Allister Here we are with Lara for marketing.

 

Lara Hey, guys.

 

Glenn Hi Lara.

 

Allister Hi, Lara.

 

Lara I've got a question here from Dylan. What is the impact if farmers keep pushing calving earlier to try and maximise days in milk/ milk production.

 

Allister Yes, that's quite an interesting question. But it's also a very difficult one to answer because the question changes dramatically depending on where you are in a cold environment. That won't make a lot of sense, in a wet environment that won't make a lot of sense.

 

Glenn But if you're in those environments.

 

Allister It doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

Glenn It doesn't. But the consequence, I guess, and that's what Dylan was trying to get at, the consequence of going earlier in those environments means that you are trying to grow, feed or import more feed early.

 

Allister Your committed to importing feed in a cold environment. You're committed to potentially more intensive grazing phases for a longer period of wet soil. So you've got a genuine risk phase of a wider base of pasture damage leading on your platform and leading into a potentially big spring peak.

 

Glenn And I think the other thing is. Depending on where you are to your current pasture supply. So currently, if your pasture supplies early and your moving carving date earlier to match that, then that's going to be really good. It's going to be fine. But if your posture production happens later and you continue to move earlier, you're going to have to find either imported feed or stored feed to feed those cows while your pasture isn't growing. So, it's about getting out of step with your pasture production.

 

Allister Correct. And I think that's the art of calving date full stop. You're balancing the days in milk discussion at the front end of the days in milk, because of course you can get greater days in milk by milking for longer. If you have better autumn conditions, you carry more cover in autumn and your body conditions okay in autumn you can have more days of milk. And that has ramifications that are positive because you have less wintering time. If you can stay on the platform. But again, none of this works if you don't have a pasture curve that is close to matching your calving date and therefore your cow requirement moving into early and peak lactation. Otherwise, it comes at a massive cost one in supplement and one in pasture damage. Every day in winter you have got cows behind wires when you're pasture growth isn't meeting their needs is another day where the land is wet and you could damage pasture constantly up until that time. 

 

Glenn So I hope we've answered the question Dylan.

 

Lara Yeah. Thanks. Well, if anyone has any technical, serious or light hearted or anything in between, please feel free to email your questions to info@agricom.co.nz or hit up our Facebook and Instagram pages AgricomNZ.

 

Allister Thanks, Lara.

 

Glenn Thanks, Lara.

 

Glenn Well, Allister, you're looking really good. Those drugs must be working. What are we gonna talk about today?

 

Allister Glenn we are looking at forages to assist with the parasite management.

 

Glenn Great, very topical. 

 

Allister And today we have a guest, and I'll let you introduce him.

 

Glenn Oh, okay. So we have a guest.

 

Allister We have a guest.

 

Glenn The actual person in the studio. Excellent, so today we've got, Greg Mirams. He's the founder and managing director of a group called Techion. Welcome, Greg.

 

Greg Thanks gentlemen.

 

Glenn And tell us a little bit about Techion first and how we get you in the studio to talk a little bit about parasite management.

 

Greg Well, we pretty much an accidental innovation company because we didn't ever set out to do this. We are kind of unusual. So we didn't come out of academia or engineering or IT we came out of farming and my backgrounds in farming. And so we've actually become and evolved into a technology company from the field. So we're very much a muddy boots developer. So a little bit unusual in that field.

 

Glenn And how long have you been in that field in terms of talking about parasites? How long have you been hanging around parasites?

 

Greg Yeah, quite some time so we've crossed three decades now Juddy, so that's when I started with the original FECPACK back in 1992.

 

Glenn And that's probably a story to start with, because I remember the first time I actually met you was actually at a parasitology conference. And I remember, there was a session there in terms of diagnostics for faecal egg counts. And I remember at the time and probably still rages today the debate between whether you can take a composite sample from the paddock or whether you need individual animals to tell you what's happening in the mob. I remember sitting back in the back row watching this very young entrepreneur defending the fact that there was this technology that used composite samples in the industry at the time would have given that to you, Greg.

 

Greg Yeah. It's really interesting because I just couldn't understand why, you know, as a farmer, if I'm weighing my hoggets, you know, I don't weigh the whole mob. I don't weigh 10. I weigh, you know, 20% or I'll run 50 over, you know. And yet they were telling me I just needed to take ten samples. And the range of results you get back is huge. So I'm going, how does it work? It just never reconciled with me. And the other problem was, if you sent those ten samples away they would charge you $100 for just ten, and I had three mobs of lambs, like, am I going to do that with $300? And I want to do it regularly it was never going to work. I want data over time. Data over time is where the gold is. And we looked overseas and they were using composite sampling. So we said why don't we integrate composite sampling. It's not against individual sampling. But when you come down on the farm practicality, we track mobs, we treat mobs. We don't treat individuals.

 

Glenn So that was our first meeting. And I think the second meeting, I think we were both at a field talk at the St John's rooms in Cheviot for those people that know where Cheviot is.

 

Allister North Cantebury in the South Island.

 

Glenn And it was when the first time where we really got the idea of controlling parasites and nutrition to come together. And what was two presentations, but they seem to overlap perfectly. And we've done that a couple of times haven't we Greg.

 

Greg Oh, yeah. Well in performance is a complex adaptive system. It requires a mixture of a whole of ingredients to get that output. And if you look at, well, okay, well, if that's the output I want, what are the major ingredients, the major contributors of that animal performance. And the first one is nutrition right. That's the fundamentals of life. But the big wrecking ball that comes in that destroys that. You can have the best nutrition in the world, the best genetics in the world. If you got a big parasite burden you get smashed. So you can't expect to get high performance if you don't address parasitism in grazing livestock. And that essence runs through today.

 

Glenn Yeah. Cool. So I guess we're going to be talking about parasites. We're going to talk about nutrition. And you've already said previously that you're not actually a parasitologist. I guess, in terms of some of the information that we might talk about today, really, this is based on some good science, but a lot of experience is that. Is that how you see some of the discussions we're going to have today?

 

Greg You know, look, I'm not a parasitologist, and I think that was part of the when we got onto this, I need to put a disclaimer out there. We're going to talk about my opinion, my interpretation, 30 years in the field. And ironically I find myself not being a veterinary or a parasitologist. So I had to create my own academic pathway. So I prefer to say that I'm a faeceologist because no one knows what that is.

 

Allister You really do look at the shit.

 

Greg We do look at the shit. We talk about it. But where it's come from Al it's 30 years of data from all over the world. It's real life experiences. We are able to get all the advantages of users all over the world and the things that have worked for them and modify them and adapt them for markets. And that's where we get the 30-50% reduction in chemical use performance going up. Highly sustainable guys and girls feeling in control of the parasite management. And that's the outcome we're looking for. It's a non-conventional route I guess.

 

Allister But I mean it's a route that's been formed by the fact that you a diagnose or a measurer of the material. Like materials constantly sent to you from all over the world. You are diagnosing what's in the material and providing feedback to your customer base, or the technology is giving customers a chance to recognise what's in their animals faeces.

 

Greg For some particular reason Al, we seem to treat parasite management differently to many other things we do on farm, for example, farmers are looking at, you know, weight gain data, soil testing data, plate curve growth data, you know, like all the time they absorb data and they make decisions. And the ones that are really, really good at it have quick access to that information. And they make intuitive and they get better and better because the data feeds their thinking. And we know in farming it's never a constant line. The variables are constantly changing. So why do we think that putting a chemical intervention on a calendar is ever going to work, it's just never going to work.

 

Allister It's a recipe for resistance.

 

Greg Well, that's one of the outcomes. High investment and then you get these other associated challenges Al.

 

Glenn I guess as an analogy, right we don't cut silage on the same day every year. Without looking at the weather forecast. So we actually get some information in before we actually make some of those decisions.

 

Allister And I think we've got to remember there's a lot of listeners that will have a no relationship to what we're talking about here, to be quite frank. So the technology we need to pull apart a little bit too.

 

Glenn We'll get there. But I think the fundamentals are there, in order to manage parasites, we need to be able to measure parasites. Just coming back because we've got a guest in here. We normally ask the guest a series of questions, so we get to know them a little better. Greg, what's your first car?

 

Greg A 1974 Toyota Corolla. With extra wide rim's, I wish I had it now. It's probably worth fifty grand now, but none of them exist anymore.

 

Glenn What colour?

 

Greg Turquoise with a cream vinyl roof. And sheepskin seat covers.

 

Glenn Top end, that is extremely classy. How much sleep do you need? I've got this theory around the amount of sleep you need and the kind of character sometimes people turn out to be. So what's your sleep requirement?

 

Greg Probably less than many. I'm a good sleeper, sleep comes pretty, pretty good for me. But I'd probably average 6 to 7 hours a night. And I have to because you sort of need a big engine for this stuff, right. Because there's so much going on. It's very dynamic. So yeah, you've got to manage yourself as much as anything else.

 

Glenn And finally, I know you're a bit of a dab hand on the barbecue. What's the one dish that you really like to cook or possibly eat?

 

Greg Well, probably any dish that someone else makes for me is probably my wife's preference. I do like my protein I'd have to say.

 

Glenn So lots of beans.

 

Greg Yes, mixed with some animal protein Juddy would be my choice.

 

Glenn Cool. All right. Let's move into this era of parasites. Greg, I'm just going to ask you to give your view of the state of the nation in terms of probably New Zealand, but I think, you know, be able to spread this many other places that have livestock. Where are we currently now? What's the situation in terms of parasites and how do we control this?

 

Greg Yeah. So to answer the local question, I'll just take you a little bit broader because some of your listeners might be a little interested, this is not an issue that's unique to New Zealand. It's a global issue and the issues are the same but different. And what I mean by that is that drug resistance is a huge global problem. The dynamics and the instruments that form our resistance profile is quite unique to New Zealand, which I'll talk about. But the fundamentals of it are a worldwide problem. We're seeing the uncontrolled use of chemicals in our food production. Now, that is a global issue. And the visibility and supply chain is constantly being talked about. And it's been talked about for a while. But the conscious consumer, the visibility, the internet and supply chain integrity come as producers of protein, high quality protein, we have to be responsive to that. And, you know, I'd like to chuck a challenge out there because I think one of the greatest enablers of us truly changing the dial on that is our meat processors, doing a little more than talking about being a food company in this area. I know they're doing other stuff, but in this area and actually recognising the great food story that we can do if we actually address some of these challenges and put them into our food story. So resistance is a challenge. The conscious consumers are a challenge. Greenhouse gas is an interesting one because there's published science now that if you've got untreated parasitism going on, your GHG will go up by 33%.

 

Allister Yeah. So that's basically all the inefficiencies in the animal. One they're on your property for much longer because that's physically not growing to the fact that they actually not functioning properly in the rumen.

 

Greg Correct. And not only that, Al you've got a dysfunctional biome going on right. Because parasites are disrupting it. So you have this dual effect. And what saddens me is that I've been in Wellington recently talking to some people, and I don't think there's any active GHG projects in animal health. And I just go, I don't know why that's happening. So again, if there's anybody listening that you've got to start shaking the tree because these are things that we can talk about now, we can address now, we can roll into our greenhouse gas story. And it's not just about planting a tree to offset. This is real stuff. Farmers will make more money and address the GHG if we get onto this. 

 

Glenn And I guess just as a really good example of something that we're talking about, the difference in terms of both greenhouse gas and efficiency from, for example, being able to wean a lamb off mom straight to the works versus weaning, going through a weaning check, having to load that animal maybe with 3 or 4 doses of anthelmintic to get them through to a slaughterable weight. But wait, those two things, that they could be exactly the same animal. They're just on a different trajectory. And at the moment we're probably not taking enough notice of the first one that we can do this. We can actually get animals to a slaughter weight without any of this if we've got their farm systems right.

 

Greg Look, you're right, Juddy, the thing is that I just want to make it really clear. I'm not anti-drench. We need these compounds and we use them. What saddens me in the greenhouse gas story is that we constantly see through our data. Because we've got a live database globally. Every time farmers are pushing up samples from the FECPAK units, we're getting the data. And when you consolidate that, we have huge parasitism outbreaks still. So we're pouring $150 million into a drug at this problem in New Zealand. And we still have these massive blowouts. So that means that our greenhouse gas is going up, production is going down because we're missing it because people can't see it. So if we can make this invisible problem visible and the guys and girls will change their treatment, it's a win win win. You do less work. Your animals are better, less greenhouse gas. Which capture that story is what we need to do.

 

Allister Inefficiencies are captured.

 

Glenn The one I want to look at is. So what is the future? In here we've got this problem at the moment we are probably relying too much on anthelmintic to get us through. There are these other forages and forage systems that can help us, paint us a picture of what the future might hold for us in this space.

 

Greg Well, I think, Juddy we got to drop it down to the farm. Right. So let's just talk about a farm. So the first thing is you have the drugs that you can use on your farm are what you can use on your farm, and it won't be the same for you or anyone else. Like it is unique to you. And that's set by your predecessors or your own behaviours over a period of time. So, you have a parasite population which is unique to a property. So what drugs work on your farm and which one doesn't is the first building block. What works? What doesn't? And I'm just going to think of it like this. If you sprayed some gorse, you know, a lot of money, got the helicopter and all the gear. And then three months later, it's all butting up again. You got to be on the phone going get in here, what's going on and you'll be it was either poorly applied or the chemical didn't work, whatever is going on. And yet that same philosophy we should be doing with us if we are using these drugs, you got to know what works. So doing a drench smart faecal egg count reduction test is number one. The next thing is the risk profile is the importation of someone else's pain someone else's problem. And if I use this analogy, if I turned up to your place with my rams that you've bought from me. He's your rams Juddy, thanks for that. Couple of grand each. And you look at them and go, mate, they've got foot rot. You're going to let me run those off onto your farm? You're going to tell me to get the hell out of here, right? And yet, if you bring a mob of lambs in and we did a faecal egg count on them, and they're checking out eggs, they're mine. And you've got no idea if they've got resistance. Right? So if you run them out onto your farm and they shit on your paddock, you have just brought my parasites. Just like foot rot straight through the gate. And that's a really interesting point because we've just published that drench resistance in the New Zealand sheep industries, now cracking $98 million in lost production. It's nearly $100 million we're losing because farmers are using compounds they do not know that don't work. Because I get asked, well, why is resistance continuing to explode? It's you know, we've got triple resistance now for triples at 27% that's like a third of our farm have got triple resistance. And that curve line is just hockey sticking. It's just exploding. And people say well why is it. Well, the reason is because if I send my animals over to Al’s and he goes all, you know, I gave them a triple when they arrived, you know, I quarantined them in. Well, there's a 1 in 3 chance it didn't work. And when you send yours to Juddy, there's a 1 in 3 chance. So when it becomes 1 in 3, 1 in 4, 1 in 5 chance. Like we're spreading resistance because we are not doing the quarantine.

 

Allister The quarantine and even the measurement. So I mean I think that's a really important thing to understand our industry because the reality is our sheep industry is broken up into a big group of breeders, on landscapes that cannot always be finished. So in the New Zealand context, a lot of sheep get traded. That's not even just the movement of genetics via size, replacement, young stock and things like that. We are literally, trading, our lamb flock around the country and some of it can travel huge kilometres within the country, under the rules of how long they can stay on trucks and that but the reality is they're still travelling long distances from areas with different pastures, different growth curves,  all sorts of scenarios. And that's what makes this such a wildfire, is that there's just so much natural movement in our farm system.

 

Greg And you're not just getting sheep. You're getting whatever they bring in, right?

 

Allister Yeah.

 

Greg You're right Al. And we see over time and we've done 20 years of monitoring resistance profiles. We see spikes post dry years, you know, and the reason is because when things dry out, we shift stock more and we don't quarantine properly. And then we see that subsequent loss.

 

Allister Making stressful decisions and moving fast and things like that create gaps in that whole process.

 

Glenn So in terms of the future, I'm really keen to just focus in on this. You know we've got some issues in terms of not knowing which drug we should be using whether they're effective, in some cases, we don't know how many worms we've got in some of the animals that we are bringing around. Give us a glimpse into the future what do you see in terms of how can technology help us get over some of these hurdles?

 

Greg Yeah. So building blocks there are. So know what drugs you've got. Don't import someone else who has not had proper quarantine procedures in place. And that's not just the triple that's actually checking that what have you treated them or someone else did, works. Simple egg count, very simple, no eggs coming in. No risk. If there are eggs in that shit then you have got a risk.

 

Allister So if I go back to some detail. You're talking about numbers of samples. You know how many samples of people you know from a system like that, what do you sort of see as capturing a flock of 800 lambs or 1500 lambs at a time, coming into a system? What sort of population dynamic do you need to actually capture that?

 

Greg So again, it's baseline statistics. So you basically go look, if you take 30 individuals in a population, that will give you a mean number. Like if you weigh 30 and then weigh 200 your mean won't change. Same with us right. So when you go and take a composite sample, you pick up 30 samples. And if you really want to be careful, take another 30 samples, do two tests through. Doesn't take long two tests through. Have a look at those results. That's going to give you confidence on whether you bring anything in. And it's taken you a very small amount of time. It's two tests through your system. You're not doing heaps of them.

 

Allister It's just another process.

 

Greg Yeah. So back to Juddy's question. So those building blocks what works on farm don't bring it in. And then you look inside the farm. So that's more when do I treat and why do I treat. And that's to answer your question Juddy about what does the future look like. We because we've got a population of different parasites and we've got a product range of different compounds. So when you get resistance, it is a compound not killing a parasite. It's not generally one compound kills nothing. It will not kill one particular parasite. And through the year, the worms change like grass grows does and plants grow. It just changes and they fill the space and they have different periods where they like to operate. So Juddy, the answer is at the moment we just pull a shotgun out and go boom. And hopefully we nail this problem. And all we're saying is we actually we start pulling a rifle out and we just, we pick off, we get the right drug because we know which ones on the right parasite. And the reason for that is because a. We know they are there. The new tech part is we're going to be able to not just provide the egg count, but also which species it is. So you got that, so you're pulling out your rifle and you're just going ping and you're not using compounds that are ineffective you're using them in a very targeted approach. And that's the future.

 

Glenn A bit like we do for weeds.

 

Greg It's exactly the same precision weed spraying. 

 

Glenn But we actually select the herbicide we are going to spray based on the weed spectrum that we're trying to control. And I guess, what we haven't had in the past is the ability to speciate on a faecal egg count.

 

Greg Yeah, exactly. And this is where you're seeing AI in weed spraying now identifying the weed and going, just a tiny little zap on that.

 

Allister I'm afraid to say I'm gonna have to ask in detail here because how do you do that?

 

Greg How do we do our part?

 

Allister Yeah, the ID component is it a visual ID?

 

Greg It's visual because basically each parasite produces an egg that looks different from other parasites. So some of them are quite close. But at the moment, if you want to speciate your worm burden from a faecal sample, you have to put them in an incubator and do what's called a larval culture. And it takes two weeks and cost you a hundred bucks. We talking about being able to do that in real time from an image. From a picture of them. So it's just facial recognition for parasite eggs.

 

Allister That is awesome because that's a big deal. And it's quite amazing actually considering you've been counting those eggs for a very long time.

 

Greg It's very, very complex.

 

Allister Okay, you've got some smart people in your team obviously.

 

Glenn So let's move on. So now we've talked a little about the diagnostics and sort of building a parasite management, kind of platform in terms of those different components of that. Can we just turn our focus to a situation where we're getting all that. We are inside our farm what are the things that we can do inside the farm that might be able to stretch those drenching intervals out, or I mean, that we're not drenching some individuals. What are the critical bits in terms of the principles of parasitism and the life cycle that we can take advantage of? What are the things that we can do to help ourselves, not just rely on, on chemical.

 

Greg Yeah. So like anything in life, the more you know, the better you are at addressing it. Right so, with parasites, the biology never changes. So they only get wormy. Sheep and cattle only get wormy when they eat larvae. And the more larvae they eat, the more risk there they're at.

 

Allister So that's loading.

 

Greg That's loading right, because what happens is as they start to eat pasture and it's got lots of larvae, the immune system starts to respond because there's foreign bodies coming in. Now, that immune response is where your growth rate starts to drop. Now, I haven't even mentioned worms in the gut here. Most damage occurs when they come over the tongue, the damage is done when it comes over the tongue. That's when the switch on starts to happen.

 

Allister So it's almost like an allergy reaction.

 

Greg It's completely the same, it is that response.

 

Glenn And the key piece of work that I thought was the most interesting is in animals where you've got that huge challenge. But with a bit of drug therapy, you can actually turn off their immune system, right. You don't get that reduction in performance. So it's not actually the worms themselves that are having the biggest impacts. It's actually the animals response to those worms which is having the biggest effect.

 

Allister That must be an interesting feedback loop associated with that. Anyway.

 

Greg Well, we'll just dive, I won't dive for long here Juddy I promise. But in areas of the world where, we don't have, Western medicine, in other words, in areas of the world, I mean, there's vast, multiple millions of people are infected by internal parasites. In all of those areas in the world. These under and lesser developed countries, we do not have any incidence of irritable bowel, Crohn's, any immune related illnesses. And just think about that for a moment. Because what happens is in our society, our immune systems don't have anything to fight off, so they take themselves and then people get really sick. So there are people, and there's a lot of interesting work going on where they are infecting themselves with internal parasites to get the immune system to attack those parasites and not their own body. So this is not a new thing. It's not about animals alone. This is a very known phenomena. So how can we manage that? Manipulate that on farm? You know, it's very simple. If our animals are eating low or no or very few numbers of larvae, they will grow better. They will grow way better. You will not need to treat them. And it's entirely sustainable. And you don't care about drench resistance. And not only that, your market loves it because there's very little chemical in it. And it's really sustainable. So the whole essence of what we should be doing is not thinking about animals with worms in them and treating them and which drug and all the rest of it, we should actually be going. How do we minimise larval intakes? I'm not saying zero because you don't need zero. No, if you have got 5000 larvae a day coming into an animal, right, it will just smash the growth rates. You can have 5000 larvae a day coming in and treat them every three weeks. And that will improve the growth rates. But if you have 1000 larvae a day with no treatments they will outperform them.

 

Allister Yeah. So relativity is quite a big deal. So let me get this right though. So for many species of parasites, it's the response of the body to the actual intake loading. That actually creates the first reaction that changes though doesn't though when you get populated by for example, gut.

 

Greg It's a continuum. You're right Al. Because then what happens is then you start getting gut lining damages and the animal can't convert. And you get lining scar tissue and it all goes down hill.

 

Allister This is the issue of identification. And this is the issue of the diversity of parasites in our landscape, because not all of them are gut feeders as per say. Is that correct?

 

Greg Yeah. And look, one of the things I think we've got to watch, we don't because we could rabbit hole all the way down and get very technical here. But you are right. They behave in different ways. They reside in different parts of the animal. So their effect is different. They're not all just worms. They are different. And we're not suggesting farmers need to understand all of those things. It's those base principle issues like so if you look at forages and how they relate to, you know, some forages habour parasites beautifully. Right, if you take brown top for example, it mats over, which means that UV light can't burn the larvae off. It traps moisture which they love because larvae need moisture. And of course then the other one is its nutritionally poor. So the animals immune system is softened and hello we get poor nutrition, parasite burdens blowing out and all goes terribly wrong.

 

Allister Yorkshire fog strikes me as a hotel for L3 larve as well, for the same reason.

 

Greg And that's why another part of that is, you know, and this is one of the very obvious things. And farmers listening to this programme will know this, you know, parasites issues in particularly lambs or calves under irrigation is polar different to just over the fence on dry. And then they can be eating rubbish on the dry and you go and look at them go, you know. And then put one of your extremely, valuable high performance feed over the fence and it's under a pivot and they're going why isn't it performing? And you guys will cop it because I'll say, well, they're just not going anywhere. Well we go in there and just watch these egg counts blowing out because they've contaminated your fancy feed, and we've taken the edge off its performance because we've parasitised it. And so the trick is when you put these high quality forages in don't contaminate them. If you can avoid that, like know what your animals are dumping onto your red clovers or your plantain and like the stuff you've invested in to do it. So maximise that performance. Because too often we see high quality, good quality forages and they're not delivering the performance. And it's not because of the forages, it's because of a parasite issue. An undetected, undiagnosed parasite issue.

 

Allister We've had quite a decade's worth of experience of that. The other one for us, though, at a practical level, is the fact that not all our landscapes can cultivate and spray out every part of the paddock. And therefore, I still feel that people underestimate dramatically the grassy areas under trees, around rocks and in gullies which give fibre, in theory, to help an adaption onto the summer crop on a potentially clean crop. But they are great hosting locations with brown tops and Yorkshire fogs and things.

 

Glenn It was a bit of really good work there, actually. Greg and I did right back at the start at Marshdale and we took some animals that were completely clean and we put them on a brassica crop, a kale crop for the winter, which was completely clean. And we saw egg counts rise. And it was because of the little bit of grass that was round the outside of it and were grazing that hard and slowly, didn't get to higher levels, but actually, they increased. So, you're right that those things can harbour infective larvae at any time, I guess. The other thing I wouldn't mind exploring is, we're probably coming into an autumn. You probably would like to get this podcast coming in the autumn. I wonder if we could just go through maybe a sheep, beef and a dairy system and just as if we're sitting there in the autumn, we know that it might be dry. Might not be one what are the things that farmers can think about in each of those systems, Greg, that might help in terms of, getting them on in the right head space to deal with parasites. So if we start with sheep, for example where we'll be coming into mating, we might have some lambs on board. What are the key things we should be thinking about?

 

Greg Yeah, it's an absolute critical time. So the timing of the podcast going out is really valuable at that time. So the first part of it is that, if you talk about drugs and drug resistance, you only see it when that drug comes under pressure. So if you've got animals grazing on, you know, really good quality clean feed, it doesn't matter if you've got drug resistance because there are limited parasites there so you don't even know it's failing. The autumn is when the game changes. Because what happens is, sunshine hours drop. We get moisture, particularly after a hot summer where remember, larvae need moisture. So if there's very limited moisture, you can have animals grazing. Not getting a challenge, grazing on very little, but doing quite well. So please don't drench in a drought like that's really bad. It's wasting your money. It's causing resistance. So don't do it, what I'm saying is have numbers to support that. But if there's one opportunity. Don't keep drenching in a drought on dry country. But then as you get those autumn dues coming in in the mornings and you get fogs and it changes very, very quickly. And I'm sure many listeners will have seen this, the last of the works lambs. Ewe lambs getting punched. You know coming in into mating. R1 calves post weaning or around weaning, you know, that. We see all this crunch coming in. Right. And so what happens, and that's when the drugs get under pressure. And that's when we see the wheels falling off. And it comes back to primary principles. So back to your point. So what we want to do is we think about what we talked about before is how can I keep my most vulnerable stock on country that has the lowest amount of larvae because it doesn't matter. And this is where your autumn forages come in. And if you've managed them really well you know when it becomes tough, then you get those young stock onto these forages and get them off, you know land paddocks, they've been grazed 15 times and you know they're smashed like and put the cattle on there. Put they put the ewes on there you know and this is why, you know, autumn prepared early winter forages is so critical to grow those young stocks through and keep things moving.

 

Allister So what we're talking about there though is a couple of different principles, aren't we. Because many of our cropping options let's just use examples rape crops, leaf turnips, chicory's. Part of it is one they've got an incredibly positive nutritional plane which just helps build the energy profile with protein for that immune challenge. But two the larvae don't function on these types of feeds the same as they do on brown top, Yorkshire fog or a wet ryegrass environment, for example. And so yeah, the challenge is part of that management is that they're not in the zone to be eaten at the level that we're getting the response.

 

Greg And you're right this is what we're doing. Is that the takeaway message which we are trying to nail is just shifting the thinking. Right. Parasites are 90% on the ground. 5% is in the animal and a whole industry run on 5%. And we keep trying to fix the 5% and wonder why we still failing. Well, the reason is because we don't address the 95%, right? So if we can just shift this thinking and go, if we can understand those larval levels and know who pollutes the farm, where and when do they do it, how do I avoid it? Then you just see this production go up, costs go down, and an environment where you're a price taking farmer and your prices are crap. Like, the only way to improve your performance is to lower your cost line. And if you look at your animal health costs and you work in energy output, that's the opportunity because you can control that, you can't control the price.

 

Glenn Often what we do is we look at some of those summer crops and say, you know, based on the margin that we're making out of our lambs.

 

Allister Lamb trading situation.

 

Glenn Then actually I can't make this work. But if you also said, well, that's also part of your parasite management programme. And so that crop is there not only just to feed those animals, but to get them away and start breaking the cycles then I think from a, combating resistance, I don't know what price you put on it. Also, they can be very, very useful.

 

Allister And I'll raise that one because, you know, we're coming towards the end of this, but I would say that this level of thinking that it's been discussed and the measurement and the identification is really important. But this is where farmers have got to have the long game in their minds as well. Because, for example, rolling into the 24 season, we've been hit by a decrease in commodity prices in our landscape while we've been hit by weather. We've been hit by the threat of droughts, and there's been lots of reactions, and not everyone's done this. But the decisions you make back in your spending process and cropping systems, for example, alone, as Glenn said, in a reducing commodity market, it's not always attractive to crop. You actually may not get a great return on it, but if you roll into late summer and you roll into late autumn and you are then hit by everything we've just discussed, the consequences of that are much, much greater than not having that safe feed in that landscape at that moment in time. So we're seeing reactions to moments without looking at the calendar year and those big stress points that may come at a later date.

 

Glenn I guess what you're saying here is to put it in perspective. What you're saying is you might not actually make any money off some of these crops in some years, but they might help you to lose a whole lot less.

 

Allister Yeah, probably. I'll go a bit further. You are reacting to a moment based on a price drop, and thinking about how I can manage my cost structures, because one of the ways to stay profitable in this environment is manage cost and focus on cost. But the reality is, if you don't think about the mechanisms we're discussing, which is, prediction measurement,  focus on stock movement,  but also providing safe landscapes to bring vulnerable stock onto. You're making a decision way back in a spring or a late winter, and in your yearly planning. And the consequences are happening ten months later. And they could be disastrous. Yeah. And it's just as simple as selling capital stock in a drought. It's the stock you actually have might be collapsing in front of your eyes.

 

Greg Yeah. And the options get short. But, I think if we try and pull this back into this higher level, we talked about shifting our mindset to understanding larval intakes. And that's really what you're doing. And a lot of how you integrate that autumn feed stuff. The other one is moving from what we generally do as a prophylactic or what they call it preventative treatment approach and going. We need to actually be moving to evidence base, like why the question, why am I doing this? And to understand why I'm doing this. If we can start to shift that mindset, it all clips together. You know, farmers, you know, they talk about oh look, you know, I'm a stockmanship. Well, where do you get your stockmanship from? You're picking up sensors and your stockmanship is your eye, your weather forecast, your grass. And what we're doing is we just chuck the egg count in there into your stockmanship decision making. And you're more powerful, right?

 

Allister Much more powerful.

 

Greg You'll make way more smarter decisions at the right time, and you'll feel in control of something that most of us still aren't. After 30 years of trying to do this, and we've got plenty around the world. And saddens me slightly that, you know, 70 plus percent of our product goes offshore. New Zealand's our hardest market.

 

Allister Yeah.

 

Greg One thing I just want to touch on is this is all great. And everyone goes, oh, I've got to buy a FECPAK to do this. You know, that's quite a big investment, you know. For us, we're going if we want to truly change the mindset of an industry and behaviour from prophylactic or just calendar to the evidence base, we cannot expect our industry to move if we don't have access to testing is easy as we have access to drugs. And at the moment, they are still poles apart. You can go and buy drench online. You can buy them at any vet clinic, any retailer. But where can you buy test easily, which is why we've rolled out with Farmlands. You can walk into Farmlands now you can just buy a test for $50 or $40 or something as cheap its as chips. You can get this data. You do not have to jump into big high tech. You can begin this journey. It's available to you now.

 

Glenn Cool. As a summary, this has been fascinating. You know, I think it's been really topical because, you know, as Greg's outlined, this is a real big issue. It's just that it's invisible to a lot of people. I think we need to change. I agree, we need to change the mindset of how we how we deal with it. So I think from that point, you know, we're not in a great state and there are some headwinds in terms of our, consumers. And actually the ability for drugs to work. They're coming at us so we need to change something. I think there's some key principles. We do still need those drugs, but we need to be relying on some of these other factors. Our management of them looking at when we're getting contamination and how we're minimising that, which is a really key thing. I think forage and forage systems are really underutilised resource here. Being able to get young animals, particularly into safe pastures, I think that is really critical. And I think you made the point, Allister, that starts sometime before that event in terms of the planning for that I think it is really important and I guess the other thing is really run it diagnostics. And Greg, you've highlighted it really well. You've actually got to know what's going on to be able to manage it. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I guess that's the challenge for all those people out there is to have a good think about their parasite management programme and get those fundamental building blocks in terms of the control of those.

 

Allister And I probably would take one other thing away that I probably appreciated hearing and understanding a little bit. It makes total sense to me now. We are in a ruminant based industry, we are seen to have a responsibility that we should be working towards as hard as we can to reduce greenhouse gases from ruminant, farming and the concept that parasite management can have a 30% impact on your outcome in methane production from a ruminant system, to be quite frank, is big. 

 

Greg We need to have the conversation.

 

Allister And the concept of that not, being recognised at a very, very high level, when we're going for silver bullets. But the silver bullet can be completely broken by not getting this right. And I feel I would like to leave it with that. And I thank you so very much for joining us today, because I think that one is a big deal.

 

Glenn Yeah, well, I better go out and do a composite sample or a couple more. I don't know what the worm count is going to be, Greg, thanks for joining us. And, we'll catch you in the future.

 

Greg My pleasure gentlemen. Appreciate it. Thanks very much.