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Viewpoint-27 July 2007 |
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In an editorial, "The paucity of Mr Howard’s legacy to science or 'speak to the hand, 'cos the face ain’t listening'" on 29 June 2007, Alex Reisner wrote:
Meanwhile, while the shortage of scientists and mathematicians is the focus of governmental reports, it remains, and the lack of suitable qualified secondary and even primary schools teachers of science and mathematics grows. And with what effect? Mr Howard's Minister for Education, Science and Training, is detailed off to decry subversive teaching in history and claim that the cure-all for teacher shortages is to be found in performance-based pay.
In an odd sort of way it's reminiscent of CSIRO — with the blessing of the responsible Minister of the time — funding research into chemical defleecing because it would rid the wool growers of dependency on the shearer with his hand piece.
How so reminiscent?
As the scientific assistant to the minister was heard to say in an aside to a sceptical researcher, "The minister is well aware that it won't work, but the government hopes it'll keep the cockies happy."
I don’t want to comment on the current political scene or what happened 30-odd years ago, but I would like to say something about the bleak picture the quote gives of ‘chemical defleecing’, or biological wool harvesting (BWH), as it’s now called.
When I joined CSIRO in 1989, BWH was a project that many thought had no future. Many cost-effective chemical agents known to cause depilation had been tested and discarded because of concerns about safety &/or animal welfare. A biological agent, epidermal growth factor (EGF), had been shown to defleece sheep effectively and safely, and a strong use patent had been obtained. However, EGF was obtained from the salivary glands of mice and was prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the process of wrapping the sheep to prevent loss of fleece and sunburn &/or frostbite and unwrapping the fleece was slow and inefficient.
In 1989-90, wool was ‘enjoying’ an unsustainable boom through the inappropriate use of the Reserve Price Scheme, and CSIRO was well funded to conduct R&D on wool sheep, including the BWH project. However, the wool industry had served notice on CSIRO 3 years previously that its specially segregated, ‘non-contestable’ funding would end in 1990. Accordingly, we had to decide what work to stop. BWH was an obvious candidate. Two factors prevented its instant death. A senior scientist had noticed that researchers at a Japanese soy sauce company had been granted a patent for modified bacteria that could produce a gram of EGF per litre of culture; this astonishingly high yield would make EGF affordable. A young research engineer, recruited for a different research project, convinced me that he could produce a robust, cost-effective sheep coat for retention and harvesting of the fleece, and a method for ‘donning’ and ‘doffing’ the coat.
The Reserve Price Scheme collapsed under its own weight in 1990, and CSIRO suffered a massive decline in ‘wool’ funding. Major reductions in expenditure had to be effected rapidly, which meant redundancies, given that most animal research expenditure is on people. This was very distressing for all concerned, but was done after thorough economic evaluation of all research areas and attempts to redeploy staff wherever possible. BWH showed up as having enormous potential, if we could make the process practical for the grower and cost-effective. If 50 million sheep could be defleeced annually at a cost comparable to normal shearing (mechanical severance of every fibre by a highly skilled and physically strong shearer working in difficult conditions), this represented annual sales of the order of $400 million. Although the total world population of wool sheep in high-wage countries
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was less than 250 million, so the ultimate market size was limited, it was still worth pursuing the project.
BWH wool is better in quality than mechanically shorn wool for a number of technical reasons. BWH sheep are happier and healthier for other technical reasons. Workers using BWH don’t have to be as strong or as skilled as shearers. As BWH did not depend on as much labour and skill as shearing, its costs could be expected to decline with volume production of coats, machinery and EGF.
The project was re-established and moved swiftly (for livestock R&D) to success: in 5 years we had a cost-effective process in prototype, and in 7 we had licensed BWH to a start-up, Bioclip Pty Ltd, run by a far-sighted and courageous entrepreneur.
So far, so good. A decade on, why aren’t all Merinos BWH sheep? I’ll list a lot of possible reasons, each one of them encapsulating a small world of activity, plus a penumbra of politics.
Sheep Coat / Fleece Retention Net
The sheep coat had to be completely redesigned into the Bioclip Fleece Retention Net, to accommodate the size variation of sheep in Australia, and to produce superior quality wool.
Manufacturing of this new net on a commercial scale took time, but it has happened: from the original price of $100, it’s down to today’s $1.
The depilatory formulation had to be redeveloped to suit the range of environmental conditions found across Australia.
Further development was required to move from a split treatment (2 doses) to a single treatment, greatly increasing the speed of the process and reducing the overall cost of treatment.
The original manufacturing plant was closed and a new one was established, making the process a much more competitive option.
BWH machinery has been developed from scratch. BWH can now harvest sheep in a quarter of the time taken by mechanical shearing without the physical stress that is typical in the shearing industry.
The physical requirements of shearing (probably the hardest skilled job around) constitute the reason why there is a real shortage of shearers in Australia, and the reason why the peak industry body has identified biological defleecing as the best option to avoid significant shearing crises in the future.
And yes, BWH is a non-traditional process and the industry was so successful along traditional lines that it found some changes hard to understand, much less adopt. Indeed, the ‘two bob each way’ attitude of some industry leaders meant that a variety of other projects were supported by the industry, such as semi-automated mechanical shearing, automated mechanical shearing having consumed far more research funding than BWH with no practical outcome.
BWH still has a modest market share, but wool (off the sheep’s back in the net) is being sold direct to the largest wool processor in the world, and the sceptics are slowly talking less loudly.
The reader may be thinking: ‘He’s left out the real reason for lack of adoption: the process is a dud.’ I’ve often wondered about that, but I firmly believe it’s not. I don’t like admitting mistakes, but I don’t think this was one.
Alex Reisner and I have a bet: if BWH has at least 25% of the market by 2035 (when I’ll be 93 and Alex 104), Alex will pay the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation $10,000.00. If it doesn’t, I’ll do the paying.
Oliver Mayo is a
post-retirement research fellow with CSIRO Livestock Industries and an adjunct
professor of biometry at the University of Adelaide. He was Chief of CSIRO
Animal Production from 1989 to 2000. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy
of Science and the Australian Academy of Agricultural Science and a Foreign
Member of the Russian Academy of Agicultural Science. He has written a number
of books and over 100 research papers in biometry, evolution, plant breeding
and human and animal genetics.
