High-tech happiness down on the farm

By LIAM DANN


It might provide some small comfort to vegetarians that agricultural science increasingly focuses on ensuring animals live happy lives.

However, the reason behind it might not be quite so palatable - stress-free animals have the most tender meat.

This drive to provide a pleasant life in the paddock is generating ground-breaking scientific work at the AgResearch centre at Ruakura, near Hamilton.

Dr Lindsay Matthews and PhD student Mairi Stewart are at the forefront, pioneering a new infrared scanning technique that will let vets and farmers give animals a full check-up without even touching them.

Matthews calls the technique "non-invasive stress measurement", and it uses a scaled-down version of the infrared cameras United States special forces and New Zealand police are using to hunt human targets.

The cameras break an animal's image down to a multicoloured spectrum of varying temperatures. The trick, says Matthews, is to develop a code for interpreting that data.

By applying knowledge about the various ailments farm animals suffer it will be possible to give animals a thorough check-up without adding to their stress with blood tests and internal probes, he says.

In theory, farmers could install cameras in the milking shed that would scan cows for warning signs of disease and injury as they walked past.

As farms get bigger and farmers have less contact with each animal, the value of this kind of technology will grow, says Matthews.

The project, based around Stewart's PhD, has only just started.

Camera prices range from $10,000 to $100,000 depending on the quality, but as it is likely to be several years before software is ready for commercial use, there will at least be some time for the price to fall

Matthews and the team at AgResearch see animal welfare as an important focus for the future.

"There are almost certainly production and health benefits to be derived from good welfare," Matthews says.

Regardless of the scientific basis to those concerns over welfare, perception is everything when it comes to securing European business.

Meat companies already do on-farm audits to ensure their supplies meet required standards, but another new technology AgResearch is developing will tell exporters how an animal has been treated, based on the state of its carcass.

Work that originally focused on tenderising carcasses through electric shock treatment has led to a new understanding of how meat conditioning relates to animal welfare.

By analysing the acidity of the carcass it is now possible to determine how stressed an animal was when it was living, says Mark Ward, manager of AgResearch's Food and Health division.

Ward says another key focus - again driven by consumer demand - is food safety, which places such as Japan and Europe are hyper-sensitive to.

An example is the BSE scare. Even though New Zealand and Australia do not have high risk of the disease because our cattle are largely grass fed, AgResearch is trying to help meat exporters meet Japan's strict standards about the consumption of nerve tissue.

Problems are caused by the tentacle-like nerve endings, or ganglia, which are attached to the spinal cord.

The spinal cord is pulled out of the carcass in processing but minute portions of ganglia can be left behind to contaminate meat, such as that used in hamburgers.

Work is under way to find a new way to eliminate this hazard.

It is hardly a sexy topic for research, but the same goes for many other AgResearch breakthroughs that are now saving the New Zealand industry millions of dollars every year.

If the organisation's new chief executive, Andy West, achieves his ambitious goals then farmers can expect plenty more such innovations to help make life on the farm even more pleasant within the next few years.

Winning ideas

AgResearch already has a long list of successful innovations. Some of the most significant include:

* Test-tube cows: In the 90s AgResearch developed technology to produce IVF cattle embryos - colloquially known as test-tube baby technology. Eggs from elite donor cows are fertilised in the lab and the embryos are then transplanted into surrogate cows. This allows 35 to 50 calves to be born from one elite cow each year.

* White clover: White clover, which produces nitrogen to increase pasture growth and animal productivity, is estimated to be worth more than $3 billion a year to New Zealand's economy. White clover cultivars bred by AgResearch are estimated to account for 50 of the world's white clover sales.

* Pest Control: Small parasitic wasps that control the pasture pest Argentine stem weevil save the agriculture sector more than $100 million a year by reducing pasture damage.

* SMARTShot: Developed to deliver slow-release vitamin B12. Much New Zealand soil is deficient in cobalt, causing B12 deficiency and poor growth rates. Smartshot benefits farms that are deficient in cobalt by an estimated $10,100 each a year.

* Time Capsules: These provide an optimal daily dose of zinc for four to six weeks, protecting sheep and cattle from facial eczema, which in the worst cases causes death. In bad years - such as 1998-1999 - the disease has been estimated to cost the industry up to $75 million.

* AgVAx: AgResearch and Otago University have produced vaccines for a range of animal health problems. AgVax's vaccines have added more than $330 million in value to the New Zealand economy .