5. Some excellent work that's been done by Dairy NZ and its collaborators at AgResearch has shown that the vast majority of embryo loss was in the first week after breeding. Now, that's completely different to what the dogma would have said, which is that most embryos are lost in the second two weeks. And that's pointing us to look at the oocyte ` the egg that's ovulated that we want to inseminate ` and, of course, all of the management and nutrition factors that precede that ovulation. So that` that work is groundbreaking, um, a world first ` probably couldn't have been undertaken anywhere else in the world in terms of the size and the scale and the team that was pulled together to do it. So it really is a world first, um, and a real feather in the cap of the research team that's been involved. Tag 192. Yep. The herd of heifers that we have specifically bred are bred to be either highly fertile or lowly fertile. And what they'll allow us to do is prove that our fertility genotype, what we're actually selecting on, is accurate. And we're very confident that it is. 98. Body condition score ` 5. We started this process, and we worked together with LIC and CRV, and we started it in 2014 to select the cows and the bulls. Finding the low-fertility cows was a challenge, but we were quite successful. There are still low-fertility animals, um, out there. The industry's quite broad. Um, we did have to find the bulls in some of the semen stocks, um, and stored by LIC and CRV, but we achieved a` a 10-unit difference in the fertility of the calves that we've bred. 193. We believe some of the factors that are affecting low fertility will be early embryo loss, but it won't be there in the high-fertility group. We're also looking at some of the on-farm practical things, such as oestrus expression, which if lower in the low-fertility group will make it harder for the farmers to find these cows on heat and then mate them successfully. The production values of the two groups of animals that we've selected we've tried to keep the same. We've tried to keep the protein in milk components very similar and also keep body condition as similar as possible. So although the BW as a whole is different, that difference is mainly made up of the high and low fertility and survival traits in that BW. We are also measuring heifer live-weight gains and looking at whether they are different. But the key reproduction trait as heifers we're looking at is puberty. Followed on from puberty, we'll be looking at oestrus cycle length as a young animal and then pregnancy outcomes to their first matings. < Yeah, 244... All animals have these activity meters on them. They're neck-based and tell us when puberty has been reached in these animals. The other things that we are doing is we're taking regular blood sampling. That's also to measure a reproductive hormone called progesterone, which helps us confirm that puberty has been reached. We're also doing regular live weights, and for this research, we're doing fortnightly live weights on these animals to allow us to track their growth, but also it helps us as an indicator of when we should be looking for puberty. We're not in a position here to do the detailed farm walks and plate metering on these farms, but what we do have and which will give us handle on feeding is that the devices include a rumination device. It's a` It's a microphone that measures, um, rumination in the animals, and that will give us an indication of whether the animals are feeding or not. What we'd like to be rolling out are two things in particular ` better genetics so we will have an idea of what we're selecting for, and because we know better what we're selecting for, we can target it and therefore make greater progress from a genetic perspective; but also management and nutritional solutions that will overcome some of the genetic deficiencies at the same time. So this really is a two-horse race, and I don't believe either of those horses are more important. We'll make progress through both. I don't think we've reached a limit in any of our genetic selection, but each item that we select for plays off against each other item. So if we can get highly fertile cows, we can increase pressure on selection for things like animal health, well-being, lameness, those types of things, so we have a far more sustainable and resilient system. We'll be back to visit Ike Williams at Waidale Rams in South Canterbury. Hi, Carol. You're here for your hearing test. Yes, I am. Lovely. Come on through, please. (BEEP!) BOY: Hi, Mum. It's Eddy here. Huh! You're the best mum in the world and you're also the prettiest mum in the world. But sometimes you don't hear so well. Sometimes it's funny, but sometimes it makes me sad. If you have good hearing, I can whisper in your ear and tell you good secrets. (SOBS) I love you so much. (HEARTFELT MUSIC) I don't wanna be sad about your hearing anymore. CHILD: Something as little as a free hearing check can make a big difference. 1 UPBEAT MUSIC Welcome back. Specialist ram breeder Ike Williams offers stud Romneys, Southdown, Lincoln and South Suffolk rams through an innovative Helmsman auction preceded by online video clips of the rams on offer. The option allows farmers to view rams and their data and to bid and buy without travelling to South Canterbury. It's just a thousand stud used, so it's pretty intensive with the lambing and all that sort of thing, so I try and sell close to 200 rams a year. '65 ` my father bought a farm and started the first studs. We used to have cattle as well. We had Romneys and Herefords in 1965. You got it. (WHISTLES) Left. Go left. Uh, my father was quite a character. He always thought that if he couldn't have 10,000 of them, he'd have a hundred good buggers. This place we bought when my father died on another farm, and it is a beautiful farm. But it's got the reliability with irrigation generally, except for last year with the Opuha. But you rely on irrigation, and you need irrigation for a stud farm like this because no one buys little wee ram hoggets or little skudgy buggers, etc, so you need to have regular feed. Where my passion is ` is breeding the sheep, so in terms of where I'm going, obviously, uh, the type of animal I'm trying to breed, my figures and all the performance and all that, and you, um` I guess the success rate ` not monetary-wise but the success rate ` on that is your clients ` how they're doing and whether they're coming back and how many rams you sell. And these days you've got to do a lot of marketing to be out there, cos it's a shrinking sheep market. So the only way for me to sell more rams is steal other clients, and that's just the reality of it, you know? And I jokingly saw if it gets to the point in the South Island I'm the only breeder left, at least it'd be easy for everyone to know where to go, you know? But it is hard work to keep going, but in terms of just the farm, I'm just quite happy if, you know, I'm paying my way and everything. I don't have to make a massive profit. You know, that's my lifestyle. You know, obviously, like everyone, as much money ` it's a bonus if I can make a lot of money. So but you measure by clients and how happy they are and how many rams you're selling, and I measure it just my own how well I think they're doing, cos you've gotta be confident where you're going. I've got two dual-purpose breeds. The Lincoln's almost a rare breed, and they're really quite specialised in what their use is. But Romneys ` Romneys are a classic. If you go back 15, 20 years ago, they were big, long, slabby type things, you know, and you only had 110% fertility. Whereas Romneys now, you know, they're probably 100 K's and yet to look at them, they're just bricks. You know, they're smaller, but they're solid. And the fertility ` weaning probably around 160% in the Romneys here. That's weaning. And you only have to do 175, like, scanning to wean that ` like 200, we'll lose 50%, sort of thing. So they've come a long way. As you can see, he's not a big sheep, but he's still a heavy sheep. He's about 100kg. He's very deep, um, thick. He's meaty. He's got a good open face, got good colour. He's actually a very good sheep. Unbelievable. I'm quite` quite impressed. Plus, he's got the good figures, which is the bonus, but he's got a decent fleece of wool, good medium jacket, and he's good on his legs. He is a very good ram. This is obviously a Lincoln, which is very few in the country now. There's only about six breeders. There's quite a specialist market for them now, that their main` main thing is for crossing over Merinos probably for half-breeds, and then they cross again to sort of quarter-breeds. The thing about Lincolns is their longevity and very strong, heavy wool. But to specialise, you gotta have a good handle of the wool, so that's very soft, strong wool. And you can see there the lustre. That's special. They blend it with mohair and make wigs and... There's actually a contract with a Japanese thing there where they take` cos of the lustre, make a special yarn to blend into fancy suits. But they're the first sheep that came into NZ, and they like wet` rainfall normally, but, yeah, they're a tough breed to breed because of the lack of genetics around. I have an Agonline sale in conjunction with my Helmsman sale on the on-farm. So you can actually bid on the rams away from the farm. You can actually bid on them for about three weeks before, but it closes the same time as my main Helmsman sale. Helmsman ` instead of you stand at auction, you can bid on all lots. And down the front here, we have, um, boards set up that say lot one to 200, and you can bid on all lots. And then it shuts about 4 o'clock, which the sale ` it start at 3; it shuts at 4 o'clock. And then you've got two minutes for the last bid. So that's how it can work in with this Agonline, which is like Trade Me, so bidders away from the farm can actually compete with people at the farm. And so, obviously, to do that, we have to do all these videos. I've just taken live weights so you've got an idea of their actual physical size. And now we take them through and we do videos where the lot one or lot two and they'll go, 'Waidale X,' and we have someone open out the wool on the Romneys, and then I'll do 20 seconds of the video. Then we do that for every lot. That goes down to Dunedin for PGG to do with the Agonline. That's PGG Wrightson's. And they load them all up, and it goes on to the Agonline website. And we have it live, as I say, from probably the 5th of November. That's normally roughly time. So that's three weeks before. And then you can auto-bid. It's probably a bit ahead of its time, and it's one of those things that takes time to get used to. It's just like the Helmsman auction. I think a Helmsman auction is yards over a traditional auction because a traditional one, you` your first ram comes up or your fourth-choice ram comes up first, and you think, 'God, am I gonna bid?' or, 'How much am I gonna pay for this sheep?' And, um, it goes too far, and you're not sure what you're doing. But with a Helmsman, if you get bid out, 'Oh, my first is gone,' you can still go to your second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth. And so with our online stuff, it also helps like that. So you've got access to everything. This is Waidale's 915. Lot 100. Let him go, please. The key for me is reaching a different market and exposing myself to more people. So one originally is just to get myself more out there, but I think practically, going forward, it is going to be a way to buy rams. And I believe if you watch a 20-second video` like, if you watch that, say, 10 times, if you're really keen on the sheep, if you can see its pasterns, you can see the colour of it, you can see how it walks. You know, you have to watch it a number of times, but you can see all those things. And then the key is obviously they've gotta be happy with` Ideally, it'd be good if they came and saw my farm and what I'm doing and philosophies and all that sort of thing, but, you know, I think it's quite a comfortable way to buy rams. We'll return soon to meet the Thomsons, a couple building their own brand of NZ whisky. 1 UPBEAT MUSIC Hello again. Auckland-based Thomson Whisky set out to make whisky with a uniquely NZ flavour with the addition of smoked manuka. It began for whisky maker Matthew Thomson and his wife and marketing director, Rachael, when they bought existing stock for resale, initially to test the market. I started by buying a couple of barrels of selected whisky. We wanted to see if we could buy some really good whisky and get it on to the market as a premium product. The risk was if no one bought it, well, we'd have to drink it ourselves, so it could go either way. You know, either way would be` would be acceptable. And then, um, you know, we got a lot of interest, and we sold those. Because it was a finite source of whisky, we knew that we had to start distilling. We had people buying our product, you know, and it was going really well, so that was a good kind of heads-up, like we've got to get things going, which was the original goal. Like, I'd always wanted to start a distillery. The cashflow challenge is the biggest problem with all whisky distilleries. So we started with old stock whisky that we could sell, so we already had some cashflow. And the other thing was almost by accident. I'd wanted to make a manuka smoked whisky for quite a while, and because this was an unknown product, there was no other equivalent. I didn't know what it was gonna taste like, and no one really did. I had my experiments at home, but that was that. So we put it into 20-litre barrels just to see, and within a few months, we were going, 'Hey, this is tasting really good. We make malt whisky, so we start with malted barley. We crush this and put it into the mash tun and heat it up, then you cool this to pitch temperature ` 20 degrees ` add your yeast, ferment it. So this is basically a beer that I've made but quite a crude beer ` has no hops in it. Then I double-distil it through a copper pot still and collect the vapour, and I put that into a barrel, which ages over time and then becomes whisky. We use 100% NZ-grown malt which comes from Canterbury from Gladfield Malt, who have been absolutely brilliant. That was perfect cos I didn't want to make NZ whisky with imported barley, you know? Barley and malt are the same thing. Barley is the grain, and malt ` the barley has been processed, where the barley's been sprouted and then toasted. When it sprouts, an enzyme becomes active that can convert the starches to sugars. So when it gets toasted in parts of Scotland, traditionally on old farm distilleries, peat would be the only fuel source, and so smoke would be infused into the grain as they were toasting it. The maltsters in Canterbury Gladfield, uh, built a smoking facility that they could smoke the malt in the same way. And` And so from then, we've been able to get manuka smoke malt and NZ peat smoke malt. I lease space at Hallertau Brewery for the distillery, which has been absolutely fantastic because I use their brewing facilities, plus there's a whole lot of brewing knowledge that goes past the scope of distilling knowledge. This is my hand-beaten copper pot still that I'm very proud of. The copper acts to take sulphurs out of the spirit, actually, and it's an important part in single malt whisky production. We imported this from Europe, and it's actually a brandy still, but when I got it here, I, um, altered it. This would have been in` This was a kind of onion shape, and I really wanted a Scotch-style still, so I had this cone formed and I actually beat out the elbow at the top there. I studied sculpture. And so I couldn't find a coppersmith, and so we did that. So, these are 20-litre barrels, and this has meant that I could release Manuka Smoke Progress Report early. The greater the surface-to-liquid ratio, the faster the whisky is gonna age. Obviously, it's a lot more expensive to do it this way. We're getting 14% losses to the angels' share in a year with these, whereas in Scotland it would be 2.5%. The angels' share is the whisky that's lost to evaporation. That's an important part of the maturation, leaving you with a softer, more viscous spirit, a bit like reducing a syrup on the stove. It's coming out through the cask. As it evaporates, you're creating a vacuum inside, and it's sucking oak flavour back into the liquid. And it's a seasonal thing. Summer and winter, you're getting a change in the pressure inside, so, um, the barrel really does something. We've just learnt so much because we started the business from scratch and we've done a little bit of everything that the business has needed. It's been pretty involved, but we've had a lot of fun with it. And I think Mat and I, when we started the business it was more like a creative project. We had a lot of fun thinking through what the whisky, sort of, meant to us, how we wanted our family surname, which is Thomson, to be, sort of, represented on a bottle and on a shelf and hopefully on an ad. I guess we're interested in design and architecture and music and sort of current culture and things like that, but we just needed it to be the perfect balance. If we'd sort of gone out and done a bottle and a label and things like that that was pretending to be a really old whisky company, you know, established 1850 or whatever, that just wouldn't have been true to our story. We are youngish and our business is` is young, so we needed to sort of come out and be really honest about that and put together a brand that was truthful. It was more contemporary, yeah. We get picked up by people that wanna associate with us for launches. You know, it could be a clothing shop or a kind of brand launch and that. That's quite good. We've actually had three awards from San Francisco Spirit Awards. We've had a bronze, a gold and a double gold. This is for old stock whiskies that have selected, and that's been brilliant because it proves that on the world stage this is quality whisky that we've got. My... ultimate aim is for there to be a NZ regional style of whisky. I don't want to have an imitation Scotch. I don't want to wait, you know` wait 10 years and then people go, 'Oh, it tastes a bit like Scotch.' I want it there to be a dis` a style that people go, 'Oh, that's NZ whisky. It tastes like this for this reason. They've got local barley and blah, blah.' And so with that, like, there's a couple of other distilleries starting at the moment, actually, um, and we need a few distilleries to get on board and start making their whisky for a style to come about. For more information on these and other stories we've covered, visit our website, which you can get to via tvnz.co.nz If you've missed an episode, you can watch it on TVNZ OnDemand using the keyword Rural Delivery. Next week ` we hear about the experience of one dairy farmer who introduced an automated milking system to his operation. We catch up on progress made and lessons learned in the ongoing fight against the invasive weed pest Chilean needle grass. And we discover the process of making raw-milk cheese from locally sourced milk at Mount Eliza Cheese. Thanks for watching. Please join us again next time. Captions by Pippa Jefferies. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016