ON EXCHANGE VISIT

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33064, 3 November 1972, Page 13

ON EXCHANGE VISIT

For the first time since the exchange scheme between officers of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in New Zealand and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in Britain was introduced a veterinarian has come to New Zealand from. Britain and he is now based on the animal health laboratory of the ministry at Lincoln. He is Mr A. B. Davies, a veterinarian with the veterinary investigation service of the British ministry at Cardiff in Wales, where there is a veterinary investigation centre. A Welshman, Mr Davies’s birthplace was a village in Carmarthenshire about 50 miles from Cardiff, and while his home is now only five miles from the famous Cardiff Arms Park he has to admit that he is not a Rugby enthusiast. In his work in Wales Mr Davies says that he deals with cattle and sheep diseases. In the winter period he says that in the area where he comes from all cattle are indoors and fed entirely on concentrate feedstuffs, which are expensive, and because they tended to be fed rather meanly for optimal economic performance there were problems related to feeding and such things as milk quality. A difference that he

could see between New' Zealand and Britain, he said, was that the value of each unit of livestock in his part of the world was higher. For instance, at the moment it cost' about $BO to buy a week-old Friesian calf and this meant that calf mortality, even at a low level, was a serious problem. In the winter particularly tine of the biggest disease factors was respiratory problems in housed calves. Mr Davies said that the sheep in his part of the world were predominantly Welsh Mountain sheep, rather small scruffy animals compared with the big “woolly mountains” that he saw in New Zealand. Their Welsh Mountain sheep were running on the uplands under fairly severe conditions. On the lower country he said that in recent years there had been a decline in sheep numbers but in the last year there had been a tendency for sheep to come back again because under a cereal cropping system it was realised that there was a benefit to be obtained from a period in which the land was in grass and grazed by sheep. Back home Mr Davies is a purchaser of New Zealand lamb and quite frequently buys a shoulder because he says there is

some fat on it which makes the meat sweeter and, of course, it is also cheaper. One of the things he is enjoying in New Zealand is being able to buy steaks that he would never dream of buying at home, except for very special occasions. This is because a good bit of rump steak would cost about twice as much as out here. As a consequence beef had now been pushed out of the diet of most people. New Zealand lamb in Britain, he said, had a repu- I tation for evenness of quality, even more so than the! home-produced commodity, and this was something that more and more people were demanding. Accompanied by his wife, and a son, aged 10 years, and daughters aged nine and six years, who are going to Ham School, Mr Davies will be in New Zealand for about a year. i He is hoping to learn a great deal from how New Zealand operates its diagnostic and advisory services, and Mr C. M- Allan, superintending veterinary investigation officer at the Animal Health Laboratory at Lincoln, who is on the left in the photograph above, shaking hands with Mr Davies, says he hopes that New Zealand people will benefit as much from their visitor coming from working under a different system and with his knowledge of different diseases.