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50 years of artificial insemination and herd improvement in New Zealand

History of AI and herd improvement in NZ by Clive Dalton & Claire Rumble.

This knol highlights the initiative and dedication of the scientists, technicians, administrators and farmers who pioneered the introduction of artificial insemination of dairy cattle in New Zealand. It is a story of setbacks and achievements, of retreats and advances, and finally of success in attaining objectives never dreamed of even by those who, from the very earliest days, held unshakeable belief in the tremendous value that this breeding system would be to our farmers and our country. This success was achieved, not only because of the skills, determination and sheer hard work of those in the forefront of the development of AB as it became known, but also because of the support given by large numbers of innovative dairy farmers who also saw immense potential in its use. This knol was originally delivered as a booklet by the Auckland Livestock Improvement Association (Private Bag, Hamilton) under ISBN 0-473-00294-9 in April 1985.

Dedication

This story is dedicated to the many men and women who over the last forty years have turned out each season to inseminate the nation's dairy herd. Their efforts, seven days a week in the early years, have played a vital role in the high productivity demonstrated by today's dairy cattle in New Zealand.

Acknowledgements

Many people have made this book possible, and most of them are mentioned in its pages. They were generous with their time, their information, photographs, encouragement and hospitality.

We are very grateful for all of this. Special thanks go to Dr John James, Mr Jeff Stichbury, Mr Jack Burton and Sir Arthur Ward for the time they spent in finding and crosschecking information. Any errors that remain are the editors'. Mr Dudley Lane kindly agreed to put his thoughts into the foreword - and this is stimulating reading. We thank him for that.

Jeff Stitchbury, Managing Consultant of the Livestock Improvement Council; Sir Arthur Ward, formerly General Manager of the NZ Dairy Board; and Jack Burton, manager of the Auckland Livetock Improvement Association (photo 1984).

The old photographs came from the files of the New Zealand Dairy Board at Newstead, most of them taken by A.E. Graham, Don McQueen and Max Cooper. Others were from the Waikato times and Mrs de Geus. We thank them all. Without the generosity of the Livestock lmprovement Association (Auckland) Inc., these words would not have found paper or ink. Mr J.A. Burton, the Directors of the Auckland LIA and many staff members justify special thanks.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the donation of one thousand dollars from Mrs Patty de Geus of Hamilton towards publication costs. Mrs de Geus is the daughter of the late T.A. Blake.

To the remaining people who helped and who are too numerous to mention in detail, our sincere thanks. Sadly, it was not possible to travel round and talk to everyone involved in Al in its formative years in New Zealand. Particularly neglected are the managers and staff of Herd Improvement Associations throughout New Zealand who devoted their careers to herd improvement in the years of rapid expansion. The nation owes them a great debt.

We can only hope this book will stimulate those we neglected to record their experiences on paper or on tape and send them for safe keeping to the NZ Dairy Board at Newstead, Hamilton, where it is proposed to set up an "Advanced Breeding" archive.

Foreword

by D.C. (Dudley) Lane, Tokoroa

This book highlights the initiative and dedication of the scientists, technicians, administrators and farmers who pioneered the introduction of artificial insemination of dairy cattle in New Zealand.

It is a story of setbacks and achievements, of retreats and advances, and finally of success in attaining objectives never dreamed of even by those who, from the very earliest days, held unshakeable belief in the tremendous value that this breeding system would be to our farmers and our country.

This success was achieved, not only because of the skills, determination and sheer hard work of those in the forefront of the development of AB as it became known, but also because of the support given by large numbers of innovative dairy farmers who also saw immense potential in its use.

Today, those of us who were able to use Al soon after it went commercial can look back in some amazement at the improvements that have been made in techniques and results since those early days. It is, I believe, even more valuable and interesting to look forward and try to evaluate what greater benefits this breeding system will continue to give farming in the future.

Though the original experimental and commercial work was done with dairy cattle, today techniques are developed for most livestock, with huge genetic gains now possible for all species. For dairying there is, I believe, still immense scope for improvement.

By using the vast gene pool of the national commercial herd, we can look forward to not only a greater proportion of our cows having still higher Breeding Indexes, but also to have traits other than production developed more intensely than there has been opportunity to do so far.

The exact details of future improvements may be debateable, but there is no doubt that very real progress will continue to be made. I believe this is inevitable because of the message that this book carries. It tells of interesting people and their personalities, of varied backgrounds and lifestyles, but all sharing one common interest, and all working for the same goal.

These people were, and some still are, part of the system that developed and is continuing to develop livestock improvement in New Zealand. People of similar attributes will surely be attracted to this system and its great challenges and opportunities, and many will remain to progress its objectives for the years to come.

Open Day at Newstead, 16 June 1964. Demonstration of semen collection has been a regular drawcard for visitors of all ages. Dairy Board staff, left to right: Tommy Green, collecting; Hugh Templar, leading bull; Max Cooper, microphone; Merv Thompson; Dennis Crean; Lloyd Reid.

Introduction

In 1983-84 over 1.52 million dairy cows were inseminated in New Zealand. In the same year the New Zealand dairy industry produced 350 million kilograms of milkfat - 265 million kilograms of which were exported earning the country $1, 659m in export receipts, or 22 percent of the country's overseas earnings.

The use of artificial insemination has played a major role in bringing about these dramatic and previously undreamed of achievements in dairy production and efficiency. It has done this by accelerating the spread of superior genes through the industry to farmers who readily acknowledge that today's dairy cow is a better performer than at any other time in our history. But the technology of artificial insemination and its development in New Zealand is relatively new.

The first experimental inseminations in New Zealand only took place in the mid 1930's and were largely unsuccessful. This was at a time when New Zealand had considerably more dairy farmers than it has now - 70, 000 compared with 15, 806 in 1982-83. The total dairy cow population then was 1.8 million compared with today's 2.2 million. In those days the average milkfat production of a New Zealand dairy cow was 100 kilograms annually compared with today's 150 kilograms.

Today any one bull can be used to inseminate 100, 000 cows annually. Only the very best five to six percent of bulls proven under a stringent testing service are used. Increasing production per cow and per hectare has never been so important to the New Zealand dairy farmer as it is now. With falling international market returns, increasing productivity is one of the few ways left for farmers to maintain or increase their incomes. In this context artificial insemination looms even larger in importance.

Most farmers recognise this and each year an increasing number of them use artificial insemination in their livestock improvement programmes - in 1982-83 nearly 87 percent of dairy farmers used it and in the 1983-84 season this rose to 90 per cent. This book tells the story of how artificial insemination was introduced into New Zealand, how it was developed to fit the country's special circumstances and how it has gained such wide acceptance.

The early pioneers responsible for its introduction and development faced two major difficulties. One was the scientific development of a new technique and the other was to convince the dairy industry to use it. In some ways convincing dairy farmers and industry officials of its value was the harder task. To those early pioneers and those who followed them - the scientists, administrators, technicians, veterinarians and, of course, the farmers - this book pays tribute.

AI or AB?

It is time for a change in terminology to end a confusion which has now become part of New Zealand farming. The term Artificial Insemination has always been used worldwide and is defined as the collection of sperm from a male and its placement in the reproductive tract of the female. The abbreviation Al is internationally accepted for this.

In New Zealand the term Artificial Breeding or AB is used, and its use has become established in Australia. This causes confusion in world literature, international databases and with overseas visitors. It means simply that we have to spend more time explaining that AB is in fact Al, or Al is AB, depending on your viewpoint. We are blamed for the confusion!

There are two explanations for the use of AB in New Zealand instead of Al. The first is editorial, as it was thought that there would be a risk of confusing Al and A1 in written material. The other explanation, which is authenticated by Sir Arthur Ward who was involved at the time, is this. Dr Joseph Edwards, a pioneer of Al development in Britain was directing the operations in dairy cattle breeding for the Milk Marketing Board of England and Wales, at the same time as developments were occurring in New Zealand.

Dr Edwards corresponded regularly with Arthur Ward and in one letter wrote making a strong protest about the use of such an "ugly title" for the New Zealand work on "Artificial Insemination". Sir Arthur relates that there was similar pressure from people within New Zealand at the time who did not like the description - or for that matter the technique!

New Zealand bowed to Dr Edwards's suggestion and tried to make it a little less offensive by calling it Artificial Breeding (AB) instead of Artificial Insemination (Al). However, in Britain Dr Edwards's suggestion was over-ridden by his Milk Marketing Board colleagues and they agreed on Al. New Zealand was thus left with the less risqu, but more confusing term of AB and with forty years of explaining to do!

The main point to accept now is that there is nothing "artificial" about the technique - that era has gone, and the present generation of farmers have known nothing else. In New Zealand the technique of artificial insemination as such was simply a bit of technology in an overall, and large, breeding improvement plan, and this was clearly accepted from the very early field trials.

This contrasted greatly with Europe for example, where Al allowed the farmer to get rid of the herd bull and keep an extra cow instead. So the New Zealand term AB, which is now part of the fabric of farming, needs to have its meaning changed to "Advanced Breeding" which it was and still is. This will again get rid of the word "artificial". There is certainly nothing artificial about the modern dairy cattle improvement programme in New Zealand.

In this book the authors use Artificial Insemination (Al) in the interests of international understanding and library cataloguing. Whether AB can be changed in future to mean "advanced" rather than "artificial" breeding remains to be seen.

History of dairying and herd improvement

The New Zealand dairy industry started in 1814 when the Reverend Samuel Marsden fulfilled Cook's earlier intentions and landed a bull and two heifers in the Bay of Islands.

Further small importations of cattle took place and in the early decades of the 19th century pioneering efforts resulted in the first signs of trading in dairy produce. This was mainly bartering or sale of dairy produce among the early pioneers within New Zealand, but by the 1840s there was a well-developed export trade to Australia of cheese packed in heavily insulated hogsheads, and butter packed in crocks or tubs in brine or else heavily salted.

A feature of New Zealand's dairy history was the early formation of cooperatives. These spread to support the industry as it expanded in areas after the bush was cleared and farms established. The development of refrigeration in the 1880s was a major technological advance to boost the export trade. The making of butter and cheese was concentrated in factories rather than on farms and this was aided by the development of the separating machine between 1885-1890, which speeded up the separation of cream from milk.

Taking milk to the factory and waiting for it to be separated before returning home to feed the skim to the pigs became a way of life for dairy farmers and greatly encouraged social contact in the district.

Between 1910-1920 however, farmers got their own home separators so only their cream needed to be carted to the factory. This meant that many of the "skimming stations" had to switch to cheese processing. The arrival of motor lorries and the sealing of main roads allowed cream to be picked up at farms and carted greater distances.

So, as supply areas and production increased from both specialist dairy farmers and mixed farmers with small surpluses, factories were amalgamated and their total number decreased. About 1920, Taranaki was outstripped in dairy production by the Waikato, South Auckland, the Hauraki Plains and later the Bay of Plenty and the Rangitaiki Plains. Farmer cooperatives continued to be set up and amalgamations took place, together with reshaping and streamlining the industry's structure and selling methods at home and overseas.

Many pioneers emerged and one of the most famous was William Goodfellow (1880-1974) in the Waikato. Rapid developments took place after the 1939-45 war in roading, transport and farm developments such as fencing, fertilisers, drainage and weed control. The supply of mains electricity to farms in the 1920s was important in encouraging people to exploit machine milking. Many farmers had their own power plants before that but the mains supply reduced the work associated with servicing their units.

The mains electricity supply also gave a big impetus to the use of refrigeration. Herd sizes had started to increase because of all this technology and after the 1939-45 war the average herd was about 50 cows. In 1909, under the guidance of the then Department of Agriculture, a "cow testing service" was started. This was where farmers could send a limited number of milk samples from their small herds of cows to be tested. The practice grew and group herd testing was established throughout the country by the mid-1920's. This system of testing was operated by and for commercial herd owners while official herd testing was continued by the Department for pedigree herds.

One man deeply involved in herd testing during this time and who was later to play a big role in the administration of the dairy industry was A.H. (Arthur) Ward, later Sir Arthur Ward. Born in 1906 in Yorkshire he trained in England as a cost accountant before coming to New Zealand in 1926 to start farming. But after two years he got a job with the Herd Testing Association in Hamilton, becoming secretary in 1929. He recalls that in those days herd test sheets were handwritten and all calculations were done by hand, adding the monthly totals to the previous total.

"In 1932-33 1 persuaded the directors to buy some Burroughs adding machines. After due deliberation this was done but we had to make some modifications to them for our needs, for example with number eight fencing wire much to the horror of Burroughs.

"The machines typed out the cows' names and production records and added up the totals, so the farmer got a sheet he could read." This mechanised efficiency coincided with more information being collected, such as data on disease incidence and mating practices. "We realised the cow was only half the next generation and we had to start doing something about the bull. This brought the Sire Survey and progeny testing into being."

Arthur Ward readily acknowledges the influence that Jack Ranstead had on these developing plans for dairy cattle improvement. John Morris (Jack) Ranstead was the son of William Ranstead who came to New Zealand in 1900 to escape the social injustices in England and to form a socialist colony here. The family eventually settled at Matangi where they became famous for their Shorthorn herd.

Jack was 16 when they arrived and soon took to farming with an intense interest in animal breeding. After gaining a diploma at Lincoln College he went home to farm and subsequently influenced many people, including Dr C.P. McMeekan and Sir Arthur Ward. Jack Ranstead was a voracious reader and his collection of books, now held in the Ruakura library, demonstrate this.

He impressed Dr John Hammond from Cambridge University on his visit to New Zealand and was acknowledged by his contemporaries to have the best grasp of cattle breeding of anyone in the country. Arthur Ward spent many hours with Jack Ranstead at Matangi talking late into the night, working out a blue-print for herd improvement.

Sir Arthur also pays tribute to the work of Mr C.M. (Charles) Hume with whom he worked for many years starting at the Herd lmprovement Association in Hamilton, but later in Wellington. Charles Hume was manager of the N.Z. Co-operative Herd Testing Association in 1925-1929 which in 1939 changed its name to the Auckland Herd lmprovement Association. Mr Jack Burton, the present manager of the Auckland Livestock lmprovement Association, remembers the respect farmers had for Hume.

"Charlie was the evangelist of the herd testing movement. He pushed herd recording, calf identification and advanced breeding as if he was preaching the path to salvation. "He was definitely an early enthusiast for the potential of AB and he went out with great enthusiasm to sell the story. "He was a terrific PR guy and it was clearly all these talents which resulted in him going to Wellington as organiser for the Dominion Herd Testing Federation in 1935", Jack said.

Sir Arthur well remembers the effort involved in collecting the necessary data for the early statistical analyses that he carried out. "We went out in 1933-35 and collected the records for the daughters of particular bulls and then compared them with the records of their dams. These were called daughter-dam comparisons - and we could then judge if the bull was improving production in the herd. We collected data from several hundred herds and I used to write out the figures and plot the daughter-dam comparisons myself."

By 1934 it was decided something had to be done to increase the national dairy herd's production and a Royal Commission recommended the setting up of a Herd Testing Council to be responsible for controlling all herd testing services. Following discussions, the NZ Dairy Board agreed to set up the Herd lmprovement Council as part of the board and accordingly the board assumed control of herd testing in 1936.

A Herd lmprovement Council was formed and held its first official meeting on 7 May 1936 and announced that its main objective was to improve the standard of the dairy industry in New Zealand by "systematic and frequent recording of production by the marking and registering of selected calves, by the elimination of unpayable cows, by the eradication of scrub bulls, by the encouragement of the use of pedigree bulls bred on the best productive record, and by any other means which may be deemed necessary or expedient".

In 1936 Arthur Ward was asked to go to the Dairy Board's head office in Wellington to carry on and develop the Sire Survey as well as expand the Field Survey work he had started in the Waikato and South Auckland. His move to Wellington, along with Charles Hume's similar move resulted in the expansion of field surveys. This work received the strong support of Professor Riddet at Massey College and Dr Ernest Marsden of DSIR.

"There were many questions to answer such as, why bother to test high producers when these were the ones which get all the disease! We had to find out the reasons why farmers culled their cows and show that disease incidence and production were not linked. We did that." "The next three years were spent in visiting dairy farms all over New Zealand and collecting data from both grade and pedigree herds to supplement our information on production testing for pedigree cows and progeny tests for bulls.

"From the data available we developed the only approach possible to a genetic assessment for the breeding of higher producing dairy cattle. To ensure that the breeding dams possessed the qualities we required, it was essential they should be profitable over a period of years. They must have good production records, fertility, resistance to disease and longevity.

"A series of good records over a useful lifetime (preferably at least five years) would show the degree to which they possessed these qualities, and so was born the Lifetime Merit Register for pedigree cows. Hopefully they would transmit these qualitites to their offspring.

"Together with the records for the bull - the sire survey - the whole of this information was combined and published in a Sire Survey and Merit Register." The results of Sir Arthur's work were to highlight the importance of the bull in improving dairy production. In many cases at that time bulls were actually lowering production. Somehow a way had to be found to use only the best bulls in the country across as many cows as possible. The stage was set for the introduction of an insemination service" Sir Arthur said.

Three years later in 1939 this policy was reaffirmed when, on the council's recommendation, the Government and Dairy Board adopted the Herd Improvement Plan. Under this plan 28 group testing associations were combined into six regional Herd Improvement Associations. These associations were to later form a vital part in the introduction of AI to New Zealand.

Arthur Ward received the OBE in 1960 for his services to herd improvements and was knighted in 1979 for his services to the dairy industry and to education as Pro-chancellor and Chancellor of Massey University for over 12 years

First steps towards AI

The early history of A1 is a fascinating story, too long to tell in full here. The main points are as follows.

In 1677 Anton van Leuwenhoek and a pupil Johan Hamm discovered sperm using a magnifying lens. They called them "animalcules". However, it wasn't until 1780 that an Italian physiologist L. Spallanzani was successful in inseminating bitches and it was he who discovered that the fertilising power of semen was the sperm carried in the spermatic fluid.

Further major developments had to wait until the early 1900's when the Russian pioneer E. I. lvanoff started developing Al techniques. A further important landmark was the development of the long-term storage of sperm by rapid cooling and freezing to very low temperatures of minus 79C. This was done in 1949 by Dr C. Polge at Cambridge in Britain. These were all vital steps on the road to commercial application of artificial insemination.

But what about New Zealand in the 1930s? This was a time when industry leaders and administrators in the dairy industry were showing concern that despite the increase in herd testing, national butterfat production was not breaking new records each year. Statistics compiled by the recently established Sire Survey, formed in 1936, suggested that 37 percent of bulls were actually lowering production. It became obvious that the national herd had to be improved and the best way of doing this was through the use of superior sires.

Theoretical studies overseas had shown that by using superior sires through Artificial Insemination, production improvements could be achieved rapidly. In the early 1930's there were 28 small Herd Testing Associations, the largest being the New Zealand Cooperative Herd Testing Association which had been fostered by the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company which at that time serviced an area from Albertland in North Auckland to Galatea. There was no road between Galatea and Whakatane where the other small Herd Testing Association was operating.

At a special meeting

on 6 June, 1935 directors of the New Zealand Co-operative Herd Testing Association decided to ask the Director-General of Agriculture, Dr C.J. Reakes, to provide the services of a department veterinary officer to experiment with artificial insemination on a number of dairy cows in the Waikato. He agreed that Mr W.M. (Wally) Webster from the Department of Agriculture's Wallaceville Laboratory in Upper Hutt should be made available to co-operate in this first experiment.

Webster was a veterinarian who was acknowledged as a national authority on infertility in sheep and cattle, and had done pioneering work on the importance of the calcium:phosphorus ratio in infertility. He had gained some experience in Al in sheep at about this same period so he was ideally qualified to help.

The Association contacted owners of 200 herds in the South Auckland and Waikato area and 44 of them agreed to co-operate in the experiment. This operation began on 16 September, 1935. At this time AI had not become a widespread practical proposition anywhere outside Russia.

Already at this early stage of development the question of the advisability of inseminating registered pedigree cows was discussed and the association wrote to the New Zealand Jersey Cattle Breeders' Association asking whether the progeny from artificially inseminated registered cows would be accepted for registration. The association replied that they would be accepted.

Bull preparing to mount teaser cow. Attendant Dennis Crean holds the Cambridge model artificial vagina into which the bull serves. Leading the bull is Graham Bowen. Photo 1969

In that first operation 316 cows were inseminated and 79, or 25 percent, became pregnant. Six different bulls were used but two - Ngahiwi Silent King and Otterburn Arab - did most of the work. In August the following year the Association's Proven Bull Committee, which was a sub-committee of the Herd Testing Association's management committee, met to discuss continuing artificial insemination for the 1936 mating season.

Because of the previous year's low conception rates it was decided not to continue the work. The committee believed an Institute of Artificial Insemination should be established at Ruakura and someone should be sent overseas to study the technique. That year the Department of Agriculture decided to do further experimentation with its own cattle at Ruakura.

Eighty-seven cows were inseminated, of which 39 percent got in calf. No further experiments were carried out until the 1938 mating season when a Department veterinary officer A.L. Thompson inseminated 332 cows in the Waikato's Ngarua district with a 32 percent success rate and in 1939 he inseminated a further 237 cows. Tom Blake, Cyril Hopkirk, Wally Webster and A.L. Thompson were the country's earliest Al pioneers.

Tom Blake, a Government veterinarian, was directed to start studying artificial insemination in 1935. He and Hopkirk carried out most of the first, early experiments. Cyril Hopkirk was then Superintendent at Wallaceville and he visited the Waikato for 2-3 weeks each year to take part in the experiments.' A.L. Thompson had been recruited about 1937-38 from Britain to the government veterinary service in Hamilton to help with Al development.

In 1938 he and Blake were charged with getting a field service operating and Blake continued studying semen morphology, a subject in which he was deeply interested. Groups of enthusiasts were set up to explore Al and this, despite the low conception rates, was the key to early progress as they contained veterinarians and far-sighted, pioneering farmers.

Blake's ability to deal with a challenge was well illustrated by his ingenuity in collecting semen from bulls. In those early days the Cambridge rubber artificial vagina, held by a technician into which the bull served, was not available in New Zealand. It was difficult enough ordering scientific equipment from overseas at that time, but the war made things impossible.

By the time the sales catalogue got to New Zealand and the order returned, the item was often unavailable. All this made local ingenuity essential. Blake solved the problem by inserting a glass jar into the cow's vagina on to which he fitted a piece of car inner tube vulcanised to an imitation vulva flap with a slit in it to fit over the cow's vulva. The jars were pickle jars supplied full of what Dr John James described as "highly respected pickles by Thompson and Hill of Auckland".

These were rugged times. Blake's early forays consisted of collecting semen from a bull on one farm and then carrying it in a test tube in his waistcoat pocket to keep it warm to the next farm. He had to travel in an old Austin over boulder-strewn roads, through streams and rocky creeks and drive to farms along rutted tracks through endless Taranaki gates to inseminate half-wild cows, some not in season and often still in the paddock.

Tommy Blake (top right) among a group of veterinary colleagues photographed in Wellington at the Annual Conference of the Veterinary Association in 1929.

It is not difficult to understand why early conception rates were not all that good! Sir Arthur Ward recalls that although the Herd Testing Association was enthusiastic about the Al concept, the poor results of these first trials were worrying. "We had no expertise in the association, we were in the hands of Ruakura and such men as Tommy Blake. In those early days we had our fingers crossed hoping the early problems would come right."

"While these early developments were going on, our bull surveys continued to tell farmers which were the best herds from which they could buy good bulls. We had to raise the standard of the national herd - and we certainly needed Al. With Al we could demonstrate that by getting more daughters from the top bulls you could lift the national herd's performance, " Sir Arthur said.

Despite the very limited success of the early Al experiments, they did set the stage for those developments which followed. These began in 1940, the year which can probably be described as the true birth of dairy cattle insemination as the core of advanced breeding in New Zealand.

Back to the beginning

The limited success of the initial attempts at AI in New Zealand accentuated the need for an experimental approach to the technique.

Dr John James, who had qualified at the London Veterinary School in December 1937, was moved from Wallaceville to Ruakura to work on Al in 1939. Here he settled in to study all the complex problems associated with Al under New Zealand conditions. This was the start of his long career as the technical guiding light of Al in New Zealand.

A.L. Thompson had left to go to medical school and James was left to tackle Al along with Blake. Blake was heavily involved with his examination of bull semen and bull infertility problems leaving the other aspects of Al to James. An area of land was provided at Ruakura with improved laboratory facilities and a trained technical staff.

"My approach, because of the initial poor results was to start at bedrock again working entirely with the Ruakura herds at No. 1 and No. 2 dairies until we got the techniques sorted out and were able to show that we could get cows in calf on a satisfactory level. So for three seasons - 1940, 1941 and 1942 - we went at it step by step, " Dr James said. These early investigations and experiments centred around the collection, dilution and storage of semen.

"We were using fresh semen and diluting it according to the recipes used by Walton at Cambridge and those used in Russia with phosphate buffer solutions. We did trials like comparing two inseminations per heat with undiluted fresh semen versus diluted fresh, old versus fresh and so on. We did well really - conception rates around 60 percent. So by the end of the third year, we were confident we could go out on to dairy farms" Dr James said.

In 1943-44 it was decided to do experimental work in the Matangi- Cambridge area, inseminating 1, 000 cows, of which 80 percent proved in calf after a service of about three months. Naturally pleased with the results, Dr James extended his experimental work in 1944 to the Te Hoe district in the Waikato and Palmerston North area as well as Matangi-Cambridge.

At this point, to speed and promote the project still further, the New Zealand Dairy Board entered the development programme, providing financial and advisory support. Unfortunately in 1943 the work ran into trouble. Only 39% of the cows inseminated actually conceived.

By that year the need for cooling diluted semen had been proven and when transporting the semen to the new farmer groups, it was put in wide-mouthed thermos flasks surrounded by ice-filled rubber balloons. At that time everyone recognised that if Al was to be effective, it had to be done on a national scale.

But to avoid having an army of technicians, a do-it-yourself system would have to be developed so farmers could do the inseminations themselves. This was basically for economic reasons - as it was thought that providing an Al service and training technicians who would only be required for a limited period each year would be a costly exercise.

At that time Dr James developed a cervical method of insemination where a speculum was inserted into the vagina so an operator could see the cervix (the entry to the uterus or womb) by the aid of a light while the semen was placed on it. "We packed the semen in cartridges - I think I got the idea from dental anaesthetic cartridges. I made tiny rubber bungs from catapult elastic to seal the top. We made a metal gun to hold these cartridges and after you sighted the cervix you pulled the trigger. Sadly the rubber bung idea was a failure as it transpired that they affected the semen and lowered its viability.

"They have got one of my old guns in the Al museum in Moscow but I haven't got any here - we threw them all out! All I have is a photo of an attractive Russian lady holding one!" Dr James said. "We devised a straw system a bit later but this was a failure as we had no means of covering the metal with a plastic sheath like we do today.

Inseminating Gun developed by Dr John James in 1945, and made by Walker Engineering Ltd, Hamilton NZ

These metal guns and the speculums had to be washed and sterilised after each cow had been inseminated as we didn't have enough spare equipment to leave it all for a clean-up at the end of the day.

"We often had to ask farmers to get a three-point plug put on the board in the shed to plug in our steriliser that we carted around. Extra plugs in the shed were considered an extravagance at the time!"

Sir Arthur Ward remembers that during these early trials when 'do-it-yourself' Al was being promoted the first experimental farmer group at Matangi was given careful instructions on using the speculum and the 'James' model gun. It was failure to follow the instructions that I reckon was the reason for the disaster it became".

"McMeekan refused to include in the group one wild Irishman - but Paddy came and thumped Mac's table and demanded to be part of the scheme. Mac said all right, he could join provided he did exactly as he was told. One of the Ruakura staff went along one day to check on Paddy and of course he had it all wrong. He had been instructed to bend down and look through the speculum and sight the cervix, then fire the gun. Paddy reckoned this was totally daft as no one ever saw a bull looking to see what he was doing".

"By 1945 it had become obvious the cervical method, although successful on a small scale, was not going to be satisfactory for widespread use throughout NZ. It required a heavy does rate of semen at a time when there was a sever shortage of proven sires and the elementary dilution techniques available and the country's limited breeding season counted against its continued use.

"It was decided that year to limit the area of operations back to the Matangi-Cambridge-Hamilton area, doing about 1, 000 cows and testing the intra-uterine method against the cervical method. The cervical method with the sperm placed at the entrance to the cervix was considered to be the ideal method for do-it-yourself operators. Having to consider a change to inserting semen through the muscular tissue of the cervix with its many folds caused some concern" Dr James said.

The technique required the manipulation of a glass pipette carrying the semen through the cervix. This was done by locating the cervix by a hand inserted in the cow's rectum. The pipette was then carefully guided through the cervix and when correctly placed - as judged by feeling through the rectum wall - the semen was pushed out of the glass pipette by a small syringe attached by a piece of rubber tube. The same basic technique is still used today.

Initially the intra-uterine method provided no immediate advantage in terms of conception rate but the big pay-off was that before long we were getting better results with much smaller doses of semen. This is where we really wanted to make advances, Dr James stressed.

"This advantage greatly improved the possibility of using Al on a national scale. Extensive dose-rate experiments resulted in a reduction of 250-300 million sperm per dose with the cervical method down to 25 million sperm using the uterine technique. This vastly increased coverage per bull. Those involved in the work could smell a bit of success at last.

"The 1945 experiment also showed that by using similar dilutions with both methods, intra-uterine insemination gave a conception rate of 65 percent, against 48 percent by the cervical method. In 1945 the Government decided to send Dr James to Russia, Britain and the United States to look at developments in Al, particularly to see the methods being used in the field which were applicable to New Zealand. However only the eastern states of the USA faced the same challenge as New Zealand - operating a statewide service from a single centre.

On his return there was another reappraisal of Al and it was decided the 'do-it-yourself cervical method was definitely not going to work on a national basis, and would not lead to the coverage with merit sires which the Dairy Board wanted to achieve through the Herd Improvement Associations. It was estimated that to cover the then national herd of about 1.75 million cows, 60 percent of the national herd would require successful insemination by proven sires to provide the replacements required.

The manpower necessary was estimated at between 800-900 for the mating period of eight to 10 weeks. A plan was developed to concentrate the Al service for pedigree breeders, and then they could supply sons of merit bulls to the industry. This was done for two to three years. From 1946 through to 1948 experimental work continued, the numbers of cows being inseminated growing to 860 as well as 51 1 pedigree cows. Conception rates were around 70 percent at this stage.

During the 1950s a scheme was introduced to provide a good future source of proven sires. Sons of proven sires were mated to sufficient cows to provide a progeny test, at a pre-determined future date. There were also experiments to test the potential of using these young bulls for field work.

The greatest limiting factor to the whole project was New Zealand's short mating period, a feature which still confuses overseas visitors about the New Zealand dairy industry. The pressure to get cows in calf, to concentrate calving the following season and hence exploit the spring pasture flush for maximum economic return is as high today as it was in the pioneering days.

The short mating season seriously affected available manpower, bull power and most of all at this point in the development programme, it limited the amount of experimental investigation which could be accomplished to a period of eight to 10 weeks each year. In an attempt to increase the time available for investigation, a short winter-mating group was begun with the co-operation of farmers of townsupply herds near Ruakura as well as with Ruakura's own herds. This meant spring work could be planned more accurately to include confirmation of previous tests and also provided a valuable source for the training of technicians in the intrauterine method of insemination.

The Ruakura AI Research building. The first building used was a wooden structure at No1 Dairy, which then became the first library. The building above was a piggery and had the front section built on to extend it for AI work. Later it became part of Ruakura's Fertility Centre. Photo 1984

Research into dilution techniques was also an important part of this early experimental work. The aim was to find the lowest effective dilution rate possible to increase coverage per bull. The key to improving dilution rates was the 'extenders' which were used to mix with the sperm to prolong their life. Dr James recalls that there was an explosion of research into extenders at that time and the Russians had used a wide range of recipes in their work.

But it was the introduction of egg yolk citrate as an extender by workers in America which was a breakthrough at the time and allowed sperm to be kept alive for an extra day. This made the organisation of field groups a real practical proposition.

"We came across a paper once which reported that whole egg, rather than egg-yolk was giving better results and we tried that. It was an absolute disaster, as the sperm clumped around the strings of albumin in the extender and greatly reduced the number of mobile sperm left to carry out fertilisation. This wasted valuable time" Dr James said. Semen storage was also receiving close attention, particularly the effects of long-distance travel.

One man deeply involved in these early days at Ruakura was Stan Southcombe. He was one of the first laymen to learn how to inseminate a cow in New Zealand. He was closely followed by Roy Gallagher and Graham Umbers. Dr James taught them the technique in the early 1940s so that the first trials could be got off the ground.

Stan Southcombe was also involved with helping Tom Blake and Cyril Hopkirk in their early work on bull fertility and the first AI trials. Consequently, when Dr James took over the AI work in 1940 Stan was the ideal man to help.

Stan Southcombe helped solve many practical problems, designing equipment and developing distribution systems. Two good examples are the bull trailers which are used to bring bulls from the tethers in the paddock to the collection area, and the overhead wire tethering system. These have not been improved on anywhere in the world and are still regularly used today.

Bull trailer developed by Stan Southcombe in the 1950s and still used today. Stockman pictured is Lauri Day. Photo 1956.

By the end of 1948 this purely experimental era was at an end and by 1949 it was decided that sufficient progress had been made to venture into commercial work to assess more accurately AI's potential on a national scale. The industry was out of its infancy!

Semen for sale

The time had come for Al to test the commercial market and the following five years were to be busy ones. Commercial groups had to be set up, farmers convinced of Al's worth, technicians trained and scientific studies had to be continued. The NZ Dairy Exporter's editor Charles Burnard and associate editor Tim Tyrer regularly reported future plans for Al. Here are a few examples:

"Plans underway for commercial Al trial in New Zealand for 1949 breeding season, " a magazine headline reported on 1 April, 1949. The report went on:

"Mr H.B. Lawry, secretary of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Herd Recording Council, said that the Ruakura Artificial Insemination Research Centre was prepared to provide sufficient semen to enable the Herd Recording Council to operate two commercial groups of 600 cows each next season, also to provide accommodation for a laboratory technician to be supplied by the Herd Recording Department and to train four inseminators for the work."

"It was the opinion of Mr James and Dr McMeekan that under commercial conditions, with standardisation on the use of sulphanilimide in the buffer solution, a conception rate of at least 55 percent was possible, ' said Mr Lawry."

The commercial pilot scheme did begin that year and 2 groups were established in both the Rototuna and Taranaki areas. These were organised by the local Herd lmprovement Association. The conception rates were higher than predicted. At Rototuna, 74 percent cows 'held' and in Taranaki there was a 61 percent success rate. The total number of cows inseminated was 1, 596.

In November 1949 the Exporter reported "Commercial Al groups launched in New Zealand but shortage of proven bulls a disturbing factor". The magazine went on. "The first Al groups to operate commercially on a co-operative basis in New Zealand made a start early last month in Taranaki and the Waikato. "During the mating season semen was sent to Taranaki by air from Ruakura from Monday to Friday and by rail or bus on Sunday. "

"Mr R.A. Candy said that if this initial trial on a commercial basis proves successful, the prime difficulty in future will be the supply of bulls of the standard which has been set hitherto for Al sires, namely bulls whose daughters on official survey have an average production of approximately 400 lb butterfat or more.

"Mr A.H. Ward, Director of Herd Improvement, said that 300 bulls of the required standard had been located by the Dairy Board's Consulting Officers but only one in sixteen had been obtained. 'A bit of our own work coming back on us' commented Mr Ward. The owners said if they were good enough for Al they were good enough for them to keep. They would have to face up to the necessity of proving some bulls as they went along, selecting on the same standard as their purchases this year."

The following month Tim Tyrer went to see first-hand what Al was all about.
First hand glimpse of the operation of a Waikato commercial Al group:

"One morning recently, in company with Mr S.J. Sheaf, General Manager of the Auckland Herd lmprovement Association, I saw at first hand the operation of one of New Zealand's first Al groups. The Horsham Downs-Rototuna group involves a round trip of 38 miles for the inseminator daily to provide Al service for 12 herds, totalling 620 cows - 568 grades and 52 pedigrees. A subsidiary group of three herds was being operated to provide further training and experience for a second technician.

"We met Mr M.W. Cooper, inseminator for the group at Ruakura where he collected his supply of semen for the day. At this stage of the season he was carrying only one test tube of 20 ccs of serum per day - sufficient to inseminate 20 cows. In the early part of the season he carried two tubes of 20 cc.

"Farmers well satisfied. "Mr Cooper told me that it might take anything from 30 seconds to 10 minutes to inseminate each cow. He is keenly interested in the work and he certainly proved himself to be both efficient and speedy. His complete kit is in a handy galvanised container - a big factor when one is handling 35 cows per day as at peak mating.

"Supervision of the project is in the hands of a combined committee of the Auckland HIA and of the owners of the herds entered in the group. Mr R.A. Candy, chairman of the HIA was elected chairman of this committee on which the association is also represented by Messrs A.S. Wyllie and D.O. Murray. The group members were Messrs C.L. Bredd, D.J. Gray and C.W. Hancock. The charges were 30/- per pedigree cow and 15/- per grade cow, 75% of this charge to be paid in advance."

In 1950, the two first commercial groups continued to operate and two pedigree groups were also established on a commercial basis with an improvement in the final percentage of cows in calf to 70 percent from the previous year's 67 percent. The total number of cows inseminated was 3, 603. That same year Al was the subject of a vigorous discussion at the 1950 Massey College dairy farmers week in July. The Dairy Exporter provided its readers with the following report.

"Mr A.H. Ward, Director of herd improvement of the NZ Dairy Board and Dr C.P. McMeekan, Superintendent of the Ruakura Animal Research Station outlined plans for the coming season. First priority for the Al service is to be given to pedigree breeeders, with an offer of four pedigree groups, each of 500 cows to be operated on a commercial basis by the Herd Recording Department together with the two grade groups operated last year.

"Dr McMeekan confessed that he had to crawl down on some of his views regarding Al in the light of experience in the last six years. He thought at an earlier stage that it was going to be possible from a technical point of view to make Al available to any dairy farmer who wanted to use it in his herd. This cannot be done. Mr James, our veterinarian in charge of the Ruakura Al centre, has done a magnificent job and without exaggeration it can be claimed that the results he has achieved are at least six times more efficient than any achieved overseas. To average 400 cows in calf per bull in two months as we have done at Ruakura has not been exceeded over a 12-month breeding season in any other Al outfit in the world (applause).

"It was fair to say that looking at all the results in the experimental group with grade cattle, the use of merit bulls through Al in 12 herds outside, serviced by Ruakura had resulted in the cattle that were approximately 30 Ib butterfat per cow better on average than the cows those farmers were breeding previously, " the report concluded. The following year the same two groups continued operations and two pedigree groups were also established on a commercial basis. The final percentage of the total 3, 603 cows inseminated was 70 percent.

Over the following three years the numbers of cows inseminated grew to 85, 000 in 1954. Percentages conceived were 76 percent of 16, 748 cows serviced over four weeks in 1952, 68 percent of 56, 461 cows over seven weeks in 1953 and 75 percent over 85, 000 cows in 1954. In 1953 the Dairy Board assumed full responsibility for the scheme. Semen was sold to the Herd Improvement Associations which provided the field service.

One farmer involved in these first experimental Al groups run from Ruakura was Ray Woodcock who farmed in the Tamahere-Matangi area

of the Waikato. He, like other enthusiasts and supporters of work at Ruakura, had volunteered to help in the early trials in 1949. He desribes how the programme operated.

"It was organised by conveners who everyone phoned to say how many cows they had to inseminate. Cows had to be identified by clipping on the rump and chemical marking. The conveners then passed the word on to Stan Southcombe at Ruakura." Ray said farmers were keen to help the research programme because they all wanted to make progress and improve their herds - they were prepared to take the risks involved for the potential benefits.

Risks there were, with early conception rates being as low as 50-55 percent. A sign of the farmers' interest was that all those involved were on herd recording - they had to be, as part of the deal was to provide production data on the daughters to the Dairy Board. "When born, calves had a metal numbered tag tied around their neck and were tattooed in the ear on a later day, " Ray remembers.

Ray had begun farming on his own account when he was 16 years old in 1927 and, like many other young men at that time, he had a burning ambition to have a top-performing herd. He said that with a first-cross herd, the results were quite good, but with further crossing the results were a disaster. They lost all type, udders were bad, feet and legs were poor - hopeless.

"So I went the Jersey way and hoped that Al could help me along, " Ray said. "The best stock were in the first couple of years when Ruakura used their top proven bulls which then were kept to found their own herd at No. 2 dairy. These developed into a beautiful herd.

"After that, during the next four years we got every type possible as so many different bulls were used. You were lucky if you got more than two daughters by the same sire. Nobody was really happy with this so some pulled out. Production was variable and there were some poor conformation stock simply because the bulls were not there to do the job. They were trying to find them. The problem could not be cured quickly as breeders would not put their top bull into the scheme at the start, " Ray said.

Some participants in these early experiments felt a little bitter but Ray Woodcock did not; he appreciated the task that had been set Dr James and Stan Southcombe. "I had a vision to accomplish something better, so one year because of my disappointment with the Al results I went out and bought 20 calves from a fellow breeder. Only four ever got into the herd - the rest were a great disappointment so you couldn't just blame the Al bulls! The good pedigree bulls were just not available anywhere at the time.

"But I have no complaints. They treated us fairly and the enthusiasm of the technicians like Roy Gallagher who did the bulk of my inseminations and Paul Kneebone was great. Their service was first class - they certainly tried to get us the best, " Ray said.

There was no shortage of sceptics at the time - many of whom Ray Woodock said were prepared to bet that Al would never go commercial. There seemed to be too many problems to overcome. There was the usual talk of the process not being natural and that poor stock would result.

"Some of the stock were poor, but it had nothing to do with the technique - it was the poor bulls that were used. "Of course there were a few jealous neighbours too who thought we were getting something for nothing - human nature never improves!" he said.

These early experiments carried out in the Waikato were also introduced at an early stage to Taranaki and the

Manawatu. Progress in the Manawatu was greatly aided by the appointment in 1929 of T.G.W. (Tom) Page as general manager of the Manawatu Herd lmprovement Association. Tom had established the first group herd testing in the South Island after leaving Lincoln College.

"The average-sized herd was 44 cow and Pedigree breeders were very much against the idea of of AI and they made their views very clear to us. I had the responsibility of getting the early commercial groups organised and this meant a lot of work travelling around a very large area, explaining what was involved and how AI could become the basis of all herd improvement - it was a case of persuading breeders to want to help themselves. There was no magic in the technique - it was simply a tool of herd improvement. That was the challenge to explain, '' Tom said.

He remembers the problems of poor conception in those early days when equipment and technique 'left a lot to be desired'. But these were quickly overcome and he remembers few problems once Al truly got underway. In 1939 a number of local Herd Improvement Associations, including Manawatu were merged into the Wellington-Hawke's Bay HIA. Tom Page retired after 40 years service to livestock improvement.

This was a time of enormous challenge and hard work for managers of the Herd lmprovement Associations as they put a herd improvement field service together. They were:

Northland: - G.E. (George) Durney R.W. (Ron) Taylor
Auckland: - S.J. (Selwyn) Sheaf
Bay of Plenty: - N.H. (Norman) Carter A.W. (Bert) Graham
Taranaki" - C.W. (Cliff) Broard
Wellington-Hawke's Bay: - T.G.W. (Tom) Page
South Island: - J.R. (Jack) Unwin

Professor Ian Campbell, formerly Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Massey University, remembers the early days when working at the Dairy Research Institute's experimental farm in the 1930's as a new graduate and working on Al.

The insemination of the Massey herd began in 1943 when Ian Campbell returned from doing a PhD at the University of Missouri where there was a strong school of reproductive physiology and nutrition. He was given the responsibility of carrying out Al research and at that time conception rates were around 30-40 percent.

"Prof Riddet was continually 'stirring-up' breed societies about their failure to demonstrate breeding improvements so there was great pressure to get better results from Al by finding better bulls and spreading their influence more widely, " Ian said.

Semen for the Massey herd came down from Ruakura by the overnight express from Fran kton, stopping at the main centres on the way. The journey, packed in ice-filled boxes, did not help conception rates and, with the prospect of new groups of commercial farmers being started in the Manawatu, many people asked the question - is there a better way?

During Dr James's visit to the Soviet Union, among the many techniques he saw was the transport over long distances by carrier pigeon. The semen was packed in material like waxed cigarette paper, enough for a single dose and these were crushed into the cows' cervix at insemination. This was discussed as an idea worth trying between Ruakura and Massey. It was believed by some that the cooler temperatures of the pigeon's flying altitude would benefit the semen! A homing pigeon flies from Hamilton to Palmerston North in about three hours and the train took six hours.

Hugh Clifford, currently Artificial Breeding Controller in the Livestock lmprovement Division of the Dairy Board, was a young boy on the Massey Dairy farm at the time where his father was farm manager.

"The pigeons belonged to a young lad at the Dairy Research Institute and he kept them at his house in town. When the semen-by-pigeon idea arose, the pigeons were moved to Massey and I got a half share - I contributed to half the feed cost and was allowed to clean them out, " Hugh remembers.

He says a saddler was given the job of making a harness to carry a small capsule on the bird's back for the semen. This was in- 1943-44. But neither Hugh nor Ian Campbell can remember what happened to this 'great idea'. So the question of did they have a trial run, did the semen get through, did some bird ever end up in Australia or someone's pot, cannot be answered. By 1945 Hugh Clifford said the idea was just a memory. So this was a period when the early field trials had created an enormous interest in farmers in the Waikato, Manawatu and Taranaki.

The farmers in Northland, long noted for their fierce independence became very impatient with the lack of progress in the availability of a service into their area. They were to discover that getting a service was not to be an easy task.

AI goes to Northland

Extract from The Dairy Exporter reported in October 1951:

"Plans for extension of commercial Al under industry control are taking shape.

"The Director of Herd Improvement, Mr A.H. Ward said that arrangements were in hand to service four groups in the Auckland Herd lmprovement Association's area - two pedigree and two grade - plus one pedigree and one grade in the Wellington- Hawke's Bay area and one in the Taranaki area made up of pedigree and grade cows. It had also been agreed to service one group in the Northland province, which was not under the control of the local Herd lmprovement Association but of a separate organisation known as the Northland Co-operative Al Society Ltd. If sufficient semen were available they would also try to service a further grade group that was available in Northland under the same organisation. As in past years, semen would be provided from the Ruakura Al Experimental Centre of the Animal Research Division, Department of Agriculture".

The more interesting question about Al in Northland was not how a separate organisation was formed, but why it happened. The answer seemed to be in peoples' attitudes rather than technical problems concerned with getting semen to Northland. Northland clearly wanted Al and didn't want to be last in the queue.

A small group of farmers led by D.J. (Darcy) Gilberd, prior to 1950 realised the potential of Al to allow them access to better bulls. Darcy had come down to Cecil Bones's farm in the Waikato to learn the technique himself after a Jersey bull he had purchased from Taranaki had broken a hip shortly after its arrival and Darcy decided to use it for artificial insemination.

The pioneers who got an AI service going in Northland in 1950. Left to right: Darcy Gilberd; Fred Platt; and Reg Beasley. Photo 1984

The block to Al in Northland appeared to come through the local Herd lmprovement Association which had no interest in providing a service. It argued its job was herd recording and that Al was a different function. However, the HIA members were nearly all stud breeders and could see Al as a big threat to their own local bull sales. And it was.

So in 1950 the Northland AI enthusiasts took things into their own hands and the following notice appeared in the Northern Advocate:
"An open meeting will be held in Whangarei for anyone interested in using artificial breeding to improve the dairy merit of their herds. Signed: D.J. Gilberd".

Another Northland A1 pioneer Fred Platt, who farmed near Whangarei, takes up the story.

"It was generally understood by local farmers that although 6, 000 cows were being serviced from Ruakura, that dairy herds in Northland would very likely be the last to receive a service and if and when Al got off the ground commercially, Northland would be the last one to get it because. many government departments believed that New Zealand ended at Auckland."

He remembers that the initial meeting was well attended by about 100 farmers. Darcy Gilberd was elected chairman, Fred Platt vice chairman, and the Northland Co-operative Artificial Insemination Society Ltd was launched. Fred Platt remembers how things progressed.

"I moved a resolution that was carried we proceed with the formation of a bull centre and we leased part of the property of a young farmer at Springs Flat - H. Wright, who was engaged to operate the centre.

"After negotiations with Ruakura, they agreed to train Mr Wright and myself in the operations of the bull centre. "We made our base in Hamilton and attended the Ruakura Research Station daily and aided by books we learnt the rudiments of semen collection and Al servicing. After about a week, the Heads of the Department offered us a more suitable set-up. "This was that Ruakura supply us with semen for 1, 000 cows and train technicians to do the job the first season. So we agreed to abandon the bull centre idea, " Fred Platt said.

Another member of that first committee of the Northland cooperative, C.R. (Reg) Beasley, well remembers the problems that arose between the Al enthusiasts and the Herd Improvement Association and then again with the Dairy Board in Wellington. It appeared to the fiercely independent Northlanders that the Dairy Board in Wellington was also being awkward.

On Friday 7 September 1951 the NZ Herald published an interesting report under the heading "Unique Venture, Al Society Formed in Northland. Farmer's Co-operative, by Our Agricultural Correspondent" In part it said: "The society is justly proud of , having formed its own co-operative Al service to dairy farmers in Northland, because some time ago a more or less official view was that it might be several years before Al groups could be formed in this area. A total of 37 herds will be inseminated and there are 100 pedigree cows allocated to each group".

Looking back to those days Sir Arthur Ward is adamant that delaying an AI service to Northland was never the Board's intention - it wanted an effective service countrywide as quickly as possible. It also fully recognised the problem caused by the local Herd lmprovement Association.

Sir Arthur also points out that the Dairy Board was concerned at the time because demand for Al was outstripping its ability to supply a guaranteed service. He said if the board offered a service and then couldn't deliver, there was 'all hell to play' as cows were delayed in calving and the whole farming operation upset. This responsibility made the board very cautious. But from Reg Beasley's viewpoint, things were very frustrating around 1950-51 .

"We had no money. We had further meetings and farmers put in twenty pence per cow to cover expenses for meeting the hall rent etc. We were forced into our own centre because Mr Candy and the board turned down our early requests for semen.

"There was a move to bring in legislation to license organisations and operators and in effect block our centre idea but we got to the Minister of Agriculture first! He was Mr Barclay, our local MP and he refused to back any legislation that would disadvantage the North.

''It was frustrating to think that the main thing stopping Al in the north was some old dead-heads in the local Herd lmprovement Association who wanted nothing to do with it. We got sick of all the old wives tales they raked up about Al, and their great fear about pedigree breeders suffering by lowered bull sales, " Reg Beasley said. In the meantime Darcy Gilberd had written letters all round the world to ascertain the costs from different organisations of setting up an Al scheme.

"I did my calculations very carefully and reckoned we could do the job for 30/- a cow, reducing to one pound after the second year with any surplus returning to shareholders. Arthur Ward spoke to the shareholders and although he said he was impressed with our plans, he thought they may be overdone.

"He offered us semen at 7/6 per insemination instead of us organising our own bulls. He reckoned we could never do it for one pound. We did our sums again over the next four months and came up with 25/- on the number of cows we had. Two or three days before the service started we got a message from the Dairy Board to say they couldn't supply at 7/6, but the price would be 15/- per dose. We didn't like the way this was done at all.

"We had a hasty phone conference with members and knew we could not operate profitably at 251-. But rather than break our promise to members, we operated at a loss and made the Dairy Board wait for their money!" Darcy Gllberd said.

Reg Beasley said the group was very annoyed about the board 'pulling this fast one' on them. But the debt was repaid. The hard work and frustrations of those early days in Northland are vivid memories to G.J. (Graham) Pratt who trained as a technician for the coop in 1953 and is currently Assistant General Manager of the Auckland Livestock lmprovement Association.

Graham is very clear that the major cause of confrontation was personalities and that the leaders of the Dairy Board's Al committee during the early 1950s could have been more helpful to Northland in those difficult years.

"At the national Al conferences that were held during the 1950s, those of us from Northland were freely invited and treated like everyone else. But it was little digs, like when our very credible results were tabled, the committee would say not much notice could be taken of these as they were not official! This made the Northlanders' hackles rise." Graham Pratt remembers the hard work they put in during those times.

"There were many weeks canvassing with meetings night after night. I remember a meeting with Hugh Kirton, the local consulting officer at the Tapora hall sitting around a kerosene lamp as there was no power in the area. After being appointed manager, Graham still serviced a group in the mornings and then spent the afternoons and evenings on the records and catching up on the management side of the operation. He remembers the administration well.

"In the initial years of the co-op, as each new area came in another director was added to the board. When the number got to 18, it was realised that a ward system would have to be introduced. Graham also remembers the bulls that were regularly offered for sale to dairy farmers at that time.

"If you had pulled the halter too hard, their heads would have come off. They were dreadful, stunted, potbellied specimens, but at that time they were the best that was available for natural service. Once people realised there was an alternative source of bulls we were flat out to keep up.

"Mind you, there were some disappointing stock in those early years from the proven bulls the board bought in. Some fell far short of expectation in their Al progeny test. "The message slowly filtered through that maybe we couldn't just accept fancy pedigrees - production had got to be the main criteria. This was happening all round the country at the time, " Graham said.

Northland had it fair share of sceptics and predictors of doom and there were also some very confused ideas about Al. Darcy Gilberd remembers a few of these. An advertisement in a local paper wanting farmers' sons for artificial inseminations brought the following reply.

"Dear Secretary, Artificial Breeding Northland I note your advert for farmers sons for artificial insemination work in Northland.

When organised I would like to take advantage of your services. My age is 32 years. I have never married but wish to have a family. I cannot understand why you specify farmer's sons. I am of Scotch descent and naturally would wish to have children by someone of similar blood and definitely not Irish blood. Second choice would be Welsh. Are we allowed this type of selection also regards physique, hair colour, etc.
Looking forward to hearing from you and am available for interview anytime - please give 3 to 4 days notice.
Yours in anticipation of an early reply: (MISS)."

The letter, when read out at the director's meeting, Darcy said nearly sabotaged the meeting and there was unanimous clamour for the address and telephone number and asking to be excused. Darcy Gilberd recalls other incidents.

"At a restaurant at Kaitaia, after a meeting, the owner came out and told us he did not approve of the system as you could taste it in the milk. A farmer with a poor conception rate told us cows did not understand the system.

"Charlie Hutchinson, our local inseminator, a batchelor of round 40 years received the following telegram - 'Your firstborn has arrived, Violet had a son'. When received at the local store post office, the post mistress said loudly 'that's not right - Charlie isn't married'."

Darcy Gilberd said he was shown how to carry out Al by using a speculum and glass tube, sucking the dose up by mouth and blowing it out onto the cervix.

"Actually in Northland we were taking reasonable care not to over suck. And we were splitting an ejaculation into 10 or 12 cows. Northland was really pushing ahead and at this stage I think after the third season about one-third of farmers in New Zealand receiving Al services were in Northland. Our conception rate for the number of doses bought was the highest in the country. This was a bit disconcerting to the Waikato groups who had better roads and greater concentrations of cattle.

"Stan Southcombe, then working for the Dairy Board at Newstead, was sent North to find out why and how we were doing this. He was staggered to find out that for 75 cows we ordered 75 doses. If 100 cows were put up, we split some of the 75 doses and if we had a surplus, we put it in the fridge for the next day so that the next day's order was for less.

"Poor Stan considered we were cheating the board by splitting doses and I think it was the next season that doses were reduced by the Board - it was a technical advancement no doubt but we had our suspicions. We had a good organisation and it was our directors, servicemen and all concerned that had a constructive, free-enterprise outlook - always looking to improve efficiency for the farmers involved, " Darcy said.

Darcy Gilberd said he has never known similar farmer enthusiasm for anything as there was for Al in Northland. "We were almost embarrassed by too much money and too many willing farmers wanting to buy shares", he said .

The Northland Co-operative Al Society operated from 1951 -1 960 when negotiations resulted in its merger with the Northland Herd Improvement Association. The HIA had new forward-looking members and the amalgamation which was effective from the 1962-63 season progressed without fuss or problems. Reg Beasley's 'dead heads' had moved on, or accepted the inevitable - that advanced breeding in Northland could not be held back.

Technicians and Training

Of course with Al expanding and the number of cows which had to be inseminated increasing, many technicians had to be trained to do the job.

One man who answered an advertisement in 1949 for Al training was Max Cooper. He had seen Al being carried out at the family farm at an early stage of the technique's development in 1945. The farm was one of those town supply herds within easy reach of Ruakura and which was taking part in winter mating experiments. He felt he had seen enough of the technique to want to have a crack at it.

Twelve people applied and were interviewed by Dr James and Stan Southcombe at what was the Ruakura Al Centre for work on commercial herds. Prior to this a group of Ruakura staff had been trained for experimental work. Max Cooper, along with Bernie Odgers, was selected for training. Max got 10 herds, (800-900) cows to do in the Horsham Downs and Rototuna area.

He describes Al then as a lot different to the practice today. In those days they worked bare handed (no rubber gloves) using Dr James' steel gun and a celluloid straw. The wax end had to be broken off the straw which was then placed in the gun. The gun was manipulated through the cervix pushing it up to the flange on the instrument. This contrasts with today's techniques where semen is put through the cervix into a precise spot. In 1949 he worked seven days a week and things were fairly rugged.

"There were no tanker tracks and there were endless gates. Often it was easier to leave the vehicle and walk to the shed. I solved the gate problem by organising the local farm kids to wait for my arrival and open and shut the gates in return for a 'black ball'. This got out of hand in school holidays when the gates were crawling with kids anticipating a hand out - it cost me a small fortune in sweets".

People's attitudes were sometimes amazing, Max recalls. "One very proper and highly religious lady in Horsham Downs stopped me one day after hearing what I was doing. She was appalled at what she had found was going on and told me it was a very dirty practice and that God had meant the bull to do the job - not a human. She offered to make up my wages if I stopped forthwith.

Max Cooper inseminating a cow with liquid semen in a glass pipette. Left arm is palpitating the cervix through the rectum wall. Photo 1953.

Max tried to explain he was using the bull's semen and that his personal welfare, which was the lady's main concern, was not at risk. He carried on despite the warning, at the rate of 12 pounds (sterling) a week. The technique was experimental and farmers accepted this.

"Some farmers even covered themselves by letting the cow be served by a bull, both before and after the insemination in case the semen affected anything! One farmer's theory was that at mating, there was a pulse of electricity that passed between bull and cow and Al deprived the animals of this enormous benefit."

"People reckoned they could pick Al-bred calves at birth, in the paddock and especially in the sale yards because they were weakly, herring-gutted beasts and lacking in constitution."

In 1952, Max Cooper gave up his work on the home farm and became a full-time instructor based at the Ruakura Al Centre. The NZ Dairy Board initially bought a small property next to Ruakura and remained there until 1952 when new premises at Newstead were built. Max Cooper was employed on a part-time basis to do semen collections from bulls and prepare semen for field use. In 1952 he became a full-time employee of the board.

Technician training during winter grew rapidly and Max encouraged others to help - people such as George Theobald and Paul Kneebone. The main training work was done at Papakura where the greatest concentration of town supply herds was. By this time "works training" was underway. This was where cows at the freezing works were inseminated prior to slaughter and then the placement of the semen in the uterus examined after slaughter using dye.

For many years Al technicians were viewed with great suspicion and the whole process with idle curiosity. In those early days children were not allowed near the shed to see the process and technicians were sometimes introduced as insurance agents to hide their true identity. Being young and single males seemed to add to the potential mystery of the process.

Max recalls how the Al boys at the time did not like the recording part and certainly not the gates. Assistants were always welcome and especially if they were female. The general consensus was that without question nurses were the best assistants. Many were farmers' daughters so had dual benefits as long as they did not appear on their fathers' farm with the Al man!

Max said their dexterity at filling pipettes - more than two at a time were filled, writing down figures and their 'good public relations' were greatly appreciated. They also could supply ready backup support through their fellow nurses if they could not turn up themselves. Their contribution was never officially acknowledged!

Max Cooper says that a major contrast today with the 1950-60's is the low number of sperm used and the pressure to get top results. "Today we use only 0.5cc of semen and it will keep for two to four days. In the old days it had to be used the day of collection for good results. Today we use two million sperm whereas before we used 25 to 50 million. "There is more pressure today as herds are bigger. Top results are expected from the top bulls, and everyone expects the top bull. In the old 'experimental' days, people were forced to take sire-proving bulls.

"There is greater pressure on trainees for accuracy and skill today to avoid any abrasion of the tissues in the uterus. The modern technician is usually a part-time farm employee and has to be home by mid-day to do the other chores. He or she must be fast and efficient."

Max Cooper has travelled widely overseas to promote New Zealand's technical expertise in Al and large numbers of trainees have come to New Zealand for experience. Max said the attributes of a good inseminator includes understanding the cow's physiology and having enough manual dexterity to manipulate without scarring. Recent studies have highlighted the vital importance of gentle handling of the delicate tissues in the uterus. He said this will achieve that extra two to three percent of calves that we are striving for today.

Dr John James said the most pleasing thing to him looking back was to see how young New Zealanders were able to pick up the Al technique in only a few days of intensive training. He said that in the early days we thought this would be impossible.

In the 1984 season Jack Burton reported that there were 390 group technicians and 16 supervisors employed by the Auckland LIA. The group technicians service cows in groups which vary in size from 3-herd groups to 14 to 15-herd groups containing 1, 700 cows.

As well as field technicians, by the 1980s herd improvement was a large scale office activity as well. Despite widespread use of computers, it still relies on dedicated office staff. This photo shows staff at the Auckland Livestock Improvement Association under records supervisor Margaret McCormick in 1984.

"This is the highest number of field staff we have ever employed and they come from all sorts of backgrounds. Many live on farms. Many are sharemilkers or farm workers, farmers' wives - in some cases both husband and wife act as a team. There are small-holders and even a public servant who takes his annual leave to be a technician".

Jack says it is interesting to see how the type of technician has changed in recent years. People are now on average 5-10 years older than they were years ago. In the early years they were mainly young farm workers who now do not exist.

"Now sharemilkers are interested as they can inseminate their own herd at a reduced price if it's done as an extra, thus avoiding labour and of course transport costs. The majority of technicians are trained by us, and any trained elsewhere have a check-up course before they start.

"There is a lot of confidence building needed and our supervisors specialise in giving confidence through moral support. A new person is accompanied by an experienced person for two or three days to get their confidence up. Our objective is to train our people as well as we can, and then get them to relax. We like people (men or women) who are technically skilled but who are relaxed personalities and who obviously can relate to people.

"It is a big responsibility. Imagine being responsible for 10 herds, 1400 cows and if you don't perform, all those cows will calve late next year. Imagine carrying that burden - you wouldn't be very popular if you failed I can tell you. I feel the tension myself every year - thinking about the 600, 000 cows out there show calving dates depends on our organisation. It keeps us on our toes" Jack says.

Forward into the fifties

The first commercial Al centre was established by the New Zealand Dairy Board at Newstead, Hamilton in 1953 and that year 56, 461 cows were serviced with a 55 percent non-return rate. Stan Southcombe was appointed centre superintendent to carry on his role in the practical Al work, and the staff at Newstead in 1953 were Paul Kneebone, Max Cooper, Stan Southcombe, Clive Southcombe and stockman Dan McLean. In those days, long hours of work were involved in the "spring rush" to get semen collected, packed and delivered. Clive Southcombe, Stan's son, remembers that around 1956 in the main season, work at Newstead started at 3.30 am.

"I did the collection, Dan McLean led the bulls, Max Cooper did the preliminary evaluation and Paul Kneebone did the dilution. Panic came in the late 1950's when we had to collect up to about 130 bulls a day during the peak. If a bull did not perform or was a bit slow, the panic became near disaster. There was one person preparing artificial vaginas another two leading up the bulls, and me running in, taking an artificial vagina, harvesting the semen, handing it in and then taking another - it was hopeless, " Clive said.

He remembers that a real bottleneck was the delivery of packaged semen to the transport depot in Hamilton.

"The Austin A40 van had to make the first despatch to catch the 6.10am Road Services bus to Atiamuri. The problem was that the next despatch could not be sent off until the van returned - about 45 minutes later. If the first delivery was held up, then this delayed all the others. The Road Services drivers were extremely cooperative and would hold the but us if we were late. It wasn't until they were 20 minutes late that they lost sympathy with the bull's reluctance to give of his best, " he said.

In 1956 to ease these seasonal peak problems, part of the old Waikato Winter Show building formerly in Hamilton's Anglesea Street was leased and turned into a laboratory. Three of the staff started there at 5am and they had an hour of making up tubes before the semen arrived for that deadline of the 6.10am to Atiamuri.

Dr John James remembered that by the 1950s, demand for Al was mushrooming and it was hard to find ways of supplying all the demands from new areas wanting to expand.

"We had established that 25 million sperm was a reliable dose and this was a great advance from the 100 million used in the cervical method. We kept to this 25 million right up to 1960, and were increasing the bull team all the time as well as dealing with ever-increasing distribution problems.

"People should appreciate the enormous amount of work done by people like Stan Southcombe in organising the bull team and Selwyn Sheaf who organised the local groups. It was a team approach and everyone was as keen as mustard, " Dr James said.

In the questions at the end of Syd Wyllie's paper at the 1954 Ruakura Farmers' Conference, Dr James was asked to comment about the low conception rates that year from Al. Here is his reply.

"I think, if we want artificial breeding to get anywhere at all in New Zealand, it is absolutely essential to maintain the highest standard possible in the productive ability of our bulls. During the last two or three years artificial breeding has really started to go somewhere and I feel that the limitation of this expansion is due entirely to the number of bulls of high productive ability which are available. If we are going to maintain the very high standard set down, and it is a very high standard, I think we have to accept a much slower rate of expansion of artificial breeding than we have at present.

"In my view, and it is only just within that last few days that we have been able to examine the position in any detail at all, the lower conception rates were due to that fact that we demand much more use from our bulls in this country than in any other artificial breeding unit in the world. We have to reach a level in the amount of work we can reasonably ! expect from a bull and I feel that last year this level was exceeded to some extent - not to a very great extent, I but sufficient to reduce the all-over conception rate from a percentage of 57 to 45, " Dr James said.

Mr S.J. (Selwyn) Sheaf served the Herd lmprovement movement in Hamilton for almost 42 continuous years after joining the NZ Cooperative Herd Testing Association in 1929 as general manager. Jack Burton who joined Selwyn Sheaf in 1955 is in no doubt about his outstanding contribution.

"Sel was a perfectionist. He impressed farmers, not because of his farming background because he didn't have one (his father was a publican), but because he ran a tight ship and there was no waste in the system. It was under his leadership that developments took place such as offering an Al service to members in 1935, and development of alternate-month testing. His insistence of thorough investigation of any problems stood his association in good stead. His cheese-paring approach to keep down farmers' costs did not affect the respect his staff had for him. He had two favourite sayings - one was, 'has it been checked?', and the other was, 'write and ask him!' Jack said.

In 1954, 160, 000 cows were accepted for service by the Board. The enterprise was expanding rapidly and Stan Southcombe was becoming overloaded with work on the commercial side of the business. A commercial manager was appointed - L.W.(Les) Jane, who previously had been assistant manager of the Auckland Herd Improvement Association.

Original AI laboratory and office complex at Newstead. Cars left to right are: Stan Southcombe's A40; Max Cooper's Morris Minor; and Sel Sheaf's A90. Photo 1952.

By that time experimental work had begun in earnest on deep frozen semen and in 1953, 473 cows had been inseminated with this experimental service with a 45 percent success rate. A bank of deep frozen semen had also been set up. The first person to get a cow pregnant in New Zealand using frozen semen, well ahead of the official research programme, was Mr Jack Vosper in his 80-cow Cleveland Jersey stud at Matamata. Jack did it in error!

"Stan Southcombe was doing my inseminations, as we were cooperating in the early commercial Al trials in the early 1950s. He left me some semen and his instructions were to keep it overnight in the fridge. "Well, 1 musn't have been thinking as I put it in the top freezer compartment rather than just leave it in the fridge. Next day I melted it and Stan reckoned I'd probably have ruined it."

"Anyway Stan was prepared to give it a go and we inseminated the cow. I swear she was never with a bull and in due time a grand calf was produced. Stan said at the time that I'd just made technical history, Jack said." Deep frozen semen offered a way to get round an increasing problem. This was the bottle neck in October when nearly all the Al work had to be carried out.

Newstead staff in 1953: from left to right, Dan McLean, Max Cooper, Selwyn Sheaf, Clive Southcombe, Stan Southcombe and Paul Kneebone.

In 1954 Pat Shannon joined the Dairy Board in Wellington as a research officer to work with Miss Olive Castle under the direction of Arthur Ward. The major attraction to Pat was the large amount of data that had accumulated by the Board's work under the direction of Arthur Ward.

This together with the board's fresh approach, again which came for Arthur Ward and Olive Castle meant that progress was a certainty. The Dairy Board looked like a place where someone could make their mark.

"There were two aspects ot tackle in the 1950s - first there was the keeping quality of semen which was very poor, and then there was the problem of distributing the semen from Newstead. We tackled both simultaneously, " Pat said.

"At that time, if you used semen on the day of collection the results were fine, but if you used it the day after, the results could be as much as 10 % lower in conception rate. This was not acceptable.

"We knew that bulls varied enormously in their semen keeping quality - and at Newstead we knew from experience which were the best and the worst bulls. The question we needed to answer was - how can we predict the keeping quality of the new young bulls that we were bringing in.

"We started working on the problem in Wellington using the laboratory facilities at Graceville, Lower Hutt with semen sent down from Newstead. I worked on this with Dr Mervyn Probine - now Chairman of the State Services Commission" Pat said.

"The work with Merv Probine ended with a simple fructose test which measured the amount of fructose a sperm used up over a given time. Good sperm used a lot of fructose but stored semen, or semen from bulls with poor keeping quality had reduced fructose use. So we used this simple test for new bulls coming into the stud at Newstead.

We needed a technique to raise the overall keeing quality by 5%, and this would raise the day-after semen by 10% which was a big advantage in getting the semen to farms further away from base at Newstead , " Pat said. Pat Shannon moved to Newstead in 1956 to continue his work.

Open Day at Newstead in 1955. Dr John James (extreme left) talks to a group of visitors. Slides were being shown behind the tarpaulin.

"The system of semen distribution at Newstead could only be described as mayhem. Can you imagine every local manager ringing in with the orders, then ringing back two or three times with cancellations and alterations! We were servicing about 40, 000 cows at that time so it was quite a picnic.

"We had to develop a system of predicting the amount of semen that was needed from the day the farmer started his Al programme. We got the data from only 10-12 herds and beat the old desk calculators through some sophisticated statistics and came out with a predictive equation which when tested on a wide range of herds worked! In fact the same basic method is used today. We know the day mating starts, the number of cows to be mated and from that we predict daily demand for semen, " Pat said.

Mr Selwyn Sheaf, Manager of the Auckland Herd Improvement Association (left) with Stan Southcombe, Superintendent of the Newstead AI Centre. Photo 1954.

While in Wellington, Pat Shannon had worked with Dr Shayle Searle, a statistician who was working with Arthur Ward and his group in the Dairy Board. Professor Searle is now at Cornell University in the United States.

"From Searle's simulations, which were quite sophisticated for that time, it was shown that if the dilution rate of semen could be improved, the impact of genetic improvement was likely to be enormous. So that had to be a top priority.

"The semen extenders at the time were all based on the egg yolk-citrate type which were used widely overseas. These were quite adequate, provided the bulls were classified as 1-day or 2-day bulls on keeping quality of their semen. However, it soon became clear that the extenders were at fault in sperm survival.

"With liquid semen, we first looked at what looked promising overseas to improve keeping quality and the best one looked at was glycene. We turned one up ourselves by accident - caproic acid. Well, these were a help in solving the keeping quality but they didn't solve the dilution rate problems.

"We started off with two hypotheses. First that there was some mystery compound in seminal plasma that actually killed sperm. Goodness knows why nature would have designed plasma to do this as keeping sperm alive would seem more logical. The second was that there could be a small molecular weight compound that diffused in and out of the sperm and killed them, " Pat said.

To test the first hypothesis seminal plasma was added to live sperm and to test the second dead sperm were added. Both these processes turned out to highly effective killers of sperm!

"We couldn't believe the seminal fluid result, and repeated it many times to make sure we hadn't fouled up the tests. The result was without doubt the truth. So to help sperm survive longer the simple solution was to dissolve nitrogen in the seminal fluid. As a result of this diluent work, the number of inseminations which could be obtained from one bull grew from 10, 000 in I956 to today's 150, 000.

"The semen dilution techniques have also helped to get round New Zealand's problem of spring mating when all cows have to be got in calf in a very short period. This problem is not found in other countries with the exception of Southern Ireland. Overseas bulls can be collected all the year round for mating programmes that provide calvings spread throughout the year.

"Brian Curson joined the Newstead staff as a laboratory technician in 1958 becoming the first member of Pat Shannon's research team. Brian trained as a quantity surveyor and was commissioned in the British Royal Engineers and then seconded to the East African Engineers. In 1948 he came to New Zealand to dairy farm in the Rai Valley where he started an Al group and became its first technician. Most satisfaction came from the work in developing the liquid semen service which lends itself so well to the New Zealand farming system, " he said.

Pat Shannon, semen dilutenologist at Newstead

Pat remembers working very hard on putting fresh semen into a single package such as a straw to help get more efficient utilisation of few numbers of sperm.

Pat Shannon is concerned that the contribution Miss O.M. (Olive) Castle made to dairy cattle improvement has never been given adequate recognition. Olive trained as a mathematician at Victoria University and had gone teaching. This did not appeal as a career and her professor at Victoria (Jim Campbell) who had been advising Arthur Ward on statistical matters recommended Olive as a possible employee.

Olive entered the world of the dairy cow in 1939 - a big contrast for a person who had never had the slighest contact with farming. Pat Shannon says that Olive's greatest ability was to be able to look at a problem, and see a way of attacking it. Probably her most famous attack was on a better way of evaluating sires used in Al. The problem, Pat said, was this.

"By the early 1940s, the technique of evaluating bulls on how much better (or worse) the bull's daughters were from their dams (the daughter-dam comparison) was running into problems because it was getting harder to find enough daughter-dam pairs. If there were only a few pairs, the sire proofs were worthless, " Pat said.

"Olive had the bright idea of comparing the bull's daughters in the herd, with the average of all other animals in that herd milked in the same season. This meant that all daughters of the sire could be used in the proof, thus removing one of the major biases involved in the daughter-dam comparison. The other important feature of the comparison evolved by Olive Castle was that bulls could be tested across herds, even when their progeny were transferred from one herd to another.

"Olive Castle remembers that she had a bit of a struggle to get her concept accepted by some of the scientific fraternity in New Zealand at that time. The 1953 Proceedings of the NZ Society of Animal Production contains a paper where Dr John Hancock (famous for his work with identical twins) had a critical attack at the concept. His criticism was effectively sunk by Olive at the meeting.

Olive remembers the world-famous geneticist, really the father of Population genetics, Professor J.L. Lush from Iowa, coming to New Zealand about 1949 and being very impressed with her concept. From this visit she was invited to visit Iowa in 1952, greatly aided by Arthur Ward's skill in finding some money to get her there. Pat said it was a great pity that she did not formally publish her work, to be officially credited with the idea.

"The only formal record to date of Olive's concept, is in the NZ Dairy Board's Sire Service Register for the 1949-50 season. This method of contemporary comparison then became used widely throughout the world. The first sign of any published work on it came about 1954 and it didn't get into practice in the UK until the early 1960s, " Pat said.

Sir Arthur Ward and Pat Shannon pay very high tribute to Olive's outstanding contribution to dairy cattle improvement. Olive lives in very busy retirement in Silverstream, Wellington. Pat Shannon said that Olive Castle kept in touch and was involved in some of the other research at Newstead. She did some analysis to prove that the difference in conception rate between large and small herds was not the size of herd, but the efficiency of heat detection by the farmer. Pat also valued the brainstorming sessions with Olive and Arthur Ward, putting up ideas and then picking holes in them.

"Arthur was very good. He loved a damned good argument and he'd always test you to see how far you'd go. It's a quality you don't get often, because you could end up losing an argument with Arthur but not losing face, " Pat said.

Taking the message to the farmer

Although in some farming quarters there was a great demand for Al, many other farmers had to be convinced of the benefits. Four groups were involved in spreading the good word. These were the Dairy Board consulting officers, MAF researchers and advisers, those in the Livestock lmprovement Associations and farmers themselves.

One of these farmers was Alex Stewart who had a problem common to so many at the time, of where to go for the next bull. Alex had been a grocer before the war and found farming a challenge and a complete contrast! He was luckier than most however because just up the road was a jersey breeder, Mr A.S. (Syd) Wyllie.

Syd Wyllie was Deputy Chairman of the Auckland Herd lmprovement Association and also a member of the Al Committee. He was a herd improvement enthusiast of the highest order and his Puhinui herd commanded wide respect. Syd Wyllie became Alex's mentor and provided breeding stock, guidance and the clear direction that the only way to go to build up a decent herd was by herd recording and Al.

At the 1954 Ruakura Farmers' Conference, Syd gave a paper on the pedigree breeder's place in the future of the national herd. His message was clear, and was supported by the 1, 600 fewer bulls needed for natural service in 1955, that 'it was by production and production alone that the place of the pedigree breeder in the national herd will be assured'.

So in 1954 when Alex Stewart wanted a new bull, Al seemed to be the best bet. With Syd Wyllie up the road, Alex had to give it a go. The service was being-offered to farmers in his Korakonui area, near Te Awamutu, provided they found 1400-1500 cows and found someone to be trained as a technician. Alex's task was to persuade his neighbours to join in and put up the cows to start the scheme off.

"There was a rehab block next door and they had been inundated with insurance men, so their first greeting to my visit was 'what the heck are you selling', but put less politely! Once you talked farming though, things progressed. The trouble came from the older brigade who had not changed their ways for a couple of generations, " he said.

He managed to persuade a local boy, Terry Wordley to become the group's first Al technician and he was sent up to Papakura for training.

"Of course the opponents of the idea had plenty of red herrings to bring up. The whole process was unnatural, you get deformed calves and the conception rates were a disaster! I said rubbish - you will get a crack at the best proven bulls available and conception rates were quite good for that time - about 60 percent. To get bulls of that quality, you could easily live with a lower conception rate.

"Once the groups were eventually formed the members were pretty loyal and all signed up again. "The critics went quiet after the first year when they saw the calves produced, " Alex said.

"If I hadn't used Al, my herd would have had a lot of inconsistencies because of the risks involved in buying bulls. You often bought failures - it wasn't difficult. "In those days I got my herd up to 199 kg fat/cow with only 75-80 cows on the 48 ha. Now my son Murray is getting 197 kg fat/cow but he has 200-210 cows at a cow to the acre. That's progress and Al is certainly a major part of it."

NZ Dairy Board Artificial Breeding Committee, November 1954.
Back row: P. Shannon, JW Stictchbury, DC Lane, SJ Sheaf, AW Montgomerie, SA Southcombe
Front row: JP James, AH Ward, RA Candy (chairman), AS Wyllie, IB Gow

Alex said there were occasional qualms about the Al product over the years, as greatest emphasis went on production and people though type was being neglected.

"There were times when some bulls were leaving offspring with faults like splayed udders. The critics of course fed off the odd fault, especially those pedigree breeders who refused to use Al. If there was an odd female with a fault they always wanted to know who she was, and before you could turn around the news was around the countryside. They never asked what it was out of, never admitting the fault could also have come from the dam.

He remembers the old days when semen quality was poor but people accepted that at the time. His favourite story is about their neighbour Dave Christie.

"Dave had a very good herd and after a lot of sales pressure from me, he lined up one of his special cows one day to be mated to the best Jersey semen on offer. The bull was Lamorna Minor - you couldn't have bettered him at that time. The deed was duly done and the calf was duly born - it was a magnificent black, polled heifer!

"Well, Dave went into orbit, he called Terry Wordley everything he could think of. He even called the calf after him to vent his rage. Terry' the cow milked for 14 years, she averaged 380-400 Litres of fat every year. And all her progeny were jet black, polled and milked like tankers.

"This was not the kind of publicity I needed in the first year of operation, the entire district dined out on this for months. One thing was certain though, Terry took special care when drawing the semen from the tank after that episode. He didn't want any more cows in the district named after him.

"Another group difficult to convince of the value of Al according to Sir Arthur Ward were veterinarians. We had a big problem with veterinarians when we said inseminations could be done by laymen. It was only because we had Dr James, a widely respected veterinarian and Ruakura on our side that they agreed. Their agreement was based on the provision that Dr James trained and passed all the inseminators. We were happy with this" Alex said.

Sir Arthur said more trouble with veterinarians arose later because they were worried about the spread of genetic defects.

"They wanted to know if there were any checks against this in the system. The criticism grew to such an extent that the Board had to begin test matings. They had a valid point mind you, but I stopped them taking it to ridiculous lengths by challenging them to report all defects they saw in pedigree herds to their Veterinary Association. They refused point blank so I suggested if we were guilty so were they. They reckoned this would contravene their client relations but they were very satisfied by our test mating system where bulls were mated to a few of their own daughters, " Sir Arthur said.

Sir Arthur Ward says the key to the success of spreading the Al message was keeping people informed about research results and always pushing the benefits of the technique to the individual farmer and the nation.

Alex and Joan Stewart, farmers from
Korakonui who joined one of the first
commercial AI groups (photo 1984)

First was the 'Dairy Exporter' in which all the research results were published as well as Sir Arthur's addresses to all the dairy ward conferences and meetings of dairy factory and directors' meetings. This spread the word to every district.

Then there was the Farmers' Conferences at Massey and Ruakura which were great forums for good practical advice pitched at the farmers' level. The Dairy Board's consulting officers were a tremendous 'gingergroup' working on the farms where the action was. They were a great stimulus to bringing in new ideas.

The formation of the NZ Society of Animal Production in 1941 is given great recognition by Sir Arthur. The founder members included such men as Riddet, Peren, Ranstead, McMeekan, James, Filmer, Hamilton, Blake and Ward. It was an ideal no holds-barred arena for debating the latest scientific work on Al, and both Blake and James delivered papers at the first meeting in 1941.

Then there was Campbell Percy McMeekan - a man about which a lot has been written and a lot not written. Sir Arthur is in no doubt that 'Mac's' unique style of getting a message over to farmers was instrumental in cutting through the prejudice, bureaucracy and old-wives' tales that so easily can slow up technical progress.

The leadership of R.A. (Alan) Candy, C.B.E., D.Sc. (Hon) Massey was also an important part of the Al message across, and everyone involved is keen to acknowledge Alan Candy's part in this. Alan Candy was recognised first as a top farmer. In 1967 his dairy farm produced over 450 1b milkfat/acre very high production for the time.

His contribution to herd improvement and Al was prodigious. His first public office was to the management committee of the NZ Co-operative Herd Testing Association in 1929 and he became chairman of the Herd Recording Council in 1937. As chairman of this council he was also chairman of the Artificial Breeding Committee, and gave 40 years of service to the Auckland Herd lmprovement Association.

He is particularly remembered for the way he pushed AI and the clear vision he had of the place of AI in an overall herd improvement plan. Dr John James well remembers the problems in the early days of gaining acceptance of AI.

Mr AS Wyllie, Deputy Chairman, making a presentation on the occasion of Mr RA Candy's 21st anniversary as Chairman of the Auckland Herd Improvement Association (inc)

The whole subject was still considered by some as risqu and slightly disreputable. But unlike many farmers in the older farming countries of the world, the New Zealand farmer is adaptable and is always looking for something new, so we kept working away, " Dr James said.

John James also pays great tribute to McMeekan and the impact he had in supporting research on Al, explaining the early results - the bad as well as the good, and never flagging in his belief of the benefits Al could bring to New Zealand farmers and to exports. McMeekan went to Ruakura in 1 943 to take over animal research. As staff were leaving to go to join the armed forces, Dr James was Acting Superintendent when McMeekan arrived.

"Mac couldn't have arrived at a better time to give our early work a push. He loved to be face to face with farmers and there was plenty of opportunity for his plain-speaking style in those early days of confronting the unbelievers and breed societies who saw Al as a threat", Dr James said.

Later, Jeff Stichbury, until recently Controller of Herd lmprovement for the Dairy Board, was a Dairy Board Consulting Officer involved in spreading the Al gospel from its early commercial days. Spreading information about Al was only part of Jeffs job.

He also had to deal with such problems as the fight to get rid of paspalum, stopping hand stripping and leg roping, and encouraging the use of nitrogen and H1 ryegrass, scrub clearance and hedge planting and sowing mother-white clover seed. He travelled long distances in his A40 preaching Al at Young Farmers' evening meetings. He remembers that many pedigree breeders were against Al, fearing a drop in their bull sales.

"They included 'experts' who swore they could pick Al-bred stock in the paddock by their weak constitution. One such gentleman was building up a big reputation for this gift of picking Al stock until one field day after he made the inevitable speech he was invited by a neighbouring farmer to pop across the paddock to his farm where he had half Al and half naturally-bred heifers and to sort them out before the crowd. It would only take a few minutes to muster them as they were handy. That was his final speech, " Jeff said.

But there was a waiting list to get the services of the proven bulls and this created an interest and genuine demand which at times resulted in farmer frustration. The Livestock lmprovement Associations played their part in spreading the message as well. Jack Burton who in 1955 joined the Auckland Herd lmprovement Association remembers talking to farmers both individually and in groups.

"We needed more Al groups so more people, especially the sceptics, had to be convinced. But it was not hard to sell really, as my message was that Al meant better stock and also the removal of risks of venereal disease which was a major problem in some herds at the time."

Jack also remembers that any bad news about the project spread like wildfire. "There were enough failures around of bulls with high prospects turning out as disasters to keep us on our toes. In 1951, however, things improved when the Dairy Board started proving bulls rather than relying on farmers' proofs. There was less chance of us coming a gutser!

"Of course we had to overcome the problem in clients' minds of the impression that 'father knows best'. We did a lot of preaching and left the clear impression' that we knew we were right."

But despite the sceptics, Al was spreading rapidly. The main problem the industry had to tackle next was the shortage of good proven bulls. The semen dilution techniques and the work on semen storage had helped solve this problem to some extent. But the Board still had to find the best bulls to use. As a result, the Dairy Board developed its Sire Proving Scheme.

Which bulls to use?

The development of Al in New Zealand contrasted greatly with developments in other countries, especially in Europe.

In the small herds of Britain, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and even in the USA, the main advantage of Al was that it did away with the need of farmers to keep a bull. Instead, they could keep an extra cow on the food the bull ate, and in the stall where the bull was tied up. It also removed the risk of accident and injury from having a bull. The herd improvement aspects of Al were secondary.

In New Zealand however, from those early midnight-oil-burning sessions of Ward and Ranstead, Al was seen as the most effective way of finding better bulls and proving their merit in commercial herd situations. It was in this approach that New Zealand led the field. The Herd lmprovement Associations (now the Livestock lmprovement Associations) and the sire survey work carried out under the direction of Arthur Ward and Olive Castle had laid a good foundation for the Dairy Board's bull proving scheme.

In 1952, consulting officer Jeff Stichbury was called to Wellington to work in the Board's Herd lmprovement Department and from then until 1956 his major task was to find good proven bulls to go into the Al service.

He had to find the bulls then travel the country to help inspect them and their progeny on farms. There could be any number of progeny from as few as 10 to as many as 40. But it was the quality of these bulls as potential herd improvers and money earners for the farmer that would, and did, sell the AI concept.

"Some of the bulls proven on a limited number of daughters in one herd appeared good but were disappointing when re-proven on many daughters in many different herds, " Jeff said.

"Partly because of this, Al had to be the tool to prove better bulls to meet the board's basic objective which was to increase profit for the farmer. He helped put into practice programmes to prove bulls by having daughters in a range of herds.

"Initially all farmers using Al were required to take some semen from unproven bulls to achieve this. But once some really good bulls were available, the attraction of an unknown young bull was greatly reduced and his daughters were less likely to be kept. This was when the Sire Proving Scheme was developed to overcome this.

"The idea for the Sire Proving Scheme as it presently operates came from a Wellington-Hawke's Bay farmer Vic Bargh who at a meeting suggested the board should pay farmers for helping to prove bulls. His suggestion was taken up and it worked, " Jeff said.

The Sire Proving Scheme gradually developed into a system, still used today, whereby bulls are purchased and taken to the Newstead Centre soon after Christmas and used in special sire proving herds as yearlings, with each bull leaving about 50 daughters. To find the best bulls, information on various aspects of the daughters is collected over a four-year period.

Production is most important and all daughters are herd tested and matched one against another. A conformation inspection is also carried out on all daughters and such things as feet and legs, jaw, rump and udder are all taken into account. Farmers milking these heifers are also asked to comment on such things as ease of putting cups on, milk let-down, milking speed, mastitis, bloat and temperament.

After analysing all this information the very top bulls are chosen for use in the Premier Sire Service. Of the 155 bulls annually purchased, only about five or six will ever be used heavily in the national herd. The others are slaughtered. The board's sire proving scheme is currently one of the largest in the world. To select the bulls it will use in the scheme, the board analyses the records of 780, 000 cows.

From these, around 16, 000 cow's records are extracted and from these 1, 200 are selected for inspection by cattle breed society representatives, dairy board and livestock improvement association staff. A final list of about 400 cows is then produced and a contract arranged with the cows' owners to mate the cows to a bull chosen by the Dairy Board.

Open Day at Newstead, 1959. Note the extended lab roof and the new administration block on the right.

It is the resulting bull calves which are purchased by the Board and used in its Sire Proving Scheme. By 1960, dairy figures showed that this 'herd improvement' approach to Al had increased milkfat production by 9.5kg of fat per cow. This early success was built on the Sire Proving Scheme.

By 1982 it was estimated the Al scheme backed by the proving scheme has increased milkfat production per cow by 25 kg a year in comparison with what it would have been if the Al scheme had not been developed.

Consolidation in the Sixties

By 1960 nearly half a million cows were inseminated in New Zealand - representing 32 percent of the nation's herds. This period of the sixties appeared to be time for a quick breather after the development of a reliable commercial insemination service and a soundly based herd improvement plan.

But there was still plenty of work to be done and the main thrust of it was in consolidation and further expansion of the service. To deal with this, additional facilities were established at Newstead and in 1961 the Awahuri centre was established at Palmerston North.

This second centre was developed to provide an Al service for the southern part of the North Island and the South Island. Palmerston North was deliberately chosen to help overcome distribution problems as the industry was having trouble with changes in the air services from Hamilton including what was described as 'frustrating habitual alterations to public transport timetables'.

Although by this time conception rates were reasonable, there were problems in the Wellington-Hawke's Bay region, largely because of distribution difficulties. The establishment of Awahuri overcame this. On the research side there was a need to find an improved extender for chilled semen and to try and improve the results from frozen semen. There was also the ever-present need to improve dilution techniques so that the genetic impact of top bulls could go further. Pat Shannon recalls the work on deep frozen semen.

"Deep freezing needs more sperm - because when you freeze semen you kill some sperm and dead sperm are keen to get their live companions to join them. Our early work had shown this was caused by an enzyme which is inactive when the sperm are alive but once they die it produces peroxide which is a guaranteed killer.

"By improving the diluents and adding catalase we could knock out the peroxide and freeze sperm in

concentrated form. The sperm can then be used for 48 hours after thawing and re-dilution.

"We hit on the idea of putting the sperm into a dialysis bag, dropping it into glycerol which then fuses slowly through the bag and this greatly helped the freezing results."

Substantial improvements in dilution techniques were achieved from 1961 onwards. Because the bulls' effective working season was so short in New Zealand, high dilution rates were essential. Original dilution studies suggested 15-25 million sperm were the necessary dose rate for insemination.

Later experiments showed that when samples were highly diluted, not only were sperm numbers greatly reduced but that sperm died off more readily than at lower rates. This gave rise to the theory that the 'dilution effect' could be the reason for the lower fertility level, rather than the shortage of sperm.

Scientists believed that this could be due to increased oxygen levels per sperm in the highly diluted material. Trials conducted with substantially reduced oxygen levels in diluents proved the theory correct and meant this dilution effect was eliminated. Since then the dose rate per insemination has been progressively reduced from 15-25 million to two million. This increased bull coverage from 4, 000 to 5, 000 inseminations to between 80, 000-150, 000 doses.

In solving the dilution problem, the potential number of cows that could be inseminated from a single service rose from 200-300 to 2, 500-7, 500. Because of the concentrated mating season in New Zealand it was not only possible to use these amounts, but also essential to be able to do so as a large number of cows are in season every day.

The Eighties

The expansion of Al in the 1950s was continued in the 1960s so that by 1968 over one million cows representing 57 percent of dairy herds were inseminated. Currently (in 1984) some 1.3 million cows in nearly 70 percent of herds are being inseminated through the Al service provided by the Dairy Board's Livestock lmprovement Council and to this must be added the cows inseminated with semen provided by the three private Al centres which began operations in the early 1970s.

Workers in the semen processing and despatch area. From left to right: Elsie Poultney, Jill Scown, Mike Doughty, Anne van der Drift (photo 1976).

With these included, it is likely that in 1984 some 90% of New Zealand dairy farmers used one or other of the Al services available to them. At the same time dairy farmers have had to face up to marked changes in the markets for dairy produce which followed the setting up of the European Economic Community, with its emphasis on protection of domestic agriculture and, in particular, the entry of Britain into the community and the consequent effect on the British market for New Zealand dairy produce.

The diversification of markets and lower prices resulting from these changes had marked effects, not only on New Zealand dairy farms where greater productivity and efficiency was required to achieve the same real income, but also in dairy factories.

Amalgamation of dairy companies and processing units became the order of the day while product diversification to meet changed market requirements proceeded apace. At the same time in areas, such as the Bay of Plenty, other enterprises (horticulture in particular) challenged dairying for the use of traditional dairying land.

The greater productivity and efficiency required on dairy farms was achieved in a number of ways. One of the most important of these was the genetic improvement of the national dairy herd resulting from the use of high breeding index bulls through artificial insemination.

There are two recent examples of the quality of high breeding index cows resulting from the use of such bulls. The first is the international Friesian strain comparison conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Poland. In this trial semen from unproven Al bulls from 10 different countries was mated to Polish Friesians and the resulting first and subsequently, second generation progeny were compared.

Despite their smaller size the New Zealand progeny matched the performance of the North American and Israeli progeny at the top of the ranking list for milkfat production and were little inferior to these strains in milk production.

The second illustration is the comparison of high breeding index (BI) and low breeding index Jersey and Friesian cows at Ruakura and Massey . The high BI cows resulting from the use of top bulls through Al proved to be more efficient grazers, produced about 25 percent more milk and fat and consumed substantially less food per unit of milk or fat produced.

The NZ Dairy Board's Dairy Herd Improvement Centre at Newstead, Hamilton, opened in April 1982.

L to R: Colleen & Clive Southcombe,
Brian Curzon, Winston Hall, Lloyd Reid
.

The dairy industry's Al service has always been a part of the Herd lmprovement Plan adopted by the dairy industry in 1939, controlled by the Dairy Board's Herd lmprovement Council and operated through the board's Farm Production Division and the Herd lmprovement Associations (renamed Livestock lmprovement Associations in 1973).

The Board's Farm Production Division operated bull selection and proving, the semen production part of the service, while the Livestock lmprovement Associations provided the field inseminating service and the means whereby the users of herd testing and artificial breeding services elected the directors of their association and, through them, the association representatives on the Herd lmprovement Council. In addition to Al the Herd lmprovement Plan is concerned with data collection, research, herd testing and advisory services.

Container for an historic importation of frozen semen from USA. The friesian semen was from 2 bulls (Sovereign Cochran and Council Rock Worthy Aristocrat) for 3 NZ breeders in 1957.

In 1981 the Dairy Board appointed a committee to review the operation of the Herd lmprovement Plan and as a result it was decided to amalgamate the Livestock lmprovement Associations and Farm Production Division services under a Livestock lmprovement Division of the board with the task of implementing policy decisions made by an amended Herd lmprovement Council re-named the Livestock lmprovement Council.

Each year the Livestock lmprovement Council produces catalogues of the sires to be used in its various services, Premier Sires Service; Nominated Service; and Sire Proving Scheme. The proven bulls listed in the Premier Sires Service and Nominated Service catalogues have been selected from the young bulls proven through the Sire Proving Scheme to give maximum satisfaction to the users of the service.

To achieve this, major emphasis is placed on the bulk breeding indexes for milk and fat yields while emphasis is also given to other economically important aspects of dairy cattle such as good temperament, ease of milking and resistance to disease.

Two popular sires. Right, Friesian, Lombardi Blair which achieved more than 150, 000 inseminations in the 1981 mating season (held by veterinarian Lindsay Burton); and Left, Jersey, Boylan Carols Laddie, which had more than 125, 000, held by Production Manager Ken Burgess. Lombardi Blair's Breeding Index for fat is 135, and Boylan Carols Laddie is 138.

Purchasing the young bulls required for the Sire Proving Scheme, proving them and holding all the bulls until they are proven costs a considerable amount of money, about $100, 000 per proven bull finally used in the Premier Sires service. But the high coverage subsequently obtained per proven bull of about 100, 000 inseminations per year means the cost per insemination is still relatively small.

Jeff Stichbury reckons the Al service has resulted in national production per cow being at least 25kg of milk fat per cow per year higher than what it would have been without it or, put in another way, an extra $175 million per year in gross income to New Zealand dairy farmers.

But both Jeff Stichbury and Jack Burton emphasise that this is no reason for complacency and that one of the tasks of the new Livestock Improvement Council must be to ensure the AI service is improved still further, and in particular that it responds so the needs of dairy farmers. Jack Burton, as a person who recognises the trust of farmers put in Livestock Improvement Associations, has firm views of the future.

AI technician Kevin Buckley returning
empty liquid semen test tube packs at the
end of his day's AI run (1984).

"The new generation of farmers is better educated and has been exposed to the latest technical advances, and they have a questioning type philosophy which contrasts greatly to their 1950 forebears. These farmers who have grown up with AI now consider it s the natural way to go.

"You've got to satisfy customer demand, or else you are out of business these days. We've only just started - we've now got 90 percent of farmers using Al and our job now is to make sure we can offer genes that will support the industry in the late 1990s and the year 2000 - that's only two or three cattle generations away."

In 1984 the Auckland LIA tested 22 percent more cows than in 1983 and each of the previous three years had been records. This rise has come about simply because farmers have realised that there is money to be made from herd testing - it provides the facts and the new generation of farmers are seeking out AI-bred stock with records.

"The race will go to the guy who can supply the best genetic material - and if I've got anything to do with it, it will be our outfit" Jack said.

Semen despatch technician Murray Gilbert (right) explains to Kevin Buckley, dairy farmer and AI technician from Eureka details of semen in the liquid Nitrogen bank. The baskets to protect the banks are made by Merv Rae of the Blind Institute in Hamilton (photo 1984).

Biography: Tommy Blake (1882 - 1966)

Thomas Blake was born to Quaker farming parents at Nailsborough in Gloucestershire, England in 1882, the youngest of, 10 children. He was an excellent scholar and classics were his strength. He entered the Royal Veterinary College in London in 1901 and studied with distinction, receiving the class medal for chemistry in 1901-02.

After completing his degree and qualifying M.R.C.V.S. in 1906, he went to Burma as assistant to the Government Inspector. His love of horses and horse sports was the reason for joining the Rangoon Volunteer Rifles. Here began a lifetime's association with the army, horses and veterinary practice.

He served as a trooper and a sergeant in Burma for three and a half years and the cups he won testify to his skill at polo, tent pegging, show jumping and driving his beloved horse 'Ben'. In 1910 he returned to Nailsworth to farm and assist in the local veterinary practice but two veterinarians in the small practice was too cramped for Tom Blake. He moved out to give his partner the practice, applied for and was appointed to a job in New Zealand.

Tom Blake arrived in the Dominion and settled in to work at Tokomaru Bay freezing works, leaving his fiance Connie Dean in England intending to join him and be married in New Zealand. In 1913 war was imminent in Europe and there was industrial unrest in New Zealand. He spent time in Auckland on official military duty supporting police in quelling the unrest.

Tom Blake later spent time in Auckland inspecting farmers' horses for shipment to the war zone in Europe. He then went with the main force of the NZ Mounted Rifles to Egypt as official veterinarian in what he described as a "nightmare trip, working 24-hours-a-day to keep the horses alive".

On 29 August 1915, Mable Constance Dean who had travelled from England to join her fiance became Mrs Blake at a ceremony in the desert at the camp of the New Zealand Mounted Rifle at Heliuan near Cairo. After a honeymoon on the Nile, Mrs Blake returned to England on a boat hounded by submarines and Tom Blake went to serve in the horrors of France. As a fluent French speaker he was in demand as an interpreter and his many military decorations included the Croix de Guerre.

Blake never forgave the Germans for the war and he publically reinforced his belief by warning his family "never, ever, let one across the doorstep". He spoke of them subsequently as 'the Hun' with great hatred. In 1919 he came back to the veterinary challenges of New Zealand to Masterton as government veterinarian. He served the farmers' needs in the district in quite rugged conditions in a Model-T Ford.

Many letters of thanks from Wairarapa farmers testify to the service he gave before he was transferred to Auckland in 1925. In Auckland, although office bound, he was also responsible for quarantine services on Motuihe Island.

In 1929 the family - they had one daughter, Patty - reluctantly left Auckland for the Waikato and the veterinary challenges of a rapidly developing area. Veterinary services at that time consisted of "stock inspectors" who, despite not being fully-qualified veterinarians, were the backbone of a service to farmers, supported by a few veterinarians employed by the Government to give free service to the industry.

Tom Blake was one of these overworked veterinarians who were few and far between before the Veterinary Clubs started in about 1928-29 when the first veterinarian, Mr Alan Leslie, was brought out to New Zealand to a Taranaki Club. Blake had wide responsibilities and diverse interests - necessary to serve the varied needs of farmers at the time. It was fortunate for them that Blake was a willing workaholic.

He was a pioneer, and New Zealand needed them at the time. He was the first to treat cows for milk fever using calcium borogluconate after reading of results of overseas research. He bought the solution out of his own pocket to prove its effect to his superiors! When in 1935 he started studying Al, he took up the challenge readily because prior to this he had started a special study of the bull's role in dairy herd infertility and the possibility that some problems could have a hereditary basis.

At Cornell a scientist called Williams was an accepted world authority but Dr John James considered Blake had made equal progress in his studies. Blake's specialisation was sperm morphology and the quality of the slides he prepared and staining techniques used are testimony to his skill. He published notes in "Nature" and had a great resource in semen samples sent to him from all over New Zealand by the stock inspectors.

He was an avid reader of scientific literature and kept in close touch with work in Sweden which showed a genetic basis of bull infertility. He was a man of high principle and of military background (many people called him 'the major') and he did not suffer fools gladly.

Once Dr James remembers Tom Blake got so wild with a farmer not having things organised for his arrival at the dairy shed that he turned his old Austin and drove "fuming", from Te Awamutu to Hamilton in second gear, foot hard down, and did not realise it. He certainly did not like his professional authority questioned and Sir Arthur Ward remembers one famous confrontation with him.

Sir Arthur said a number of farmers thought Blake was a bit too severe in his classification of bulls and Dr Filmer, the Director of Agricultural Research asked Arthur Ward to examine the fertility records in the herds where Tom Blake had done his classification to check on this.

''I concluded that Blake had been too severe but Filmer passed the buck and asked me to 'diplomatically' draw Blake's attention to be a little more cautious in his condemnation of some bulls.

"The opportunity came on Mr Syd Wyllie's farm at Korakonui. As we stood in the milking shed idly chatting Blake brought up the subject of sperm classification. I gently commented that perhaps the outright condemnation of some bulls was a bit severe, as despite Blake's classification, they had got a reasonable number of cows in calf! Blake exploded!" Sir Arthur said.

"Mr Ward, I don't give a b_ _ _ _ _ if he gets every b_ _ _ _ _ cow in New Zealand in calf. If I've classified him as a bad bull, then he is still a bad bull!" Tom Blake retorted. Sir Arthur said they never did agree on this subject and Tom Blake could not be swayed. Tom Blake had a great sense of humour, but it was the dry variety. He feasted off the "Newzilnd" language when farmers' cows were "crook, and when a caller on the phone said his cow had "died on him". Obviously these terms had not reached the Royal Veterinary College.

He never failed to turn out and help a farmer in need, any hour of the day or night. Nor did he fail the endless people who brought animals of all shapes and sizes to his house at 4 Boundary Road, Hamilton. He spent endless hours in his lab at the Department of Agriculture which was in the Public Trust Building in the centre of Hamilton, and in his study at home. If he did not return home before midnight, Mrs Blake and daughter Patty used to walk into town and throw stones at his window in the Public Trust to pull him away from his microscope to come home.

The Second World War greatly depressed him. His hatred of Germans flared up again to such an extent that one day a farmer who phoned him about a problem got the phone slammed down on his ear when he spelled out his name as "S-C-H-U-L-T-Z. When getting off the train from Frankton at Wellington to attend the inaugural meeting of the New Zealand Society of Animal Production in 1941 where he was to give a paper, Dr James had great difficulty calming him down after he saw a passenger carrying some golf clubs - golf clubs in war time! What next!

In 1946, Tom Blake had a severe stroke from which he only partially recovered. With dedicated family care, he regained some speech and mobility, but he never returned to Ruakura where work on Al was developing. He died in 1966. He loved New Zealand where his life was one of great activity. He helped to lay the first foundation stones in the development of Al in New Zealand.

Biography: Dr John James

"Looking back, the most satisfying part of the development of Al in New Zealand was the work done on intrauterine insemination which reduced the number of sperm we needed to get a cow in calf - it allowed us to achieve our prime objective which was to make 'improver' bulls available to every farmer in New Zealand". This is how Dr John P. James sums up his work in New Zealand.

Dr John James, veterinarian at NZ Sire Services Ltd in Hamilton.

He was born in Rarotanga in 1907 where his father was a missionary. He went to school in Britain and towards the end of his school days he visited the 1925 Wembley Exhibition at which he said he was especially impressed with the New Zealand stand. His house master told him instead of getting an office job in London he should get himself out to New Zealand and look for some challenge.

That he did in 1924, and at the age of 17 he came out on the Post-War Public School-boy Scheme where he was sponsored by the government to go farming. However he found saving up for a farm rather difficult and under his mother's influence decided in 1932 to go to veterinary school in Britain, successfully qualifying in 1937.

He arrived back in New Zealand in May 1938 and went to work at the Wallaceville Research Station on mastitis research being done between the Department of Agriculture and the New Zealand Dairy Board's Herd Improvement Association. The department had decided there was to be a massive field attack on mastitis and according to James he was "hired to join the front line as God's gift to mastitis in New Zealand"

In 1939 he was transferred to Hamilton to continue his attack on mastitis. But with war approaching and money short the Department of Agriculture's laboratory for routine sampling of milk was closed and he was moved to Ruakura to work on Al.

"The biggest blessing at that time was that we had behind us a body of forward-looking men. You needed them to help you look beyond the initial problems and failures - men like Ward, Riddet, Candy, Filmer and later Hamilton and McMeekan, " he said.

"When we started, never in my wildest dreams did I think we would get the technology to the state where it is today. That a technician would keep a bank of semen which would not need servicing for two months and out of this could be chosen the top pick of the nation's bulls."

John James' quiet manner masks his great strength as a stimulator and teacher - without these qualities that early Al team at Ruakura and later Newstead would never have achieved what it did. He talks all of the time of what 'we' did rather than what 'I' did. He was proud of his staff. His logical and practical no-fuss approach led the team, the team led Al from an academic trick into New Zealand's dairy sheds and into the nation's exports.

In 1972, when he retired from his position at the New Zealand Dairy Board's Al centre at Newstead, he was awarded the OBE for "services to the dairy industry". New Zealand owes him a considerable debt. We could also save some thanks for his house master and the New Zealand stand at the 1925 Wembley Exhibition!

Biography: Paul Kneebone

(An appreciation of the late Paul Kneebone by Dr J.P. James)

Paul Kneebone started his working life in the police force in Auckland where he once recounted while 'on the beat' in Queen Street early one morning that he came across a figure leaning through a recently-broken jeweller's window.

After a small prod with the hand and 'issue' truncheon, the figure withdrew slowly and almost immediately Paul found himself standing beside a robust person nearly seven feet tall. The sequel is not recorded, but it was no doubt resolved by the quiet determination which was such a familiar part of Paul's personality in later life.

After his time in the police force Paul joined the bacteriology section at the newly-formed Animal Research Station at Ruakura. This bacteriology training provided a good background for his work in the artificial insemination laboratory at Newstead which he joined in 1954.

Although in charge of the laboratory procedures, in the assessment, dilution and storage of liquid semen, the small staff had to share the necessary routine work in handling and feeding bulls, haymaking and the numerous other daily tasks associated with maintaining farm animals. It was a strong team spirit which was determined to make the Al work succeed, regardless of hours worked or work required, which eventually brought success to their efforts.

One of the most pressing problems of the early years was getting the prepared liquid semen to the farmers' herd as soon as possible after collection. The semen extenders used at the time did not give the best conception rates when used after 12 hours of collection.

To overcome the time problem in distributing the freshly-collected semen each day to as wide an area as possible, Paul Kneebone volunteered the suggestion that staff start collecting early in the morning - at 3.30 am! This resulted in much better conception rates and greatly increased farmers' confidence in the AI technique.

Probably not enough credit has been given to Paul Kneebone and the other members of that team for this early-morning work which they accepted without complaint. In later years Paul suffered a serious medical handicap, with no decrease in his work standards which Paul set himself.

Later on when transferred to a position on the administration side, his loyalty and integrity was a continuing and appreciated contribution to the successful development of artificial breeding in New Zealand.

Biography: Stan Southcombe

"He was a practical, grass-roots man, dedicated and hard working, " Clive Southcombe describes his father.

Stanley Alfred Southcombe was born in 1901 on the family leasehold farm at Patea in Taranaki. In 1930 he left the farm, marrying his wife Mabel in 1932 and then becoming manager of a Department of Agriculture demonstration farm near Rotorua.

In 1935 he became Livestock Overseer at Ruakura with special concern for the dairy farms. From then on he became deeply involved in Al and in the late 1952 joined the Dairy Board. In 1953 he became Superintendent of the newly established Newstead Centre. Stan took in his stride the hard work of those early days at Newstead.

Mabel Southcombe said she threatened to take Stan's blankets over to the lab many a time as the dairy board seemed to have prior right to him. Stan would not leave work until he was sure everything was in order.

Later when the new Awahuri centre was to be built, he was given the job of planning it. After his retirement in 1966 Stan was kept on as a liaison officer for the dairy board to show trading visitors from overseas around local dairy factories and farms.

Clive Southcombe said that what pleased his father most was seeing how Al had developed from such small beginnings at Ruakura, and by the time he retired there were two Al centres, vast improvements in technology and an efficient service that covered the whole of New Zealand.

Sir Arthur Ward said that Stan Southcombe was one of the most conscientious, reliable and hard working men in his experience of Dairy Board staff.

"He was an excellent communicator with tons of initiative and great common sense. It was a thoroughly rewarding experience to work with hirrl as general manager of the board and the practical development of Al owes Stan a very great debt, " Sir Arthur said.

Table of Events

1909
Herd Testing started by NZ farmers and supervised by the Department of Agriculture.

1929
Arthur Ward becomes secretary of the NZ Co-operative Herd Testing Association and emphasis on recording to improve bull selection in given priority.

1934
Royal Commission investigates the state of the dairy industry and among it's recommendations is the setting up of a Herd Testing Council to control all herd testing.
Establishment of a progeny testing or a Sire Survey.

1935
6 June. Directors of the NZ Co-operative Herd Testing Association call for a government veterinarian to start AI experiments.
Mr T Blake, Department of Agriculture veterinarian in Hamilton given responsibility to start AI trials on Waikato farms.
AI with progeny-tested bulls offered to members of the NZ Co-operative Herd Testing Association.
16 September. First AI trials started on 44 Waikato herds.

1936
Formation of the Herd Recording Council (later named Herd Improvement Council) to "improve the standard of the cattle in the dairy industry." First meeting, 7 May 1936.

1938
A.L.Thompson and T.A.Blake charged to get an AI field service going. First work in Ngarua district on 332 cows.

1939
T.A. Blake's semen classification work checked in field.
Dr John James moves to Ruakura to take over AI research.
Launching of the Herd Improvement Plan.
Technical committee of Herd Recording Council formed.
Amalgamation of Herd Testig Associations - 6 instead of 28.
Formation of Dairy Baord's Consultancy Officers' Service.
First six consulting officers appointed (E.P. Nielson, F.L. Knowles, W. Corboy, M. Witham, R.W. Taylor, C. How).
Lifetime Merit Register introduced.
Dr James starts AI development work on cows at Ruakura's No 1 and No 2 dairies (carried out for three seasons 1940-43).

1941
Inaugural meeting of the NZ Society or Animal Production in Wellington.
First list of proven sires published by the NZ Dairy Board.

1943
More Ruakura trials in the Matangi-Cambridge area.
Trials run into problems caused by rubber bungs killing sperm.

1944
AI trials extended by Ruakura to the Te Hoi area.

1945
Change from cerival-speculum technique to the intra-uterine technique. Restricted trials in the Matangi-Cambridge area.
Government sends Dr James to the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Russia to examine developments in AI which were relevant to New Zealand.
First sire survey and merit register published.

1946
Daughter -dam comparisons changed to within-season basis. Term "Merit Sire' introduced.

1947
Studies of production of AI bred stock initiated.

1949
Daughter-mature (herd mate) cow comparison method of sire survey introduced.
November 1949. First commercial AI in Waikato and Taranaki.

1950
Meetings in various pars of the country to test farmers' interest in provision of an AI service.
NZ Dairy Board assumes full responsibility for commercial development of AI.
First bulls bought for proving through AI.

1953
Establishment of an commercial AI centre at Newstead, Hamilton by the NZ Dairy Board.

1954
Dr J.P. James appointed as "Director of AB" at Newstead.
Pat Shannon and Merv Probine start co-operative research on semen production and utilisation.

1956
Rating system for Sire Survey's introduced.

1958
Insemination recording using new punch card system.

1959
Detailed research starts on semen dilution work at Newstead.

1961
Establishment of Awahuri AI Centre near Palmerston North.
AB Sire Proving Scheme introduced.
New diluent 14G used for semen.

1963
Production Ranking Test (PRT) introduced.
Caprogen used as new semen diluent.

1967
IBM computer installed. AI records for all Livestock Improvement Associations. Herd test records processed by computer introduced progressively 1967-69.

1968
Herd Test ranking index introduced.

1969
Storage of deep frozen semen in liquid nitrogen.

1970
Herd Improvement Department of Dairy Board renamed the Farm Production Division.
Estimated Genetic Value (EGV) introduced for all bull proofs. All cow herd mates used in comparison.
Merit cow recording discontinued.

1971
First non-pedigree bulls included in Sire Proving Scheme.

1972
Re-diluted deep frozen semen used.

1973
NZ Friesian semen sent to FAO trial in Poland.

1974
Breeding indexes replace ratings in Sire Survey.
Semen allocation systems introduced.
Charolais progeny test begins (first beef progeny test work).
Contract mating for Sire Proving Scheme begins.
Conformation survey for Sire Proving Scheme starts.

1975
DIY AB introduced in Livestock Improvement Association (Wellington-Hawke's Bay area).

1980
Database development started.

1982
29 April. Opening of Dairy Herd Improvement Centre at Newstead, Hamilton.

1984
July 1984. Formation of the NZ Dairy Board's Livestock Improvement Council.

Presenter: Dr Padraig McAuliffe at Enterprise Ireland Big Ideas 2011

19 Oct 2011 at 10:55am

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