Allister Here we are with Lara for marketing with some new questions for us.

 

Lara Hey, guys, I can't believe it's around about Christmas time. Are we excited?

 

Allister Yes, we are.

 

Glenn I can't believe it's about Christmas time either.

 

Lara I have a couple more questions here. First one up is from Dylan, what's the ideal ryegrass heading dates split on a standard dairy farm. And does this change across New Zealand?

 

Allister That's quite a broad question. I think the reality is that many, many dairy farms in New Zealand are using quite late flowering genetics. Key to that is that it takes a lot of the spring pasture quality management out of spring because they don't go to seed until pretty much December or early summer. And I feel that in the time frame when nitrogen isn't as widely used, particularly early in the season, needing early season growth is quite important. On average, you're only picking that up with earlier flowering material. So the key would probably be to think strategically about using some mid maturity earlier material and probably at about 30 to 40% of your area over time would be one of the answers. But being well aware where those paddocks are because they will have pasture management challenges 2 to 3 weeks earlier than the average pasture on your dairy farm. So being well aware of your flowering date, writing it on your farm plan and knowing exactly where the paddocks are, will help you manage pasture quality through late October through to the start of December.

 

Glenn Would make one other comment and I entirely agree with you, Allister, but it will also depend on what's there now. So probably if we are having a lot of late flowering ryegrasses, then the introduction of some mids could be quite beneficial. If there's a lot of mids there, then actually the introduction of some later flowering varieties might actually be of benefit and that will depend on what the seasonal requirements are. I think the really important point here is understanding what your pasture curve looks like and what your demand curve looks I think is really important. So the recipe won't be the same for everybody. But I think the general principles that Allister has just outlined hold true, you know, across the country. It's just the differences will be where you've come from and what their supply and demand curves look like.

 

Allister And yeah just summarising again the colder you are, particularly in the spring, the more likely you are to want to investigate early season grasses that grow earlier in spring because colder conditions with moderate nitrogen use can be quite challenging to hit pasture production at a key point in the milk production curve.

 

Glenn Particularly again if you are calving early.

 

Lara Sweet. Thanks for your question, Dylan. Another one here from Angee. What crop options people might have when they miss the ideal sowing window.

 

Allister So there's no detail on this question about an exact example. So what I would always highlight is if it's in spring time, you've actually got to be very, very careful because if you miss your target windows, you are literally sowing into summer conditions. So you are typically sowing crops in spring to harvest spring moisture before the onset of summer dry conditions. So if you miss your target spring window, your very next phase is summer dry or drying soils. And this is a nightmare for agronomists because fundamentally soil moisture conservation is a big deal for germination and your crops getting established. If you miss your primary window, the one thing you probably need to recognise is you've also missed your window for target grazing dates, which means that whatever you consider using, if you have a plan B needs to have a maturity or a ripening or a grazing window that still fits your target time. So often it's a shorter maturity crop of some description that you're putting in the ground, crossing your fingers, that the soil isn't too light, too fluffy, not enough seed contact you need to roll to make sure your seed has got contact as you head towards drier conditions and you are looking for earlier maturity crops that grow faster, ripen quicker and can be grazed at the same time as if you hit your target date earlier. Quite important. In the autumn, quite a different story. Basically, you can get away with sowing virtually anything early if the moisture conditions are right, but as you get lighter and lighter, you tend to find the success of brassicas get weaker and weaker. You move to ryegrasses and then from ryegrasses to oats is a way of getting accumulating winter feed. So the two times a year have quite two different answers.

 

Glenn Yeah what he said.

 

Lara Awesome. I personally love this question that Howard sent through sum up in one sentence what your favourite thing is about each other.

 

Glenn Oh, you go first Al.

 

Allister Oh, mate. Well, it would be so, so simple to just say its your sparkling personality. The thing I do like is that inside your sparkling personality is actually a very bright person who brings a whole lot of thought to a whole lot of questions. And you're a real academic, wrapped in a very charismatic package. And I think that's probably one of the deeper insights I probably even thought about answering that question with you. But yeah, I always get amazed at the styles of things you create and do at an academic level and a personality that doesn't come across that academic at times.

 

Lara That's a bit of a backhanded compliment.

 

Glenn I don't know what to say.

 

Allister Yeah, well maybe.

 

Glenn The thing that I.

 

Allister This is really weird by the way.

 

Glenn I really appreciate is that I always get. Sometimes it's brutal, sometimes it's blunt, but you always bring a perspective to an issue that cuts away all the surplus stuff and gets to the heart of the issue and provides solutions to and opportunities to solve that. But always recognise that it's coming at you blunt right, and you're going to get it in the smallest words and it's going to be right at the heart of it. But if you can cope with it then, it's so refreshing because it really highlights what the solution is. So I really appreciate that I've even got a problem I know Allister is going to give me his very blunt opinion of how that could be solved. So I really appreciate that.

 

Allister As I say, a very weird question, but that's okay.

 

Glenn Can we can we finish that now?

 

Lara If you have any more cute questions, whether they're technical, light hearted or anything in between, please feel free to email us at info@agricom.co.nz or hit up our Instagram and Facebook page at Agricomnz.

 

Allister Thanks, Lara.

 

Lara Thanks.

 

Glenn Thanks, Lara. Well, Alister, you're looking very festive. Must be the time of year and the colour of your eyeliner or something. I'm not sure. But what are we going to be covering today?

 

Allister Well, Glenn, we're going to have a bit of a light-hearted look at our careers. To be honest, we've had a couple of stories that have occurred over that time, and I'm just thinking the diversity of the different things we've experienced with some of our colleagues and our friends and some of the stories might be worth sharing just for a giggle.

 

Glenn Yeah, bit light-hearted look at the last 20 something years of being on the tools if you like.

 

Allister Yes, absolutely. And I suppose at the heart and soul of it, both you and I have spent a huge amount of time in Australia and we've got some really close friends and colleagues over there, some of which don't work for our company now. But when the names are mentioned, they know who they are. And you and I have only travelled very rarely in Australia together, but we've had a few moments together that always cracked me up and I still remember a Warragul field day in Gippsland with the Stephen Pasture team, which probably was one of the very few times we were together in one of those events. Can you remember that one? What I'm talking about?

 

Glenn Yep. It was actually one of my first trips to Australia with you at a field day. So you can kind of picture this it was a four day field day event. And so we're at the field day during the day and in the evening we retire for maybe a meal and then head off to our hotel room to spend the night before we get up and do that all again.

 

Allister And also because you know back in the day to it was hard to get accommodation and Warragul is quite a decent sized town now but always hard to get accommodation. You have to book a long way ahead and quite regularly there'll be 3 to 4 of you in one of your motel rooms.

 

Glenn Yeah. And because it was a studio unit I don't think, I don't think we were sharing, you know, necessarily a double bed or anything silly but we had this unit where there were three or four bedrooms and we each had a room in that and as I recall, what had actually happened is we'd been staying with Stephen Pastures sales team and with some leaving that group in and no one else arriving. There was only two of us, so we were too big for the accommodation we'd been and the Stephen Pasture Seeds team with a few people arriving. They were too big for the small unit that they'd been in, so we actually swapped over halfway through that and what were we doing at the field day?

 

Allister We were launching one of our flagship products, ONE50 perennial ryegrass in the day. And yeah, we used to get right in behind the launches of these things in Australia particularly and so very, very themed tent and site, a lot of visitors turn up and talk to you about your general pastures. But we were launching ONE50 over there at that time, so quite a long time ago.

 

Glenn This big ONE50 launch the key thing is we had swapped over these motel units. So we'd gone into the unit that the Stephen Pasture Seeds team would come out of. And unbeknown to us that one of our colleagues over the head decided to play a prank on the two Kiwis in terms of this product, this launch. And so what he'd done is when we'd changed over, he had got every alarm clock he could find probably in the whole complex, and he'd hidden them in drawers, you know, under beds in the bathroom. And he had set the time for the alarm to go off right at 10 minutes to 2. And of course, AM, ten minutes to two in the morning. And so of course we were sleeping very tired after a couple of days at the field day and all of a sudden these alarms started going off at 10 minutes to two they were going off in the bathroom and in the drawers under the bed. We couldn't find one. The one was in a cupboard somewhere, all going off at the same time and the next morning Allister, what was the conversation?

 

Allister A very good friend and colleague and his name will be mentioned. He basically walked up to us and said, did you get it? Did you get it? ONE50, ONE50.

 

Glenn 10 minutes to two. It's called ONE50. So yes, it occurred to us quite early on that this had all been set up for what has been a great product.

 

Allister Worst thing about it is they actually snuck into our room the second night, did the same thing all over again, so we thought we'd cleared it out, and then the alarm went off again at 1:50 a.m. Thank you Karl Drever. Anyway, that's just a start. And then, you know, we've had a lot of awesome colleagues over the years and one of our colleagues back in PGG days was the Territory Manager for New South Wales, a good friend of both of ours, a gentleman called Dean Baker. And what I love about Deano was that he had a story that I just enjoyed so much. And everyone he told, I think enjoyed for the sole reason is that, no matter how many years after the emotion of the moment, still kept on coming out and the way he described the story. But he was an agronomist out near Dubbo, checking a paddock of peas one day on quite a large farm. So this would have been a huge paddock and he had jumped the fence and he went out in the paddock and lifted up these peas and checking for mildew and bugs and stuff and lifted up the peas. And here was this dirty big brown snake. And so he went reeling backwards and he's about six foot six actually reeling backwards, stomping through these peas, heading for the fence. And the way he tells the story, it was all panic. It was 36 degrees. He was hot and sweaty and he reached the fence. He put his hand on top of the post to leap over and it's quite a large property, big station and the fence post collapsed. On him as he was leaping over it.

 

Glenn With the snake in hot pursuit.

 

Allister Yeah, well he probably passed about three other snakes on the way back out of the paddock in his panic. But it was more the fact he stuck his hand on top of the fence post and the fence post collapsed under him. That wasn't his issue. One where was the snake, but the issue was he ended up going between all the barbed wire. So he had a barbed wire crosses across his chest and between his legs. So he got wedged between the barbed wires on this fence. And if anyone recognises what it means to be tangled in barbed wire, it's not a great thing to get out of. And so he's sitting there wondering what the hell to go on, and next thing he gets this almighty whack, because the station outrigger, the electric fence was on it and the only thing he could literally grab hold of to leverage himself out of this barbed wire. And if anyone understands the issues of having power and barbed wire, that's actually a really lethal combination. So this guy was sweating. He was getting really anxious because he couldn't pull himself out of this electric fence. And so every time he describes the story him, his voice is quivering from the fear of the snake. And there is wedged between barbed wires on a barbed wire fence with the only way he can actually physically leverage himself out of it is to grab hold of the outrigger and pull himself out. And he thought he probably only has about 3 or 4 whacks on the outrigger left in him before he was in deep trouble. So in the end he leveraged himself off it. He ripped his whole shirt off and ruptured the crutch out of his pants. And I think the way he describes it, he just drove back to the office, went home and just stayed in a dark room for the afternoon to calm down. So the delightful story that I really enjoyed the telling.

 

Glenn Very good.

 

Allister And I suppose the one thing about the time with Dean, is I spent a lot of time in New South Wales travelling the whole Eastern seaboard, but I was also doing extension work with the DPI, setting up trial systems with DPI at the time throughout New South Wales, but also setting up our own first series of demonstrations. So this is in the early 2000s to mid 2000s and one of the things I was doing one time was setting up a trial site in southern New South Wales in a place called Queanbeyan, which is just on the edge of the ACT, and it was quite a moment and it sort of sits a theme for a couple of the wee stories, both Glenn and I've got around lightning and it was a really calm day. It was actually almost a blue sky with just a few clouds in it, and I had this quite large rotary hoe, hand-held rotary hoe out preparing a sort of about a 30 by 40 metre trial block in the bottom of this paddock just off the road. And I was busy pulling this and it was a really calm, bizarre sort of atmosphere. I didn't think much about it, but next thing the transformer on the power pole directly across the road from me, probably no more than about 80 metres and I was on this rotary hoe digging up this plot exploded and it got hit by lightning and I literally could smell the ozone in the air and the hair on the back of my neck was standing on end, Dean was sitting in the car four rubber wheels on the ground on a cell phone, wondering what the hell was going on. And here I was holding this rotary hoe. Every cockatoo within about 100 kilometres was up in the air and it blew the power to Queanbeyan for the whole afternoon. And I just literally the closest I've ever been to a lightning strike. So that was my little wee story.

 

Glenn There is nothing like a lightning storm in Australia. They do it really well. Very, very well.

 

Allister You had a good one too though. Just driving.

 

Glenn Yeah. So we were up the Hunter Valley. So just north of Sydney. Well we were inland and we were driving along and we could see the storm coming and I was actually with Dean our colleague, and just driving along and we drove into this electrical storm and which was okay, it started raining and I was pretty okay with it. But then when trees started exploding along the side of the highway, I was like, we've got to get out of here. You know, how do we not know that the car is going to get hit next so I was pretty keen to get out of this thing because there was there was lightning going everywhere. So we found the first place we could go, and it happened to be a little place called Raymond Terrace. And so we ducked in there and we went into the bottom of a car park in a small shopping mall. And so we drove in the air and the lightning was still going. It was a wicked storm. Anyway, but we pulled into this place. You'd never go to Raymond Terrace for holiday. And you certainly I mean, it's a great place to go and hide from storm. But what we discovered in the car park in Raymond Terrace was the locals were probably more scary then the storm so we didn't spend a lot of time there. But we rolled out of there because we could see the storm rolling away and we were in an opposite direction. But they do a great storm there.

 

Allister Well, speaking of that, the one that you and I experienced together was the cracker. We were in Benalla in northern Victoria, a location we spent a lot of time with a family business that we called Smide Seeds back in the day, which we really loved working with over the years. And we were sitting at the top of the town hotel in Benalla, where I spent a number of weeks over the years. And I just remember so vividly again, a lightning strike that felt like it hit literally above the hotel. And the funny part was every door along our whole section of the hotel opened and everyone walked out in their pyjamas, or their boxes to see what was going on, because literally the lightning strike was directly over that building.

 

Glenn And it woke everybody up. It was such a crack that it woke everybody up. And then the rain after it was really impressive. So we're all standing there, you know.

 

Allister Everyone looking at each other.

 

Glenn Yeah. Like strangers in the night, looking at this thunderstorm in various states of dress at this very impressive storm rolling through Benalla. And as I say, no one does lightning like Australia does. It's been it was very impressive.

 

Allister Juddy and I have a long you can imagine we do a bit of banter over the years and one of the things that I take great pride in is that I have never had as many small audiences as Glenn has. I think I've my smallest audience to a field day or a presentation is about two people and Glenn, I think is one person twice.

 

Glenn Does that say something about my subject matter. I'm not sure.

 

Allister I don't know. But you know, our job is always to support our colleagues. Our job is always to be on point regardless of who's there and that always brings me to that story that you have with one of your presentations.

 

Glenn Yeah. And I guess it's a story of self awareness. I think if there's a message we can take from this, it's about being a little bit self-aware. And as you mentioned, it was a road show we were, on the road through Victoria and southern New South Wales. And on that particular road show it was around brassicas. So we travel to different towns and we had these meetings set up where we'd bring in various agronomists and sometimes farmers to these meetings and talk a little bit about. I was actually talking about the grazing management of brassicas and how we can get the most out of the brassica crop from the different grazing management we can put on them. And I shared the stage with someone else who was talking a little bit about insect protection of brassicas and we had these, these presentations and it was basically rinse and repeat everywhere we went. You know, I'd go first and talk about the grazing management and then the other speaker would come along and he would talk about some of the seed coatings and the protection from insects for these particular crops. And remember, we rolled into Queanbeyan it was the area that you got struck by lightning, Allister. Anyway, so we rolled into Queanbeyan and we got ourselves set up. And on this particular event, one person turned up. So it we had an audience of one. Now we'd been getting, you know, 30, 40, 50 people along to some of our meetings. But at this particular point, one person turned up. And of course, you know, because there's one person there and we're servicing our clients, that one person was going to get the presentation in exactly the same way as I would have been 50. So anyway, I went first and this person sat in the front row because it was a bit awkward if that were sitting in the back row. But anyway, this business in the front row and I got through my presentation and she asked a couple of questions, quite intelligent questions. Anyway, so the person I was sharing the presentation with, he got up and he started talking about seed coating and some of the insects that are controlled by this. Unfortunately, he was about halfway through that presentation when our audience of one, her phone goes, and she looks at and she looks at me and she goes, I'm really going to have to take this. So it was a personal call and we went, listen, go right, just go. Anyway, so she gets up with her phone and walks out the door and goes down the corridor to take this personal phone call. So that wasn't the problem. The problem was that the guy who was doing the presentation, let's just call them Jim to protect them. Jim keeps going. So now we have an audience of zero and Jim's still firing away and in terms talking about all the insect pests and all the rest of it. He's not that self-aware, there's now no one. So one of the guys I was with, we were milling around the back and kind of said should we actually tell Jim that he's actually talking to nobody with. Oh, listen, we'll go on for a couple of minutes. So a couple of minutes passed and Jim still going on about insect pests and some of the controls. And in the end, we kind of stopped him. Jim. Jim, I've got a question. And he sort of said yes what's the question? And I said who are you actually presenting to because there's no one here. And he went, where did she go? She's taken a call. And the funniest thing was he said, well, should I continue? And I'm like, no, I've heard this for about the fifth time. Right? So just no, we'll just wait until she comes back. And so she did eventually come back. And Jim, just kind of rewind probably 5 or 7 minutes of his presentation so that she could catch up. But a really good message there in terms of being self-aware, probably not great to be presenting to an audience of zero. Yeah maybe being self-aware of your environment. I would say.

 

Allister That's quite classic. Oh, to be fair, we've got a couple more stories from Aussie, but they've been vetoed because they probably aren't appropriate anyway, coming back over here to New Zealand and we've had a quite a long period of time in both product development, but nutrition. You have done a lot of weird stuff to animals over the time Glenn all with ethics and approval. 

 

Glenn I don't know where you were going there Al.

 

Allister With animal ethics approval but you've done some pretty interesting projects over the time. And there's a couple of stories that are quite freaky in their own right. But you do take the piss a lot, and that's a pretty strong lead into one of your more classic moments.

 

Glenn Yeah, this is a bit embarrassing and this is about technology actually and being able to use technology properly. And so that's the lesson we can learn from the story. So in the development of Ecotain, one of the mechanisms that which Ecotain uses to reduce nitrate leaching from the urine patch is to actually increase the volume of urine and decrease the nitrogen concentration. So nitrogen concentration in the urine patch, is really important when it comes to the amount that's being leached. It's a key indicator. And so a lot of our work was looking to see whether, you know, different cultivars, different breeding lines, different grazing managements, different animals, livestock responded differently to plantain, Ecotain in terms of urine volume in urine nitrogen concentration. And one of the other aspects of plantain through the animal is a biological nitrification inhibitor that actually comes through the urine. So animals are consuming plantain and there's a breakdown product that actually ends up in urine which blocks that natural conversion of urinary nitrogen through the nitrate sand in technical terms, it's a biological nitrification inhibitor, and we didn't know quite how stable that was. So we were doing some work. We were comparing some different cultivars of plantain, collecting urine from those sheep that were grazing those and getting them to the lab to try and work out what those compounds were. And one of the key things we were trying to do is get the urine from the sheep to the lab as quickly as we could and so we had the system set up where the lab. We set a day aside and the lab was ready to receive those and so what we were trying to do is minimise the time between the urine coming from the animal and get into the lab. And the idea was that if the urine was still warm, by the time we got to the lab, that was really good. It was made meaning that we were going to probably capture most of those compounds. We didn't want to leave it sitting around for a long period of time. So it set up the day. And then the idea was as soon as we'd collected those urine samples, I was going to get in the car and I was going to drive to the lab and as I left I was going to text them. So use my technology to send a text to the lab saying we you know, there is urine samples are on their way and therefore everybody was right on schedule. So this particular day we had a full set of urine samples. I think we had something like six or seven different lines and we collected urine samples from all those animals and when they were sitting in the back of my car and the last urine sample was collected, went back in the car, we banged the boot down. I jumped in the car and I got him a cell phone. And this particular day, I was kind of feeling a bit humorous. So I text the urine express is on its way and I hit the button and I started driving to the lab until I realised actually the person I had sent that message to wasn't at the lab was actually my cousin. So I get this phone call from a cousin. What on earth are you doing? And what is the urine express? And so to this day I apologise to my cousin that the urine express is not on the way to her and that simply the names were very similar so I just got the wrong person. So lesson to people if you are sending texts that you should really make sure it's the right person you send it to, because some of the text I send, particularly around urine, are probably not appropriate for most people.

 

Allister That's a classic.

 

Glenn So yeah, the urine express is on its way. Is a term that haunts me a little bit because I sent it to the wrong person.

 

Allister Oh, so interesting in watching those developments. My little moment not quite the same, but it was a little bit of lack of awareness at the moment as well I'd herniated a disc in my back and so I was having some quite bad times with a back problem. It was 15-16 years ago now.

 

Glenn Yeah, that's painful.

 

Allister Oh yeah it was a pain in the back. Actually then it just shot all over the place. So I had a couple of rough incidents with that before I had my disk taken out but it was in the release and the development of the brand of the grass ONE50 again, something I played a big role in over the day and I was at the back of Dunsandel, Mid-canterbury in the South Island in New Zealand and I had this one of my earlier paddocks of ONE50 and the dairy operation had just grazed it in a bit of wet weather and I'd driven up there to just have a look at the paddock and I'd taken photos of the paddock and when I arrived they've just grazed the block in the wet and they'd pugged it and damaged it. And I had lined up on the right side of the fence and I took a beautiful photo of the sort of damaged area and the rest of the paddock and I tasked myself to come back in three or four weeks to see how the damage had come right. So I had lined it up on the fence, lined it up with a tree in the background. So I had two before and after sort of photos and I made a call to come back. So it's a back road. It's quite a long way out in the middle of nowhere. And I pulled up along the side of the fence. I was in an automatic car at the time. I pulled in and I pulled along the fence to try and find where I was going to take my before and after photo, my after photo.

 

Glenn So getting a landmark.

 

Allister Getting my landmark sorted out. And it just so happened, you know, this is the time before digital cameras on your phone. I had a camera, I had a brick. And as most people that know me, I spend quite a bit of time on my phone. And it just so happens I was talking to you on the phone at the time. So I was double tasking and I’d driven up the fence line. I put it in reverse and I drove back and I found my spot. I was talking to you on the phone. I had my camera out and I got out of the car and I turned to the paddock and took this photo. And it's quite an iconic photo of the time because what it highlighted is the resilience and the recovery of a diploid perennial ryegrass from damage, because you could not tell literally where that damage was just 3 to 4 weeks later and ONE50's resilience under pasture damage was quite impressive and that was a very strong graphic of before and after.

 

Glenn And I've actually used those photos in the presentation so I can appreciate.

 

Allister The forethought of that.

 

Glenn Forethought of that and the fact that you've got them lined up because they were perfectly the landmarks were lined up. You done a fantastic job in terms of that. But I guess there was something else that you hadn't taken into account.

 

Allister No, because I was talking to you on the phone. I was taking this photo and I wasn't really aware of what was going on. And I was actually in quite a lot of pain because I was going through one of the episodes with my back. I was like really in quite a bit of pain and I sort of suddenly thought something wasn't quite right. And I turned around and when I got out of the car, I must have left it in reverse as I was reversing up. And because I was in long grass, but it wasn't rolling when I got out of the car. But I must have lifted in reverse because I turned around and the car was 30 to 40 metres back down the road.

 

Glenn Going backwards.

 

Allister Going backwards down the road behind me. And all I can be thankful today is that literally it was a quiet back road, but that probably wasn't the funny part. The funny part was watching this person who was in quite a lot of pain and quite lame, trying to catch this car going back down the road in reverse and so it was just a moment. And it was one of those moments where we have an award in our research farm associated with people that make dumb decisions. And the point is, no one saw it. There was no one that witnessed it. There were no cameras. No one saw it. So if I didn't tell anyone it didn't happen.

 

Glenn And the interesting thing is I didn't know that for a year.

 

Allister Yeah. I kept it off the radar for a whole year.

 

Glenn And so now I know why you hung up on me abruptly, because you were chasing a car that was backing down the road.

 

Allister Yeah, it was a moment. Alright. But I suppose one of the ones that takes the cake for me, I just thought it was all about context because I really enjoy that project you did on radish and some of those things, like I say, you do the most interesting scenarios. So I think we'll call this one the last one Juddy because it's one of my favourites.

 

Glenn It combines a lot of elements here. There's an element of blue skies discovery, there's an element of context here and there's an element of just sometimes explaining things wrong, right? So it's got all these elements. So there was a radish product that we had and, some of the glycosylates in that radish, some of the secondary plant compounds, there's a chance that they may actually slow metabolic rate of an animal. So not strong evidence but evidence enough. And so we decided that we were going to go and do some work to see whether we could actually pick up a difference from sheep that were grazing radish to them grazing ryegrass in terms of metabolic rate and one of the proxies of metabolic rate. So it's basically the amount of energy an animal uses to basically keep themselves upright, alive, breathing all of those things. And so one of the proxies of the single fasting heat reduction or basal metabolic rate is actually heart rate. So what we thought is if we could actually measure the resting heart rate of sheep, what we might find is that there are some differences between those two crops. Let's not go into what the useful understanding of that could be. We just wanted to see if we could find that difference. Yeah, of course you can measure heart rate of sheep by grabbing a stethoscope and going up into their armpits and listening to the sounds of the heart. But what you tend to find is that that's not resting because that pretty excitable in terms of being restrained in the yard. So it wasn't really going to help us. So what we decided to do was we went down to the local university and probably unbeknown to them, we borrowed from the physiology department some of the strap on heart rate monitors, you know, that athletes use for tracking their heart rate during exercise. So these things aren't designed to go in sheep. But we didn't actually tell them that we were. We just wanted we just wanted 15 of them. And so we got them in the yards and we strap them on the sheep and they work because they sense the electrical signals of the heart. And so they need good electrical conductivity. And so with weather in full wool you can't get any contact and then they kind of Bluetooth to a watch. So that's how they work and that's how we're going to record their heart rate. So with a full body of wool we were never going to get electrical conductivity. So we get the shearing handpiece and we put a blow kind of around the brisket, an up in the side to try and get electrical conductivity. And of course once we strap those heart rate monitors back on those animals, there's still probably two or three millimetres of wool that the combs missed and that's enough to be insulative to the electrical signals coming from the heart. So we had a bit of a thing about this and so I came up with this brainwave as sometimes I do and I shot down to the local supermarket. And I went and bought a pack of disposable razors thinking I can trim the rest of that two or three millimetres of wool off down to the skin, and then we're going to get some really good contact and then we're going to be able to measure resting heart rate anyway. So we got some disposable razors and we found that it would go, you know, it would do two or three centimetres and then it would all clog up and we couldn't shave them very well, these disposable razors. So anyway again another brainwave, this is where it gets really interesting. So we went back down to the supermarket and I went down to the personal care aisle and I pulled out two large tubes of hair removal cream going, I think this is going to work. We're going to get rid of the small amount of wool by putting all this hair removal cream all over these animals. And then the other thing that really works with some of the older style heart rate monitors is to get really good contact between the skin. What you need is something that's water based for athletes it's when they sweat, you get a really good contact because you've got water between the monitor and the skin. Course sheep aren't going to sweat for us. So the other really good thing or the other good substance that you can get good contact with is actually personal lubricant, right? So KY gel or the equivalent, you know, so I went down the other end of the personal care aisle in the supermarket and got two large tubes of personal lubricant. So that's good. And then the other trick that we get is if you actually mix a little salt in with the personal lubricant, you get a really good conductivity. So I went round to the baking section of the supermarket and bought a large bag of salt. And then I kind of think I've got the hair removal cream. And then got the personal lubricant there, salt in that. I thought that is probably going to be a bit messy isn't it. So I'll shot around to hardware aisle 17 and I got myself a couple of tea towels because so that was going to make sure that things didn't get too messy. So anyway, so I thought, this is going to be really good. I've got this. So I went up to the we went up to the check out to pay for all this, right? And so as I was loading the conveyor belt that went up to the lady at the checkout, I sort of counted. I've got the two tubes that will be enough of the hair removal cream and I'm pretty sure the personal lubricant there's enough there to sink a ship and to deal with that, that's great. Tea towel, salt I think I've got everything and as it was going up the conveyor belt, it kind of dawned on me about that point that all of those things together. Right. Didn't really look that kosher. This looked a bit yucky. And as it got to the lady on the check out, she took one look at me and she said to me, I always remember she looked at me and said, well, you're going to have a very interesting afternoon aren't you. I don't know why I said this, but I was trying to explain myself. I said listen, lady. Yeah, it's not what it looks like. This is for my sheep which was probably accurate. It was probably not the right thing to say. And just two things from that story. I've never been back to the supermarket market. And secondly, actually this worked we got the hair removal cream. It burnt all of that wool off perfectly. It was as smooth as anything we caked on this personal lubricant with some salt mixed in it. In under the the heart rate monitors and we got perfect connection, put those animals out and we got hours and hours of resting heart rate or grazing heart rate of sheep in both of these treatments, it was fantastic. The downside was that the variation between sheep was larger than the variation within treatment. So we didn't quite have the power.

 

Allister You need more KY Jelly.

 

Glenn Yeah, and probably more heart rate monitors. But it worked, which was really useful. But of course the next thing was trying to get personal lubricant and hair removal cream through on the expenses was a little bit more difficult. So I think my managers at that time for kind of overlooking what could have seemed like quite a dodgy purchase at the local supermarket. So that's my story. So sometimes we do things that in one context seem completely normal and quite harmless, but in other contexts can seem quite dodgy. So that's my story.

 

Allister Well, look, this is leading into a very festive time of year. And the reality is we just wanted to keep it light hearted and share a couple of moments that always put a smile on our faces when we think about it and always get more get more outrageous over a few drinks, too, I'm sure. But here's wishing everyone a very, very merry Christmas and I hope you have a safe New Year. And let's hope for a cracker in 2024.

 

Glenn Yeah, Thanks, Al I've got to go and check the rain gauge on the reindeer. And so better go and have a merry Christmas, and we'll catch you in the new year.

 

Allister Seeya.

 

Glenn Bye.