New Zealand agricultural history. No 26. Importing exotic sheep breeds

Impact of importations on New Zealand sheep industry

NZ Sheep Breeders Association (NZSBA) registrations

What happened to White Headed Mutton, White Headed Marsh?

What happened to the Oxford Down, Gotland Pelt, Awassi?

By Dr Clive Dalton

The impact of the exotic sheep importations

There was clearly a massive burst of enthusiasm in the first years after the exotic sheep importations to register the new breeds with the NZ Sheep Breeders Association (NZSBA), so that many purchasers of the sheep could become official ‘stud breeders’ with their purebreds as fast as possible.  There was clearly money to be made!

The 1990-2002 New Zealand National Sheep Breeders Association (NSBA)

The flock book over this period records the following details which show what happened to the breeds: 

• 1990 NZSBA flock book records entries for Danish Texel, Finnish Landrace, Gotland Pelt, Oxford Down and White Headed Marsh.
• 1991 breed societies for the Texel, Oxford Down and Finnish Landrace formed.
• 1993.  Oxfore Down was renamed Oxford.
• 1995.  11 in-lamb ewes and 4 rams registerd by Silverstream East Friesians.  There were 49 flocks in the 1997 flock book.
•  2002.  Last remaining Gotland Pelt stud withdrew from NZSBA.
• 2014 NSBA website.   Only Finnsheep, East Friesian, Texel, and Oxford breeds are listed.

What happened to the White Headed Mutton?

The Oldenburg or White Headed Mutton sheep imported by MAF in 1972 all went into a large hole on Mana, but while they were there, John Dobbie reckons from what he saw of them that they had nothing to contribute which was any better than the modern easy-care Romney.  The Muttons he said was on a par with the old-style Romney with poor lambing percentage and plenty of lambing problems. 

The White Headed Marsh

These are considered to be different to the ‘Mutton’, and there is one flock of White Headed Marsh sheep listed in the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of NZ.  It says they came from sheep which arrived in New Zealand in the 1980s (being imported from Denmark) and were released from quarantine in 1990.  These are the AE imported sheep.  Google both breeds and you get the same photo (above).

What happened to the Oxford Down?

After release from quarantine at Hopuhopu, the unsold animals went to the MAF Research Station at Tokanui near Te Awamutu.  Robin Hilson says he took some over, but couldn’t sell them, and because of their poor lambing rate, he said they were never a success and his were culled. 
There are five breeders listed with the NZSBA so a few must have survived. Clearly they have made zero impact in New Zealand, and even a small proportion has never been included in any composite breed. The breed's dark face was a major fault.  The photo (off the Internet) shows a typical ram all done up for the UK show ring.

What happened to the Gotland Pelt?

  One story is that most of them were sold to an Australian buyer soon after they cleared quarantine. The other is that a few were farmed for a short while on a property near Feilding, before being sold to a farmer in the Takaka area. Small numbers seemed to spread around the country before being bought by a farmer in the Southern Wairarapa who owned a mill in Petone that made cloth for Peter Jackson’s films.  But surprisingly there are 27 listed owners of Gotlands in the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of NZ in very small flocks 2014.  

What happened to the Awassi?

There is one flock listed in the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of NZ. The great live sheep export industry to the Middle East, which was a major target for the breed, never really got going because of animal welfare issues both on the journey and at their destination.  But this trade could develop again.

Awassi ewes at Flock House.  
Photo: Dr Deric Charlton

New Zealand agricultural history. No 27. Importing exotic sheep breeds

Breeds that survived after the importations

Texel; Finn; East Friesian

 By Dr Clive Dalton

The Texel

Texel ram in UK.  Photo: Don Clegg

 The Texel always looked a good prospect because of its meat, and when the world discovered the breed, it was in great demand, especially in UK were stud rams make unbelievable money (e.g 23,000 guineas), and rams have been so further selected on phenotype for meat conformation, that they are starting to look more like pigs with wool on!


The Rams are certainly a challenge for shearers when trying to bend their necks to tip them over. It's often a two-man job to tip large rams today with quite a bit of concern over health and safety of shearers.

The Texel has without doubt been the most successful of all imported breeds in New Zealand because of its meat conformation and lean carcass, and its main use now as a purebred is as a terminal sire, and as a 1/4 or 3/8 proportion in composites. The breed has garnered more hype than the other meat breed in New Zealand, although judging by ram sales at for example the Frankton Ram Fair in 2014, no Texels were on offer.  The main meat sire breeds sold were Poll Dorset and Suffolk.

But in terms of ‘efficiency’ of meat production efficiency (i.e. feed in and meat out), I reckon today’s Poll Dorset, Suffolk, South Suffolk, Southdown and Hampshire would be as good.  To test this we would need to resurrect the ghosts of the late Drs Alan Kirton and Barry Butler-Hogg, our revered meat scientists from Ruakura! Sadly there’s nobody around to do this sort of basic research any more, but it would be valuable to know how they all compare to sort out fact from advertising hype. 

The Texel also played a part in the drive to increase bulk in wool, thanks to its Cheviot genes which it acquired way back in its Dutch history.  In producing 'Growbulk' sheep, Dr Rowland Sumner at the Whatawhata Hill Country Research Station put Poll Dorset (as they had high-bulk wool), Texel and Romney together.  But Roland says the way the NZ clip has gone in recent times, the Texel has no special merit for bulk any more, as most coarse wools can meet the bulk specifications for the market.

The Finn

By the 1980s, the national lambing percentage had been given a dramatic a boost, and the Finn was given all the credit for this. 

There’s no doubt they had a major role with the and got major media coverage with their big visual impact of large litters of lambs from the purebreds (see picture at left). Supporters of the breed always point this out. 

But  most composites or 'stableised crossbreds' today have no more than a quarter Finn in them to restrict litter size to manageable levels for NZ.

The purebred Finn is said to have shown  a natural resistance to Facial Eczema which surprised everyone.  It was suggested that having evolved in a tough environment, they must have developed good immunity against toxins in general. This seems a bit stretched when it comes to FE as they have evolved as a housed breed for half of each year.

Coopworth breeder Edward Dinger who has selected for FE tolerance on MAF's Ramguard programme for 30 years, and who as a member of a group purchased 45 pure Finn rams at $1000 each, and farmed them successfully till FE hit.  He estimates the Finn tolerance is 'useful but low', and equivalent to a tolerance of about 0.3mg sporedesmin/kg live weight, when today's breeders have  sheep up to 0.6mg sporedesmin/kg live weight.

So the general statement that 'Finns show FE tolerance' may be true, but it's very dangerous if breeders selling them are not testing for FE on the Ramguard programme, and they don't state at what level of sporidesmin dosing the the rams have been tested.

Below are examples of 'general statements' which may be acceptable as 'advertising' but not as proven, tested and documented information in my view.

Robin Hilson in his 'One Stop Ram Shop' International Newsletter No 97, October 2013 makes the following claims regarding the Finn with the heading that ' All NZ ewes need a dash of Finn'!  These are the stated reasons:

 

Finn X ewes don't have bearings (except old ones)

Finn X ewes have some natural resistance to FE

Finn X ewes don't need flushing

Finn X ewes perform predictably

Finn X ewes produce few triplets

Finn X ewes carcasses yield well

Finn X ewes multiple suckle lambs

Finn is the most used sheep breed in the world

Robin describes the Finn as a browser rather than a grazing sheep, with 'excellent survival, longevity and productive repeatable performance'.  He also claims in 'One Stop Ram Shop' International Newsletter No 96, June 2013' that 'Finns, Texels, East Friesian crossbreeds make up 40% of the national flock and soon to be 50%'.  

I have had comments from other sheep breeders that a couple of these statements are true, two others are half true, and the rest are total advertising hype.

The East Friesian 

It’s interesting why all the hype associated with this breed, that there are not flocks of thousands of them throughout the country.
Why was their great potential for both fertility and milk production never fully exploited?  Their large body size  could also have boosted meat production, even if their wool potential was limited.   
But its effect as a purebred on the national flock is hardly measurable today, and there are no large commercial flocks of purebreds around 

Photo (left): East Friesian ewes from Jock Allison.

One commentator told me that the East Friesians in the first importation from a flock in UK seemed to be a fairly robust sheep and had seen a fair bit of pasture and fresh air. This contrasted greatly with the sheep brought in from Sweden by Dr Jock Allison, which had evolved in housed conditions for half of their lives, and were not robust enough as purebreds for NZ farming outdoor pasture conditions.  This I think is very fair comment.

John Dobbie who managed a flock of EF halfbreds commercially in the central North Island said that unless ewes were being sucked dry by twins or triplets, they had too much milk and  had big problems with mastitis.  Even 180% lambing was not high enough to milk them out, and avoid udder and mastitis problems he reckoned.  

John found that the EF component in a composite needed to be no higher than a  quarter  for most farming conditions. It's interesting that no composites on the market have any EF genes in them now.  Their most outstanding feature John says was their wonderfully quiet temperament.  They were great sheep to work with.

It was always too long a shot to expect the breed to lead a national surge into  dairy production, and even now where sheep are milked, the Poll Dorset and even Coopworths are used.  So the  contribution of the East Friesian to the New Zealand sheep industry, with an animal  before arrival was considered to have so much promise, has been hardly measurable. 

Five East Friesian breeders are listed with the NZ Sheep Breeders’ Association and three  breeders are in the Rare Breeds Conservation Society of NZ.

John Dobbie ONZM

But John Dobbie also makes a very important point, which is that when these new breeds came on stream, all the old Farm Advisory Officers like him had been morphed into ‘consultants’, and there’s no doubt that charging for advice’ killed their jobs.  

John reckons the East Friesian probably suffered most from this neglect of advisory support, as farmers didn’t get the hands-on experience to help them find the right niche  for the breed.

Free independent advice disappeared, and what was worse, these new consultants were 'pushing product' to claim 10% commission on sales, and even compete for the highest sales prize!  Totally stupid!

At the same time, the MAFTech research division was being gutted, so again there was no on-farm research being done which could have helped find the proper niche for the East Friesian, or to do some genetic work to select them for New Zealand outdoor pastoral conditions.

So the question remains - where are all the East Friesians these days after all the cost of bringing them in?

New Zealand agricultural history. No 28. Importing exotic sheep breeds

 

The costs of the exotic sheep importations

The benefits to the NZ sheep industry

Give me a bid on the cost

It was not real money

By Dr Clive Dalton

Do we need to know the cost?

I believe we do need to know the costs/benefits of past MAF importations, for the simple reason that sometime in the future, somebody will want to import sheep again from other parts of the world, and the costs of what happened last time’ would surely be the first question to be asked by the boffins in Treasury.

I’m in no doubt that New Zealand is going to get Foot and Mouth disease which will wipe out millions of livestock, and which will have to be replaced by animals with good genetics.  So this means looking overseas again.  But maybe if this happened, the disaster would be so great for New Zealand's economic survival that nobody would even think about the cost.  If FMD took out the sheep industry, it would take out all other cloven hoofed animals too.

Why were the costs of the whole exercise never published?   Where they ever worked out?  There’s nobody in Treasury today who would go back through the accounts, if they could ever find them.  There’s probably nobody in Treasury now who would know what a sheep is, or that the small island they can see from their high-rise office in Wellington harbour, was once a prime animal quarantine station!

Where were the farming media?

Where was the farming press at the time asking about the costs? Why didn’t the media chase the Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Finance, or get questions asked by opposition members in the House about the cost and benefits of the exercise, especially after the waste and horror of the slaughter of the first importation.

You have to wonder looking back, if the cost was so high that for political reasons it had to be buried along with the sheep at Mana and Crater!  Why did Federated Farmers not question the cost/benefits of the exercise?  They were probably carried away with all the hype like so many others in the industry about the hyped massive benefits to New Zealand.

Give me a bid!

In idle moments I muse over a likely cost, and start making mental bids starting with millions.  You’d need to start bidding in the low millions, and probably move into the hundreds of millions. I could see the bidding heading for half a billion.

It would be easy to say that’s ridiculous, but try to itemise the bill for the two MAF importations which taxpayers paid for:

•   All the travel back and forwards between NZ, UK and Europe over the years for scientists, vets and bureaucrats. 
•   Costs of meetings, meetings and more endless meetings.
•   Cost of the whole disaster of the first MAF importation.
•  Purchase of the sheep for live import and ET.
•  All the vet costs associated with all of that.
•  Transport approvals, clearance documentation and travel costs.
•  Preparing Somes Island and care of sheep 24/7 for both imports.
•   Continual vet testing of sheep on Somes at Wallaceville for both imports.
•  Preparing Mana Island and care of sheep 24/7 for second import.
•  Continual vet testing of sheep on Somes at Wallaceville.
• Costs of slaughter and burial at Mana.
• Preparing Crater block and care of sheep 24/7.
• Costs of slaughter and burial at Crater of first import.
• The costs of taking Mana and Crater block out of livestock farming.
• Preparing Hopuhopu farm and care of sheep 24/7. 
• Cost of setting up and running the secondary quarantine units.
• Salaries of all staff who had time allocated to these projects over the years. 
• And much more that never saw the light of day - deliberately!

·    

·         Not real money!

I haven’t met anyone who when invited dare make a bid at the cost of the MAF imports.  But then as my former MAF veterinary colleague commented when I tried to get a bid out of him – ‘what’s the worry, it wasn’t real money’! 

And that really is it! What he meant was that it was taxpayers dosh, and even if the cost was published, after some initial disgust, there’s nothing anybody could do about it as it would just be written off with zillions of other dollars that nobody knows about.  So, I’ve stopped worrying as taxpayers’ money apparently isn’t real money, and sadly this attitude very much alive – as we speak!