Improving the environment

Until the mid-1960s, for example, pig production in Australia was practised as a minor sideline to dairying and wheat farming. Typically a farmer kept up to 10 or 15 breeding sows, with both capital investment and standards of husbandry kept at low levels. Indeed, the role of pigs in Australia was accurately summed up by the statement that 'pigs serve the national economy best as salvagers of by-products, surpluses and refuse'. [52]

Economic pressures in the mid-1960s which brought about a switch in pig production from a byproduct enterprise largely on dairy farms to a specialist grain-based system brought far-reaching changes to production methods and industry organization; changes which gave new opportunities for the development and application of scientific management.[53] The intensive systems of production which now dominate the industry include units in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia which house up to 13 thousand sows under stable environmental, nutritional and health conditions, and represent multi-million dollar investments among the biggest in the western world. Most pig farmers, however, manage units of 50 to 500 sows on family-based mixed farms. Their high levels of productive efficiency and their improved systems of management owe much firstly to the initial work of a New Zealand scientist who migrated to Australia in the early 1960s, Dr. D. M. Smith of Mayfair Farms Pty. Ltd., and secondly to the research carried out by State Departments of Agriculture, often by young scientists who had undertaken research degrees supervised by A. C. Dunkin at the Mt. Derrimut Pig Research Centre of the University of Melbourne.

Similarly massive changes have taken place in egg and poultry meat production and, during the last 50 years, an industry has emerged with new levels of efficiency, international in character and using technologies of world wide application. The changes that have developed have been described as:

. . . the emergence of a separate poultry meat industry which is now the larger of the two production areas, intensification of production with a scaling up of the size of production units, detailed understanding of nutrition leading to a capacity to develop diet formulations using a wide range of feedstuffs, application of quantitative genetics to poultry breeding, disease control using isolation, vaccination and medication, and the design of improved equipment and housing.[54]

In many cases the development of intensive plant and animal industries, each with a significant level of environmental control, has involved the application of principles that were initially developed in the USA or western Europe. Sometimes it has proved possible to transfer detailed techniques, genetic material and equipment for use in Australia. More commonly, however, the special conditions that prevail in Australia, socio-economic as well as climatic and environmental, have meant that ideas from overseas required careful and critical testing and a process of adaptation and amendment, sometimes drastic amendment, before they could be applied successfully and profitably in Australia.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering