The Meat Board’s $1 million grant for facial eczema research has been welcomed by a long-standing group of sheep breeders known as Advanced Romney Designer Genetics.
The Meat Board contributed to the Eliminating Facial Eczema Impacts (EFEI) programme, which has a budget of $20.75m over 10 years as a cross-sector partnership between the Ministry for Primary Industries, Dairy NZ, Fonterra, PGG Wrightson, LIC and several other companies.
The FE project aims to provide tools, knowledge and solutions for farmers to combat the disease while also improving productivity in the red meat and dairy sectors.
Advanced Romney Designer Genetics (ARDG), formerly the Auckland Romney Development Group, was founded 56 years ago and has been hugely influential in breeding facial eczema tolerance and worm resistance.
The flocks of the group are spread from Kaipara in the north to Masterton in the south of the North Island.
Retirements and changes of ownership have ushered in new breeders, although the founding Alexander family remain prominent.
The late Rex Alexander formed the ARDG with the help of eight other Romney breeders with the objective of improved production and profitability, but they quickly realised that the annual scourge of facial eczema had to be tackled.
At the time Rex and his wife Marion were farming at Waiuku in South Auckland, a hot spot for the disease.
He recognised the importance of genetic differences between animals, both sheep and cattle, in their response to the FE challenge in northern regions of the country.
That challenge comes from ingestion of spores of a fungus that grows on pastures in autumn under certain conditions – most often after dry summers followed by warm, wet autumns.
The spores contain a toxin that causes damage to the animal’s liver, which can be clinically expressed on the skin of the face or sub-clinically in loss of appetite and growth.
The skin damage is secondary to liver damage and both together can result in ill-thrift, lower milk production (in cows), low fertility, metabolic diseases and death.
ARDG resolved on a structured breeding programme with a central flock at Waiuku, and annual ram testing to find the sheep that are FE resistant.
Decades of testing, measuring and culling have played an enormous part in the great increase in sheep productivity over the past 50 years.
Initially groups of lambs from known sires were exposed to toxic pastures and then slaughtered to gauge the extent of FE liver damage.
It was an uncertain and expensive process.
In the late 1970s Dr Neale Towers at Ruakura developed a blood test for gamma glutamyl transferase (GGT), an enzyme produced by the liver, that identified how severely animals were affected by FE without having to slaughter them.
ARDG embraced this performance test, putting up progeny from supposed resistant rams for comparison with those from susceptible rams.
It also formed a company to produce sporidesmin, the isolated toxin from pasture, then used as a drench for rams for testing their genetic tolerance.
Stock Safti Ltd was purchased by MAF, then AgResearch, and is now called Ramguard.
Animals are challenged with the facial eczema toxin and their tolerance measured in terms of the level of the GGT enzyme in a blood sample.
Towers says that without the leadership of Rex Alexander, the now-established practice of breeding for resistance to FE would have withered and died.
FE tolerance is strongly inherited (c.40%) and is genetically independent of important production traits.
Selection to improve tolerance will not directly reduce the response to selection for productive traits.
ARDG selects for both FE tolerance and highly productive traits.
When ARDG was formed the lambing percentage in all Romney flocks averaged about 85% and today it is consistently above 155% for ARDG flocks.
ARDG is the foundation for breeding sheep for FE tolerance, selling rams to many of the leading Romney studs throughout the North Island.
Rex Alexander passed away in February, aged 90.
In a history of ARDG written by Dennis Trotter in 2019, Rex paid tribute to the recoding work of wives and farming partners, especially in the days before computers and emails.
“The task of keeping exacting records was a massive one. It was all eyeball, pencil and paper with long delays in processing, which was carried out in Wellington.
“Electronic have enable group members to speed up progress and accurately record breeding traits.
“An additional benefit has been the introduction of worm testing, known as FEC, and dag scoring.
“DNA testing is now being used to help the selection process and scanning has now reached 200% conception.
“Our reliable records gave us credibility in the sheep industry, as figures don’t lie.
“Not only were we able to evaluate our own success, our figures imparted confidence for those to whom we sold.”
The foundation members were Rex, Ian and Graeme Alexander, Ray Cave (Onewhero), Ref Florence (Paparoa), Viv Mackereth (Whitianga), Peter Simpson (Whitianga), Phil Smart (Waeranga) and David Wayne (Waikaretu).
The current chair is Craig Alexander, Ian’s son, farming with wife Tina at Hobbiton in Matamata, and the flocks of Rex and his son Ross are now farmed by Paul Crick and Dayanne Almeida near Masterton.
John and Jan Marchant’s family farming trust at Maramarua is still active, as is Bob Steed’s Kereru Station, Tangiteroria, where Bob farms in conjunction with his daughter Helen and her husband Rhys Dackers.
The flock of the late Stuart Williams at Kaukapakapa is farmed by Adrian and Jenny Savannah at Glenbrook.
“If it wasn’t for Rex Alexander the whole group breeding effort by ARDG over more than 50 years wouldn’t have got off the ground,” Bob Steed says.
“That is the measure of his enormous contribution to the whole NZ sheep industry.”
Steed says an objective of the new FE funding project should be to find a blood test to rank sheep on their disease tolerance so that sporidesmin testing isn’t required.
ARDG continues to contribute to the Central Progeny Test programme at Glenside, Masterton.
It has also contributed to the pilot Multiplier project with Whangara Farms as a breeding partner, supplying semen from the groups rams to contribute to the improvement of the Whangara Farms flock.
