Agriculture & Farming

New Zealanders didn't invent sheep, although we would have if it weren't for the small stumbling block of them having already been invented. However sheep were brought to New Zealand early and eventually thrived (although the first sheep were two luckless Merino brought here by Cook in 1773, and dead by 1774). For most of our history, sheep formed the backbone of the New Zealand economy, the heart of our farming culture and the leg of our Sunday roasts. Say 'New Zealand' to a foreigner and chances are they'll say either 'hobbits' or 'sheep'.

But of course, despite the ready-made varieties of sheep available to us, and in the true spirit of Kiwi ingenuity, we decided to invent our own flavours to suit our own geography.

Geoffrey Sylvester Peren (b. 1892, d. 1980) of Massey University created the Perendale - a hardy, low maintenance kind of all-terrain sheep for either wool or meat production. The Drysdale sheep was originated by another Massey University staff member, Professor Francis W. Dry (b. 1891, d. 1979) who discovered the sheep gene that made the wool of some Romneys particularly coarse.

And New Zealand’s most successful sheep-invention is undoubtedly the Corriedale. The Corriedale is a large-framed, hornless sheep, with dark pigmented skin on nostrils and lips and a heavy fleece of long stapled, bulky wool (you know the one). The Corriedale was developed in New Zealand and Australia during the late 1800s by crossing Lincoln or Leicester rams with Merino females. The breed is now distributed worldwide, making up the greatest population of all sheep in South America and thrives throughout Asia, North America and South Africa.

In 1973 Dr Ken Drew and MAF vet Les Porter borrowed a few deer and set up an experimental farm. The two set out to put a structure around deer farming to formulate the basic management practices. They were generally considered 'crackpots', but they persevered, coming up with a set of practices and approaches to deer farming that covered things such as: the right sub-species to choose (in NZ we typically have red deer, red deer-wapiti crosses and fallow deer); the layout of paddocks; how many deer to keep together; creating a more natural environment; general animal health and even antler removal.

Put simply, the Allflex tag system is a farm-management tool. It is not an invention that can be described as a first, but it deserves its place in the book by being an innovation that made their product easily the best. Before the Allflex system was developed, stock were identified by either a metal tag or a one-piece plastic tag.

These tags weren't easy to see, they rusted, they fell off. The Allflex system solved those problems and enabled farmers to improve the efficiency of their work.

In the 1930s Alfred William (Bill) Gallagher (b. 1911, d. 1990) developed a plan to keep his horse Joe from scratching itself on the family car (an Essex, incidentally). Mr Gallagher cunningly connected the car to an electrical supply. When the horse rocked the car, looking to for a good scratch, a triggering device sent a current through the car, and through Joe. It worked. Animals will go to as great lengths as we will to avoid electric shocks. Mr Gallagher did not go on to patent his electric car protector (we can only speculate why not - perhaps because it was total overkill), but he did begin experimenting with electrified fences - and not just around cars - around paddocks

Chris Johnstone was a farmer and a bagpipe player and also had a kind of head start - he was the Great-Nephew of Ernest Rutherford. He put his genetic predisposition for splitting to good work, and created the Eze-Pull. It is so effective that you can remove even the most reluctant staple, "If you can see it, you can pretty much get it out."

Staplelok fenceposts are a high-tensile, galvanised steel section, with a scalloped groove down one side of the post. The staples that hold the wires to the fence are banged into the groove with an ordinary hammer and lock into place. They will not slide or come out until removed with the Staplelok staple remover.

In fact it would take between 300 and 400 kilograms of force to pull the staple out without the staple remover. The posts are extremely strong and very light (2.2kg) compared to fence posts - a farmer can carry up to twenty at one time. Remember even Colin Meads could only be expected to carry one or two wooden fence posts.

In 1923 Lamont and Board were about to open their own butter factory in Te Aroha, and were unhappy about the method that was being used to pasteurise the cream for the butter. Back then cream was often contaminated with outside flavours: when the cow ate strong-flavoured weeds or grass, the flavour would find its way into the milk.

There's nothing worse than oniony, grass-flavoured cream! The established method of pasteurisation (basically boiling the cream and cooling it again) may have killed all the bad things in the cream, but it didn't help it to smell or taste better - it was common for cream to come out of the process tasting cooked or even burnt.

One early example of New Zealand's farmer/engineer breed was John Blake, of Otakeho Taranaki. He bought one of the earliest milking machines, but quickly realised its limitations. In true kiwi spirit, and thanks to his training as an engineer, he set about improving the machine, redesigning the cups so the cow was milked in a quarter of the time.

Word got around his neighbours what Blake had done, and many asked him to create improved cups for their machines too, which Blake did happily, the extra money supplementing the farm income. However, after only having made a half a dozen sets, the manufacturers of the original machine found out what Blake was doing. Instead of congratulating him on his initiative and purchasing the design from him, they claimed his 'improvement' was an infringement of their patent rights, and forced him not only to purchase back all the cups he'd made for his neighbours, but to cease using the design on his own machine!

Rightly annoyed, Blake took the opportunity to design and create an entire milking machine of his own from scratch, a process he finished in 1907 when he sold his first 'Simplex Milker'.

Dr Robert Norris and David Illingworth and the team at the NZDRI started working on the 'spreadable butter' project in the 1970s. Part of their impetus was a change to regulations which meant the English were no longer guaranteed to buy our butter, they had to want it.

To become viable, it had to still be butter, so the DRI researchers had to work out a way to use the same raw materials as 'normal' butter - cream and salt - to make a spreadable butter. They determined that the secret is not what you put in; it's what you take out.

In March, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez broke up in the waters of Alaska, spilling oil over thousands of square kilometres, researchers started to look for ways to clean the oil up, other than sopping it up in the feathers of seabirds. It was this tragedy that brought the world's attention to a development of the Wool Research Organisation of New Zealand (WRONZ).

In the 1980s they developed 'knops' - little lumps of wool that are combed out of the wool when the wool is carded.

Field testing proved very successful and in the year 2000 AgResearch released the world's first novel endophyte, AR1.

This little invention was the result of twenty years of research by a team of mycologists, chemists, agronomists, entomologists and horticulturalists. The improvements to New Zealand's pasture and animal health are probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the country. And stock growth isn't the only potential for endophytes. What about bird strike at airports - a $1.2 billion problem? AgResearch scientist Chris Pennell was flying into London when his plane was hit by bird strike. He began to think about the problem.

Using two new endophytes, AR601 and AR95, Pennell's team made a special seed to controls birds at airports around the world. The grass is resistant to insects and repugnant to birds - so the birds stay away. PGG Wrightson are selling this remarkable invention under the name Avanex all over the world.

In 1906, one John Clervaux Chaytor (b. 1836, d. 1920) became the first person in the world to apply agricultural materials aerially - he went up in his hot air balloon and threw seed into the air so that it would spread over the valley below. The location is often incorrectly quoted as Wairoa, but in fact this happened in Wairau, in Marlborough, on the family farm 'Marshlands'. This mechanism of spreading seed was one the family kept at, and as a young man John's son Edward Chaytor (later knighted, and a famous solider during WWI) spread grass seed over the family farm from a hot-air balloon.

Most historians credit Alan Pritchard with pioneering what we now call 'topdressing' - flying a plane over a patch of ground and releasing fertiliser or seeds (actually often both at the same time) over the land. Pritchard was a pilot with government's Public Works department in the 1930s and 1940s, when he thought of the idea of sowing seeds from his plane after eating grapes while flying, and throwing the seeds out of the window. A few days later he experimented with sowing lupin seeds by sewing a sack of seeds to a downpipe, and flying at different heights to work out the right dispersal rate.

Strictly speaking, his employers didn't really know about his aerial experiments, and he forged the log books of his flights to allow him more time to trial his ideas. Throughout the period 1939 to 1943 he experimented until he had some quite specific and exact results to show that this method of dispersing seeds and fertilizer was extremely economical. After he published his results, a government minister he regularly piloted asked him how he'd worked it all out. When Pritchard admitted what he'd been doing with the log books, the minister gruffly congratulated him, and told him that if anyone had an issue with it, to send them to him.

With that endorsement, topdressing was ready for mainstream use.

Cyril John (Johnny) Callender (b. 1928, d. 1978) was a New Plymouth mechanic who spotted a gap in the market.

He knew from his rural contacts that the standard method of getting around on a farm - a horse - was not ideal, and that the alternative two or four-wheeled transport options were no better. In 1963, what the cow cockies of the 'naki needed was a motorbike built especially for the conditions - with disc wheels (to avoid sticks getting into the spokes), a slow first gear (so they could follow stock slowly), enough grunt to climb the hills and light enough to throw on the back of a ute.

The Mountain Goat was born.

New Zealand has a lot of trees. It's probably even possible to count how many without too much difficultly, given enough time and eyeballs. But knowing how much each tree is worth, if it's the right type to cut down for timber, and when is the right time to do that - this is a much harder problem, certainly not one solved by meandering through a pine forest and idly glancing around.

Christchurch designer Tim Cox designed a product to help - his Tretech system, which is really three products in one. A handheld hammer goes into the tree and anchors there, then an ultrasound transponder device measures the diameter, quality, and density of the wood, and sends all that data back to a handheld receiver, which also measure the height of the tree. So now you have all the data you need you need to assess the quality of the tree - add to that GPS and a camera and you've got the full information on the tree.

The Tretech system replaces a number of older and much more expensive products and promises to eliminate double handling and errors.

No doubt about it, John Hartstone (b. 1923) is the quintessential 'bloke in a shed' inventor.

Not only did he dream up his invention in the middle of the night, but he also yelled 'Eureka' when it worked. Hartstone turned that Eureka moment into a globally successful product with 95% market share and tens of millions of dollars of sales. He also significantly contributed to the improved productivity of dairy farmers the world over. So what was the great idea? A meter, for measuring the milk from an individual cow. Prior to Hartstone's invention in 1963, farmers and dairy companies couldn't accurately measure the output of an individual cow as it was being milked.

The British Milk Marketing Board was lamenting the lack of an accurate measure in a magazine article Hartstone was idly reading during a night of insomnia. Hartstone thought about the issue and realised he might have an idea of how to solve it. He knew a lot about cows, having 130 of them to milk twice daily. He wrote down all the principals he thought would be important for the measurement system, and as he did so, he recalls having a 'blackboard in my mind' upon which he could see the solution developing. By 5am he was pretty sure he'd cracked it.

He trundled off to do the morning milking, and straight after, hit the nearby big town of Otorohanga to pick up parts for a prototype.

Patrick's father had just bought a farm and was frustrated at having to hang 20 gates from their 'gudgeons' - the metal pin that farm gates hang from. Patrick needed a project for his school science fair and this was a perfect opportunity.

The Gudgeon Pro 4 in 1 looks like a 1.4m-long spirit level, but has holes specially placed to guide the drill to allow perfect gudgeon placement. Its length is designed to show you how far to ram the fence posts in, it has markings to guide wire placements and has levels to ensure the posts are upright.

Gladys Reid (b. 1914, d. 2006) was known to the science establishment as a crackpot. ‘Mad Glad’ they called her, and ridiculed her publicly, causing her fellow farmers to also doubt her and laugh at her. For from 1959 Gladys insisted on proclaiming that facial excema – a dreadful disease in cows – was caused by a deficiency in zinc. She’d used her training as a dental nurse, and some careful experimenting with her own dairy herd in Te Aroha, to show that adding zinc sulphate to the water trough significantly lowered the incidence of facial eczema, even when other farms in the area suffered.

Despite this, scientists and officials refused to take her findings seriously. The Animal Health Board even noted in 1975 that zinc was ‘completely useless as a form of treatment’. Reid battled on, trying to prove her case. Despite getting overseas recognition, it wasn’t until 1981 that she was vindicated in New Zealand. That year farmers were advised to spray their farms with chemicals that depleted zinc in the soil. The practice caused a big outbreak of facial eczema and the Establishment was forced to back down. They admitted Reid had been right all along. She received an OBE in 1983 for her research efforts – and, one suspects, for her perseverance in the face of opposition, scepticism, sexism and most likely prejudice against people from Te Aroha.

There is no doubt about it - farmer Robert Ellis (b ?, d. ?) of Brightwater (near Nelson) is one of New Zealand's unsung geniuses. In 1910 he converted the waterwheel from a mill on his farm to power up his own house. The mill ground out flour during the day, and generated electricity at night. In 1911 he decided to hook the wheel up to help power the local streetlights, but he didn't want to be bothered having to go and turn them on and off every night. Ellis, in a flash of inspiration perhaps only surpassed by the other area genius, Rutherford, realised that the hens running around near the mill might provide a solution.

The first settlers to New Zealand had a problem. After travelling thousands of kilometres across the sea carrying them, their beloved Kumara (sweet potato) was having trouble adapting to the cold.

The cooler climates on NZ meant the plants were at the mercy of frosts and cooler ground temperatures. They early Maori didn't have greenhouses, or fancy irrigation systems, so they started by building some fences and walls around the plantations. This kept the wind out, but what they also realised was that stone walls had another benefit - they soaked up the warmth of the sun during the say, and radiated it back out in the evening, lengthening the period the crops were kept warm.

Critics have said that lightproof milk containers create a solution for a problem that didn’t exist. Dairy giant Fonterra claims that the new container they launched in 2013 was only trying to mimic the cow. After all, cows aren’t see-through. Fonterra’s tests indicated that 70 per cent of blind test subjects – subjects who didn’t know what they were drinking, not necessarily blind people testing – preferred the taste of milk coming from their new, lightproof bottle. The bottle’s three layers of lightproofing mean the contents are at less risk of being spoiled by exposure to light.

Why then did consumers nominate the new bottle for the year’s ‘Unfit Packaging Award’? It seems that in their hurry to innovate, Fonterra may not have realised that some consumers don’t like the idea of their milk being wrapped in three layers of plastic coating, and most consumers don’t like it when they can’t see how much milk is left in the bottle. Ironically though, this has itself led to a new wave of innovation as consumers invent ways of seeing how much milk they have left – one genius creating a ‘balsa wood ballcock’ to stick out the top of the bottle. Perhaps this whole thing could have been avoided had Fonterra realised that basically, people don’t like change, and unlike the new bottle, they will be able to see through any marketing gimmicks used to force it on them.

John Stuart Reid (b. 1857, d. 1894) came up with an ingenious invention to fix up the broken fences, but also to solve another issue. No.8 Wire, so favoured of farmers at the time, had a couple of challenges. While it was thin enough to be pliable, it was affected by the weather, stretching when it was hot and becoming loose. It was painful as a farmer to have to keep tightening and loosening the #8 when the weather changed.

Around 1885, Reid developed a device that could go in as part of the fence, which allowed the farmer to adjust the tension of the wire easily, and do it without the hard work of having to pull and yank the wire by hand. The device looked like a small handle, connected to wire ratchet wheel. Pulling the handle turned the wheel which squeezed the wire through and gripped it so it couldn't slip back. It was a major labour saving device, and soon 'Reid's Titan Wire Stretcher' was a great success, with the papers of the day cooing over it, saying 'the knowledge how to use it could be acquired in a few minutes and that an ordinary lad could work it without too much exertion'.

Reid patented it in NZ and overseas, and achieved good commercial success with his strainer, although he also had to fend off another Otago local in the process.

Erecting a temporary electric fence is fiddly. Sometimes you need a live connection, sometimes an insulated one, and the connecting handles would break ‘as soon as a cow went near them’. Grant Pearce of Galatea in the Bay of Plenty turned frustration to opportunity with his ZAMMR Handle.

Pearce’s idea was for a sturdy multi-purpose handle that could either connect the fences while conducting electricity, or connect and insulate, and could also be used as a gate-break. He made a model from clay and wire and enlisted a Christchurch company to turn that into a flash-looking prototype. ‘A lot of the farmers I know like iPhones, so I thought it should be a little bit funky.’

Pearce’s advice to inventors is, ‘Do not fall in love with your invention.’ He says the day he was waiting to hear the per-unit cost from the manufacturer he was genuinely scared. He had a cost figure written down, above which he knew he’d have to walk away and a ‘Yahoo!’ figure, below which he could make money on the handles. The quote came in at half the ‘Yahoo!’ figure. ‘I ordered 10,000 and took them to Fieldays.’ To this day Pearce is not sure if he would have been strong enough to walk away if the numbers hadn’t stacked up.

Pearce turned up at Fieldays $55,000 in the hole. ‘If that first farmer had gone, “Nah, that’s not worth it,” I would have been screwed.’ But Pearce had tested the concept with a few close friends and felt sure it would be well received, and he was right. He sold 3000 the first day and securing a deal with big agritech manufacturer Tru-Test Group. They not only paid him for his invention but now give him a royalty for each one sold. Pearce says bringing an idea to market is ‘not for the faint-hearted’ but – though he won’t be made a millionaire from the ZAMMR Handle – he’s extremely happy with how it’s gone.