By SIMON COLLINS
A lone cow wanders slowly into the milking enclosure, stopping after every step or two to graze or just look around.
"They're not like us, they work on cow time," says Robert Wieliczko, who monitors the 28 cows in a model automated dairy farm near Hamilton run by Dexcel, formerly the Dairying Research Corporation.
As the cow enters the milking bail, a milking robot swings into action. An electronic pedometer on the cow's ankle tells the robot which animal it is. The shape and position of that cow's teats were stored in the robot's computer the last time the cow was milked.
As the cow nibbles nonchalantly at a grain feedlot, the robot first showers its teats with water, then carefully attaches the milking devices, just as a farmer does in a traditional milking shed.
Wieliczko, watching on a computer screen, can monitor not just how much milk the cow produces, but also indicators such as protein levels, saltiness and any signs of mastitis, the udder infection that affects about a quarter of New Zealand's dairy cows.
So far, there has been "virtually zero" mastitis in the first batch of cows milked by the robot since June last year.
"What that is due to we don't know yet. It might be just luck," says Dr Murray Woolford, Dexcel's principal scientist.
When the milking is done, the robot opens gates, which lead the cow to new pasture. Knowing that being milked is the only way to the new pasture is part of the incentive system that teaches the cows what to do.
"Some learn in two or three days. They all learn within a week," says Woolford.
Far-fetched as it sounds, he believes this is the future of New Zealand dairying.
"There is a huge amount of burnout in dairy industry labour," he says. "Any highly repetitive manual task such as milking cows will eventually be replaced by machines."
As a joint venture between Dexcel and robot supplier Sensortec, the robotic milking project is also a model for the Waikato "ag-biotech cluster", a network of about 30 companies and research institutes that add value to the milk that is the lifeblood of the region - and of our economy.
If New Zealand is going to transform itself from a commodity producer to a source of specialist, high-value products that can earn us first-world incomes, these Waikato agritech and biotechnology companies will be crucial.
According to research by cluster organisers Heather Claycomb and Bill Kain, the Waikato accounts for 38 per cent of New Zealand's exports. It also has 25 per cent of the country's research scientists. The Ruakura Research Centre, where 60 people gathered to launch the cluster network on Wednesday, claims to be the largest agricultural biotechnology research centre in the Southern Hemisphere.
Yet in 15 years of constant science reforms, the once-strong links between the researchers and the exporters have atrophied.
After 20 years at Ruakura, the last 10 as AgResearch's science leader for soil and fertiliser research, Dr Doug Edmeades left in 1997 and set up his own Fertiliser Information Service because he was frustrated that his research was not reaching farmers.
"It was a consequence of commercialisation," he says. Required to make a profit, AgResearch gradually shifted its resources into products that it could sell, such as its controversial project to use cows as "factories" to make drugs for multiple sclerosis and other human diseases.
The farm advisory service of the old Ministry of Agriculture, which once passed new technology to farmers, was sold to Wrightsons.
"The forces that have been on them in the market mean many of those people no longer service the technical area," Edmeades says.
"There are many companies that have sprung up in that gulf between science and the farmer that are selling products and technical information. But if you are selling a product, you can no longer be seen as independent. One of the big cries I hear from farmers from Bluff to North Cape is, 'We want people who are independent."'
In areas such as genetic modification, Edmeades says that, rather than helping local companies, the crown research institutes now keep their work secret so they can get patents and earn royalties - often from foreign biotech companies.
"So you end up with the science institutions, funded partly by the crown, competing with the private organisations. You end up creating a problem."
Edmeades has just taken on two new partners and expanded his consultancy into a wider business called AgKnowledge.
He hopes to move into a Waikato Innovation Park which is proposed to bring high-tech businesses together on 20ha of Tainui land at Ruakura. After more than a decade of debate, the Hamilton City Council, WEL Energy Trust and Industry New Zealand have finally stumped up $2 million each to get the park under way.
And the new ag-biotech cluster, started with a $14,000 Industry New Zealand grant, is trying to get the researchers and industry talking again. "The wheel has turned full circle," Edmeades says.
The region already has an impressive base of world-leading agritech businesses.
They include Gallaghers, the world's leading manufacturer of electric fences, which has diversified into card-based security systems with installations as far afield as the United States, India and Africa.
DEC (formerly Dairy Equipment Company) has just got US regulatory approval for a device that gradually releases a hormone to increase a cow's fertility. It also runs Sensortec, the company supplying Dexcel's milking robot, in a joint venture with Fullwood of Britain.
A newer company, Advanced Animal Technology, has sunk $10 million from private investors, including local vets and Auckland venture capital firms Caltech and MTech, into an even more advanced controlled-release device that can make cows fertile at any time of the year. "We are the first people in the world to develop an active delivery technology and commercialise that," says managing director Brian Cornish, who will launch the new product in October.
"The device contains a microchip and software and a power source so it's pre-programmed to deliver the active ingredients at specific times to manage the fertility process. It has intelligence."
At the other end of the scale, several tiny companies have sprung up to commercialise valuable compounds in local plants and animals.
Scientist Dr Robert Welch and former Carter Holt executive Jack Jenkins founded NZ Biotechnologies five years ago and sell food ingredients to Japan, Korea and elsewhere.
"Last week we had 40 people out picking up some of our plant products. We have another 15 preparing them today," said Welch on Wednesday.
Former Meat Research Institute executive Mike Lorier established Cardinal Bioscience about four years ago and now has two laboratories in Hamilton processing extracts from cows and deer to make health foods, or "nutriceuticals".
Surprisingly, one big gap in the local network is Waikato University. The Claycomb/Kain study of 25 Waikato organisations found that all had links to Massey University, because of its traditional strength in agriculture and veterinary science, and a majority had research partnerships and other links with Auckland University.
But only 54 per cent reported any links with Waikato University, and those were "few" or "very few".
"None of the organisations had a grasp of where the University of Waikato's core science competencies lie," Claycomb and Kain found. The new cluster is aimed at remedying this.
Dr Roberta Farrell, a former chief operating officer of US biotech company Sandoz and now a biology professor at Waikato, was at the cluster launch to talk about three new companies that she hopes to spin off from her research. One of them, Pacific GEM (for Genes, Enzymes and Microbes), has a new system of DNA testing to catch criminals.
Farrell wants to raise between $8 million and $10 million to build Australasia's biggest fermentation facility to make hormones, enzymes and other "bioactives" at the proposed innovation park.
At present, she says, New Zealand's only fermentation facility, run by Industrial Research Ltd in Lower Hutt, is booked up until 2005. Auckland biotech company Genesis has been forced to make its drugs in Germany.
"So New Zealand is begging for it," Farrell says. "We are structuring ours to be beyond where IRL is - research and full production."
Innovation park chief executive John Birch says he is ready to sign up other tenants for the park as soon as he finalises a development deal with Tainui - possibly in the next few days.
"A pharmaceutical company is talking to me seriously, ICT [information and communications technology] people are talking to me seriously, a biotech organisation in the formation stages is very likely to become part of this," he says.
"The pharmaceutical guys are committed to doing something in New Zealand, but they have a genetic engineering aspect to their business and they are waiting for the Erma outcome [the impending decision of the Environmental Risk Management Authority on an AgResearch application to insert various animal genes into cows].
"That's one of the attractions of the park - they can be closer to AgResearch and to Roberta and some of her people."
Tainui itself may develop most of the 90,000 sq m of buildings planned for the park. But Birch's Innovation Waikato, owned by Hamilton development agency B2H, will build the 5000 sq m commercialisation office and "incubator".
The commercialisation office will help researchers and entrepreneurs to develop their first business plans, protect their intellectual property and raise initial capital.
Those who raise capital can then start in the incubator, where they will have access to business mentors and experts. Eventually, they will be expected to move out to their own premises in the park or elsewhere.
If it all works, the cluster's founders hope that people around the world, when they think of the Waikato, will think "ag-biotech".
"Take Dunedin, with Bio-South. If I hear about [Dunedin-based] Blis Technologies once more, I'm going to slit my wrists," said Claycomb at Wednesday's launch. "Or take Canterbury, with their IT cluster. They occupy that place in your mind, you know what Canterbury is all about."
The Waikato has the exporters and researchers on which to build an even stronger international reputation. The cluster network and the innovation park should help them take the first step - simply talking to one another.
www.b2h.co.nz
How to make science mean business
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