AgResearch Senior Research Associate Wendy Bain was the recipient of the Sir Arthur Ward Award at the 2024 NZSAP conference held in Oamaru.
Nomination for Wendy Bain
The Sir Arthur Ward Award recognises the successful application of research or experience to an aspect of animal production in New Zealand. For her entire 43 year working life, Wendy has been involved in the practical application of animal production research across a number of farmed livestock species and varied technologies.
Her research has primarily focused on the genetics of carcass composition and meat quality, including the use of first ultrasound and then computed Tomography (CT) scanning for both research and industry applications. She was involved in the generation and maintenance of the Invermay Coopworth Lean and Fat Selection lines, their subsequent use in the reciprocal back cross experiments to find quantitative trait loci for meat quality trait loci, and more recently in the large-scale industry progeny tests run by the then Meat and Wool New Zealand and FarmIQ. The work she has been involved with has not only resulted in substantial documented industry change, but also the successful mentoring and development of many research scientists, post-doctoral students, field technicians, and summer students. This is a role where she has excelled, and many researchers research skills have been greatly benefited from her supportive but persistent input.
Wendy began work at Invermay Agricultural Centre as an 18-year-old in 1978 and has worked there since as a research associate working first for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, through the MAF Tech era and now AgResearch.
For the first 25 years she was the key person looking after the data collected from the Lean Lamb research programme initiated by Peter Fennessy and utilised by many Invermay animal researchers. The project consisted of Coopworth selection lines investigating the use of ultrasonic scanning to improve the lean meat proportion of the carcass and monitor the changes in other production traits. Ultrasound scanning is now almost universally used in the sheep terminal sire breeding industry and in many dual purpose flocks to improvement meat production. As well as this work being widely published, it contributed to the subsequent development of the meat genetic evaluation module which has been included in the Sheep Improvement Limited, now Beef + Lamb New Zealand Genetics, since its commencement in 1999.
The second development was the commencement of InnerVision in 1994, a CT scanning service initially used for both research and commercial breeding measurements in sheep and deer.
In this role Wendy has been the “Jill of all trades”, the operator of the machine, analysis of the resultant images, the organiser of commercial and research uses and the AgResearch budget manager.
The average New Zealand terminal sire meat yield index has increased by around 330 cents per lamb born since 1999, largely driven by to industry uptake of ultrasound, CT scanning and progeny testing for meat.
In the nearly 30 years that have passed since the first CT scanner was installed at Invermay, she has overseen some four different CT scanning machines and a DEXA (Dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry) machine for use over a wide range of tasks. In addition to the ‘normal’ livestock and carcass CT scanning work, Wendy’s scanning credits have included scanning Kākāpō chicks for fungal infections in their lungs and a wide variety of earth cores from lakes and seabed of New Zealand tracking glacial melting, floods and earthquakes. In recent years this work has increasing concentrated on not only carcass composition but also estimation of intra-muscular fat content for breeding and development, shape and size of the rumen in low and high methane emitting cattle, deer and sheep. Key issues as New Zealand attempts to improve its livestock productivity whilst mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
Commencing, around 2000, Wendy was involved in research identifying and then estimating the effect of the Texel GDF8 muscling variant, again a critical component was the use of the CT scanner. This work, along with others, has led to this gene variant increasing in frequency to where it now constitutes between a 20 and 30% frequency in the New Zealand slaughter progeny. At the same time work was redirected towards increasing meat quality by improving colour stability, post slaughter pH, tenderness and intramuscular fat. Perhaps this was most exemplified by the FarmIQ project where over 20,000 animals, as the progeny of more than 1000 sires, were generated, genotyped and measured for growth, carcass composition and meat quality traits.
This work is continuing in the form of the South Island Genomic Calibration flock which is evaluating progeny of more than 50 sires per year. This work is now available for commercial breeders, again through Beef + Lamb New Zealand Genetics service to breeders. The same work is also underpinning the development of in-line measurement of meat quality through processing plants.
Wendy Bain, has been responsible for the organisation, slaughters and collection and collation of data over the last 15 years. In more recent years, her focus has shifted to similar large scale experiments collecting methane emission data on leading commercial sheep breeders properties.
Wendy’s technical talent and abilities in CT scanning have also been pivotal within the Deer Industry for improving venison quality and yield within the AgResearch-led Deer Progeny test programme initiated in 2011.
Use of the CT scanner for deer at Invermay within the bounds the deer progeny test created the eye muscle area breeding value (EMAceBV) and confirmed the association with overall carcase muscling and a positive correlation with venison tenderness. The CT work underpins the now common practice of measuring ultrasonic eye muscle area in NZ’s key deer studs as evidenced by the incorporation of eye muscle area and loin weight in many stag sales catalogues.
An examination of ResearchGate statistics identified 58 publications where she is an author or co-author and an h-index of 17. However, her research and industry impact is much wider than these statistics suggest.
Finally, the proposers consist of two McMeekan and two Sir Arthur Ward recipients who are profoundly aware that the success of their research programmes has been dependent on the outstanding contribution Wendy Bain has made over almost four decades.
Nominated by: John McEwan, Tony Pearse, Gordon Greer and Neville Jopson