Supercow? What, me?

Press, 26 July 1986, Page 21

Supercow? What, me?

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

A couple of mates came over the other day to help get rid of the dunny and afterwards we sat around yarning over a cup of tea. One wasn’t having any milk in his tea. And why not? “Had to give it up,” he said. "All bull calves this year.” This apocryphal explanation reminded me for no good reason of camels, so I pointed out that the hairy old joke (Ask a committee to design a horse, and what do you get? A camel) might have to be revised. Tomorrow’s horses aren’t going to grow humps, but the camel just might turn into the supercow of the future.

Recent intelligence from Israel is that some devilishly cunning scientists there are working on bedouin camels with advanced technology. They believe camels may hold the key to solving protein-deficiency problems in the world’s arid and droughtprone areas. It seems that camel milk keeps longer than cow’s milk, is lower in fat, rich in minerals and vitamins, and easily digestible. And from an arid-region agronomist’s point of view, the camel is the perfect browsing animal. Camel herds do not denude the soil of its sparse and precious vegetation. They roam over wide areas, eating only some of the herbage in any area (unlike sheep and goats, which may leave the soil bare). Camels can reach high into trees and bushes for fodder, and will eat bitter, thorny shoots that sheep and even goats spurn. As well as milk they supply transport, meat, wool for rugs and

blankets, and hides for tents and leather goods. In Turkana, in northern Kenya, a team of workers from F.A.R.M. (Sir Michael Wood’s Food and Agriculture Research Commission) has begun to establish an experimental camel farm.

There are lots of problems, both social and technical. To help with the former, the team includes a British anthropologist whose task is to make sure that the infusion of Western technology does not clash with African ways — such as the tradition in some areas that camel milk must be drunk fresh and cannot be sold. There could be problems with labour for camel farms in the regions where traditional beliefs hold that only boys, single women, and ritually purified men are permitted to milk camels. Apart from all this, there are the problems of finding suitable stock of milking camels, then building up a herd. Camels breed at only half the rate of domestic cattle.

But the researchers believe that the potential benefits of camel farms justify the effort needed to overcome the taboos and technical problems. Scientists at Ben Gurion University in Israel already know, from studies made in Pakistan and in the Negev Desert, that on a diet of only six to eight kilograms of fodder daily a female camel can yield about 40 litres of milk, which is a lot more than cows could manage in similar circumstances.

To critics who say that an infusion of modern camel tech-

nology would destroy a traditional way of life for desert dwellers, the Israelis reply that drought and famine have already destroyed it. It’s a bit early yet to predict whether some of the miles of deer fence which has sprung up on the Canterbury Plains in the last year or two will one day restrain herds of spitting camels. But the Israelis are confident that the camel has a great potential to expand agricultural production in the world’s arid regions, and to improve people’s diets there.

Scientists at Ben Gurion University are now working on ways to accelerate the breeding cycle.

Left to her own devices, a female camel does not breed until she is about six years old, and thereafter only at two-year intervals. The Israelis have brought the breeding age down to three years by using hormone injections, and are playing about with fertility drugs, embryo implants, and in-vitro fertilisation. They reckon that by injecting fertility drugs they can make a female camel produce 50 eggs, so that 10 selected superior camels could in theory produce 500 pedigree calves within 18 months. One bull camel could produce all the necessary sperm, and the rest could be killed for meat while still young and tender. Eat your hearts out, producer boards! Actually, my mates weren’t too impressed by all this. They reckon they might stick with sheep. Things are a bit slow just now, but sooner or later they’ll be over the hump. And who wants to farm an animal that farts in your face and spits in your eye? « * * Among the trees which caught the eye on a couple of recent field days were two young stands

of the “Bishop pine,” Pinus muricata, a tree whose needles have an appealing, bluish-green cast. Both were on high, cold sites, and I get the impression, from talking to foresters, that this tree is likely to be planted more frequently in the future on inland sites where it will tolerate greater exposure to low temperatures than the more familiar Pinus radiata.

The Bishop pine (named for its “hometown,” San Luis Obispo) is a fairly recent “discovery” on the forestry front, but it has been grown in New Zealand for quite a long time and a few mature stands exist. A particularly good group was noted at Braemar Station, Lake Pukaki, during a survey of high-country forestry potential by a team led by Nick Ledgard, of the Forest Research Institute, Rangiora, and Mark Belton, of the Forest Service, Christchurch.

Aged 60 years, the Braemar stand averaged 31.4 metres in height and just under 50cm diameter at breast height (1.36 metres). The timber volume was estimated at 1063 cubic metres per hectare. This translates to an m.a.i. (or "mean annual increment” — a forestry term for the amount of timber a stand of trees adds to its volume each year, which is money in the bank from a forester’s viewpoint) of 17.7 cubic metres. The tallest tree in the Braemar stand was measured at 33

metres, and, bearing in mind that individual trees in a plantation tend to grow less quickly than isolated specimens because of root competition, it is interesting to compare this with the tallest known specimen in the British Isles, where the climate, the British repeatedly tell us, is particularly favourable for the growth of plants of all kinds. The Braemar free is several metres taller than the tallest recorded British bishop pine.

The Braemar trees are the “blue strain” of bishop pine, which is favoured for forestry because it has better form and smaller branches than the “green strain.” The blue strain is also hardier, coming as it does from the northern end of the tree’s natural range in California.

One of life’s little ironies is that in New Zealand the bishop pine is regarded as a tree for cold inland sites where Pinus radiata ei'.her fails or grows badly; whereas in California it is a coastal tree found on exposed headlands, buffeted by gales which sweep in across the whole width of the Pacific Ocean.

The Braemar plot is not the only good one that the survey team found in Canterbury’s high

country. Measurements of a stand in the N.Z.E.D. plantations at the Lake Coleridge powerhouse gave a yield almost as good, at 845 cubic metres per hectare at the age of 52 years, an m.a.i. of 16.3 cubic metres.

Bishop pine timber is regarded as being comparable in quality to that of radiata, and has roughly equal value. The value of stands like the ones at Braemar and Lake Coleridge depends on the number of marketable logs that they contain (not on the total volume), but even if only twothirds of the stems were sawlogs the Braemar stand would be worth around $16,000 per hectare standing. This works out to between $250 and $3OO per hectare per year. Not many highcountry properties give this sort of annual yield from sheep! There aren’t enough big old stands of Bishop pine in the Canterbury high country to make a general comparison with the yields from Corsican and Ponderosa pines — the two favoured high-country pines — but these figures from Coleridge and Braemar stand up well alongside the averages for the better-known trees.

Very few big old specimens of the Bishop pine are on record in New Zealand. Probably the largest was a tree measured In a Forest Service survey at 38 metres tall and 83cm d.b.h. in 1970. However, this tree is not mentioned in more recent publications. . < , •

No time for

tradition

Blues and

greens