Sailing stormy waters of sheep farming
A pioneer of breeding facial eczema tolerance in coopworths is selling his last ram. He talks to
Navigating big ships and farming sheep have a bit in common, Waikato coopworth ram breeder Edward Dinger can probably conclude as he counts down to his last annual ram sale.
The former mariner has devoted more than half a lifetime working to optimise the profitability and survival of sheep in New Zealand’s warmer regions with their lurking menace facial eczema.
Across both careers, he’s seen heavy seas and had to steer his way out of tight spots.
Dinger’s Ceres Farm at Whitehall, near Cambridge, is the home of the Mid-North Coopworth Company, which has produced the sires of some of New Zealand’s blue chip coopworth rams.
Netherlands-born Dinger bought the rolling hill country farm with family in 1964 and has bred rams for more than 40 years, 31 of them devoted to facial eczema-tolerance breeding.
At age 75, he says it’s time to call it quits, and the farm’s traditional annual ram sale in November will be its last.
A finalist in four categories of the 2015 Beef + Lamb sheep industry awards, Dinger has been gradually easing out of the business, selling down his recorded and commercial flocks and reducing the size of Ceres Farm from its original 145ha to 53ha (50ha effective).
He’ll keep farming – ‘‘I’ve got to do something’’ – but says it’s time to step aside.
‘‘There’s a whole new era in ram breeding coming, a whole new electronic world.’’
Dinger says sheep farming with a strong science input has been a fascinating journey.
But sadly it has no ‘‘happily ever after’’ ending.
Like many sheep farmers, Dinger is hugely frustrated with the erosion of governmentfunded scientific research, the seemingly aimless path of the red meat industry and the upand-down earnings.
And despite decades of his faithful work and $250,000 of investment in facial eczema recording and selection, in a bad year on Ceres Farm, this ‘‘shocker’’ of a disease is still around.
Sheep farming as it stands, he says, is ‘‘totally unsustainable’’.
‘‘I’m glad I’m getting out of it. It will get worse before it gets better. Always with governments, they start measuring when you reach the bottom.’’
Dinger feels qualified to judge.
He remembers when AgResearch at Ruakura had its own mycotoxin research team of more than 10 scientists and researchers.
‘‘Because they found you could breed for tolerance and could give zinc as an antidote they disestablished the whole mycotoxin team. There’s some facial eczema research at Invermay [AgResearch] but there’s been nothing new in the past five years and there are still so many questions to answer. ‘‘It’s verging on criminal.’’ Liver-attacking facial eczema virtually wiped out a recorded flock of 660 ewes under Dinger’s management in 1980.
‘‘It’s a terrible, nasty disease and your sheep suffer. And what you see is only part of the iceberg. If you have 10 per cent visible you have 50 per cent with clinical facial eczema.
‘‘It suppresses the whole immune system. Even those with a touch of it get pneumonia and are more prone to worms and all disease. A sheep with sub-clinical eczema doesn’t perform – especially if they have it as a hogget. A hogget will never perform to its genetic potential. It doesn’t matter what sort of sheep it is.’’
There is no known treatment for facial eczema. But tolerance to it is strongly inherited, which led to pioneer selection programmes by scientists and breeders.
In 1980 when facial eczema struck hard, Dinger could turn to Ruakura’s mycotoxin team for advice.
‘‘Who do you talk to now?’’ he says.
Dinger was at the time flockmaster for the Mid-North Coopworth Co, then a breeding group of 11 farmers and breeders. The ewes had been selected out of the screening of 33,000 ewes.
In 1983 the group folded due to an industry downturn.
Dinger continued its work, ram breeding on his own account and keeping the company’s name alive.
In 1984 he started to breed for facial eczema tolerance with the organisation Stock Safety, taken over in 1986 by Ramguard at Ruakura. Ramguard produces sporidesmin, the facial eczema toxin, which is used to challenge animals. Their tolerance is measured in a later test for the level of GGT or gamma glutamyltransferase, an enzyme produced by the liver.
‘‘That first year 25 rams were dosed with 0.1mg sporidesmin per kg bodyweight. Only two rams showed no increase in GGT levels,’’ Dinger recalls.
Since 2005 that dose level has been raised to 0.6mg, which produces a very good level of protection for an average year, he says.
Along the way, Dinger has carried as many as 2500 ewes, achieved lamb drops of more than 200 per cent, lambing percentages of 183 per cent, farmed a small simmental cattle stud, taken on up to 300 dairy grazers at times and won sheep industry awards and coopworth breed representation accolades.
His breeding programme has included DNA testing to generate improved primal muscling, progeny yield testing to establish baseline performance levels for saleable meat yields, and worm resilience selection. Wool brings in about 10 per cent of the farm’s income.
Not a bad achievement for an immigrant who bought Ceres Farm not knowing a thing about farming.
As it was, his father Hans had to run the farm for four years until Dinger could finish his contract as a navigator with Royal Interocean Lines, which became part of cargo shipping colossus Maersk.
Dinger was 28, freshly married, containerisation was on the horizon, and it was time to put down roots, he recalls.
His father, an expert on tropical climate agriculture such as coffee, palm oil and sugar cane, had been earbashed about New Zealand’s attractions by a Kiwi when in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Dinger senior had come to the Waikato because he had friends at AgResearch Ruakura who convinced him it was the region to buy in.
His son would have preferred to buy a big farm in Gisborne but accepted he could go always farm bigger later.
Dinger’s first move was to book the previous Ceres Farm owner for regular farming lessons. His second was to start planting trees on the almost tree-less property.
At the time, Ceres Farm was running romney ewes and southdown sires, and buying in replacements.
But after difficult lambings and lambing percentages of only 92 and 93 per cent, Dinger was looking for another breed.
His father’s friends at Ruakura were excited about a breed developed by scientists at Lincoln College from the pairing of romney ewes and border leicester rams to increase lambing percentages. It was called the coopworth and is now the second-largest flock in New Zealand, used for both meat and wool.
Dinger was sold and joined a coopworth discussion group. He was soon asked by Eric Williams, a noted coopworth breeder and founding member of the Coopworth Society, to join the Mid-North Coopworth Co and within a year was appointed its flockmaster.
By then Dinger had started breeding his own replacement stock.
‘‘There was a bit of sentimentality in that. I thought it very unsatisfactory that you looked after a ewe for a whole year then it spent three months raising a lamb and then off they went in a truck to get their heads chopped off.’’
The early days of breeding rams were tough financially but word of their quality got around and Waikato’s Tainui bought up to 30 rams a year, which was a great start, Dinger recalls.
When the breeding group folded in 1983 he gained some clients and again when Eric Williams retired.
‘‘As soon as you start selling 100 rams a year it’s a viable proposition.’’ For too many years they were sold cheaply at $250, he reckons, but these days you won’t get much change from $1500 for a Dinger ram.
Sometimes ram buyers forget the ‘‘enormous’’ amount of work that goes into selection breeding, Dinger says.
‘‘We monitor everything from birth rate on. The only way to get ahead is to record, record and more recording.’’
That said, it hasn’t made him rich. And he’s never regretted sticking with coopworths. ‘‘They’re a superior sheep.’’