Efficient Ram Usage with Professor David Lindsay

In this week's podcast, we're talking a whole lot about testicles! Our guest, Professor David Lindsay, shares his passion for the biology of reproduction and optimising ram usage on-farm. 

David was at the University of Western Australia in the 1960s, a time when the region was experiencing significant land clearance. The Department of Agriculture recognised the need for a lecturer in the reproductive physiology of sheep to address the increasing demand for sheep. He took up the role and sheep numbers quickly rose from a deficit to a surplus in just two years.

David shares some best-practice ram management principles, such as focusing on the last 54 days before mating to optimise sperm production. He also explains optimum ram-to-ewe ratios, taking into consideration the age of both animals, their condition and seasonal effects. 

Reflecting on his career,  David emphasises the importance of effective scientific writing, a skill he developed over the years and now teaches to a wide range of industries, astrophysics included! "Nobody knows you're there if you don't write," says David. "However, one of the things I found as I went on publishing this sort of material, was how difficult it was to write," he says. Professor Lindsay believes that writing should aim to inform, not to impress, a principle he has passed on to aspiring scientists.

David has a huge wealth of knowledge and we only just scraped the surface. 

If you have any questions about anything mentioned on this podcast, or one for our upcoming Q&A, email us at info@nextgenagri.com or leave a voice note here: https://thehub.nextgenagri.com/c/ask-your-questions-c7d0a4/

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Transcript

Mark : 0:05

Welcome to the Head Shepherd podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo at Next Gen Agri International, where we help livestock managers to get the best out of their stock. I want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflex for sponsoring Head Shepherd again this season, and I'm also excited to introduce our mates at Heinegger as brand new sponsors of the show. Msd in Orflex, or perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia, offer one of New Zealand, australia's, largest livestock product portfolios, with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products connected through identification, traceability and monitoring solutions. Like us, they see how the wealth and breadth of information born out of this podcast can help their men and their farming clients achieve their mission of the science of healthier animals. Heinegger will need a little introduction to our audience. A market leader and one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fibre removal, together with an expanding range of agricultural products and inputs, the Heinegger name is synonymous with quality, reliability and precision. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. It's fantastic to have both of these sponsors supporting us and bringing Head Shepherd to you each week and now it's time to get on with this week's episode.

Mark : 1:16

Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we've got Professor David Lindsay those who know him well, known as Prof. He was a lecturer at University of Western Australia in its heyday and taught a lot of ag professionals out there, so there'll be quite a few people listening that will have been taught by Prof. No doubt I know him through his scientific writing courses. I think I did a couple of them. I ended up with a nickname from that. A few people call me cowboy because of that day, but other than that he's one of the greats of science communication. The right to inform rather than right to impress is his mantra. Alongside that, he was also an ultra fine breeder. Not sure how far along those sheep go up, but we're going to find out in just a second when we interview Professor David Lindsay. What else is happening. So I think we've got a Q&A session coming up, so we'd love to have some questions.

Sophie : 2:14

Yeah, I've got a Q&A session, so either email us at info app or Sophie at Next Gen Agri or in the show notes to this podcast there'll be a phone number that you can leave a voice message to Try not to answer phone messages. The quality of phone calls around rural Australia isn't great, so if you can wait till you get home and send it to us on Wi-Fi, that would be fantastic. Yeah, can't wait to get some questions in and I'm looking forward to this podcast. These are usually my favourite topics and guests, so, yeah, a big one this week.

Mark : 2:46

Yeah, I'm sure Dave's not going to disappoint, so get him on now. Welcome Professor David Lindsay to the show.

Professor David Lindsay: 2:55

Thanks, thanks, nice to be there.

Mark : 2:58

Excellent. Yeah, we've got a few things to cover. Today we want to talk about, obviously, a teaching time there at University of Western Australia and a bit of part-time sheep breeding, but also your scientific writing courses, which have had a big influence on my attempts to write papers and lots of other people like me. I guess, if we start back with UWA and I would probably classify the days that you're at UWA as the hey days there's obviously a lot of UWA graduates are out doing great things in our industry at the moment. Did you actually lecture back at UWA?

Professor David Lindsay: 3:37

Well, I used to lecture in reproduction in sheep. I got the job because I started at the University of Sydney and it was in the mid-60s that there was a huge expanse of going on in Western Australia, clearing million acres a year and all sorts of things like that. The company from the Department of Agriculture worked out that they were clearing the land faster than the sheep could reproduce to stock it. So for some reason or other they decided that the way to handle this was to appoint a lecturer in reproductive physiology of sheep at UWA, and I was lucky enough to get the job. It is interesting that I came here in 1967 and in 1969 the sheep were bringing about the same price they're bringing now absolutely nothing, because it was a bloody sheep in 1969. So the Department of Agriculture followed that completely wrong and I'd done my job in two years and got the sheep from being a deficit to a complete life in those two years. So it allowed me to then to get on and do research into things that I really enjoyed and like doing, freed from the idea that somehow or other I had this goal of increasing the reproductive rate of sheep.

Professor David Lindsay: 5:21

So that's how I got going and fortunately I had a lot of good students, and I suppose one of the things was that I found, as I went on was publishing this sort of material, how difficult it was to write, and I didn't like writing very much, unfortunately for me. They used to give a little course called Scientific Communication or something or other, and it was given by an economist. Of all the people who left in a hurry, and I happened to be at that stage the Dean of Agriculture at that point, and so I said, well, I'll get somebody else to do it. And I couldn't get them. So I said, well, it must be easy, I'll do it myself. And at that point I started to realise the importance of writing as a scientist because, in fact, if you don't write, you don't do anything.

Professor David Lindsay: 6:23

You don't do. Nobody knows you're there I mean your mother does and a few other people, but nobody else knows that you exist. So you've got to write, and there are very, very few courses around that incorporate the communication of the science that people do into their training as scientists, and so when I retired in 2000, I continued to talk to people about writing, and I've written a couple of books on it now and it's become an attrition of mine. So I've got to think of a new way of retiring.

Mark : 7:07

Yeah, and it definitely got a wind of its own. I guess, and I'm pretty sure I've done at least two of those courses and, yeah, really really powerful stuff. And obviously, I guess things that are written well you kind of don't know they're written well because it's just easy to read and that's the point, and I think I always remember many things that you said during those courses. But one was right to inform, not to impress, and that, I think, is very critical. Obviously there's plenty of people trying to sound smart by using big words and things, but if your mother can't read or if someone's right off the street can't read it and work out what you're trying to tell them, then you really haven't done your job.

Professor David Lindsay: 7:54

Yeah, it's funny. I've quite recently become a great fan of Alan Elder, who you might have started out from. He was the poor guy Pearson Mesh, you remember the American. He actually ran a program for Scientific American on one of the American channels where he interviewed scientists. He worked out that scientists couldn't explain himself, and so he became a great advocate of scientific writing and set up a course at Stony Brook University in New York.

Professor David Lindsay: 8:30

He worked on scientific communication and he's written a book which he bought out in 2018, called If I understood you, would I have this stupid look on my face, and it's really quite a great read for anybody. But one of the great things he said was don't tell people what you want to tell them. Tell them what they want to know, and the key to good writing is actually getting people to want to know what you're about to tell them, and it's a way of thinking about writing that made an enormous difference. In fact, what he says is not much different than what I say. He just says he doesn't say much better than that. It's a great read if you want to read it. He's talking about communication.

Mark : 9:32

Excellent. I guess, whether it's written, verbal or video, audio, I guess all forms the same thing applies if you haven't, I guess if people haven't understood what you're trying to tell them and you haven't communicated I think there's a lot of in the science world Particularly, there's a lot of people that I think, having written that paper or having done one video or one audio or something, then that's the communication job done. But really, if we know that everyone is differently, we can tell 10 people the same thing and you get 10 different understandings of what you've told them. So it's definitely an art form to have people understand what you're trying to tell them.

Professor David Lindsay: 10:18

Yes, you've got to be thinking of the reader all the time. Clearly, you're doing this podcast series. That you're doing shows that you actually understand that pretty well.

Mark : 10:29

I don't know whether we hope to be communicating out there, and definitely it's a changing world and we've found this medium to work well for farmers, because you can drive a tractor or bring a mob of sheep in and listen at the same point. So that's, I guess, how I'm with this style of communication. Back at UWA, what were some of those research projects? I guess that would have been the time when Estrogenic clover was wreaking havoc and a few other things going on.

Professor David Lindsay: 11:01

Yes, it was. I was pretty lucky with that too, because I worked with Clark Francis, who was probably the most prominent clover breeder. We looked at Estrogenic clover and so on and we looked at what you might be able to do with the sheep to stop it. But eventually they found that the best thing is to work with the clover in the legumes rather than the sheep. So a whole series of highly Estrogenic clover were phased out and non-Eastergenic types were faded in. So that was better than trying to change the sheep and find the resistance to it. It's still a little problem, but because we don't have the clover, the omen and pastures we used to have, its effect is much less and the varieties around have diluted out the Estrogenic varieties as well. So it's not the problem it used to be. But it allows us to find out a lot of other things. There are things that we did that I'm finding even today people don't quite understand the fundamentals.

Sophie : 12:31

One of them is.

Professor David Lindsay: 12:33

you know. One of them is about rams. I was interested, and some of my PhD students were interested, in the behaviour of rams and how they rams and use and the whole mating setup and I find that there are practical ways that you can make. Farmers can make or save quite a lot of money in rams. The ram breathers don't think that's a good idea because mostly it rams that you can use. If you prepare rams well, you can use fewer of them and of course you don't have to buy them.

Professor David Lindsay: 13:17

Rams are fairly expensive part of your farming business I guess your farming business but the ram is incredible producer of it's a dynamo in terms of production of sperm, and since it only takes one sperm to fertilize an egg, people think that they're just being proximate. Producing all these sperm. I mean, one gram of testicular tissue will produce you something like 10,000 sperm aminophilic A minute. You know that's incredible thing. Yeah, well, wait a minute. They can produce 20 million sperm per day, or 14,000 sperm a minute. I'll just get wrong. And so if you can make sure that your arms have got big testes and that's not so hard either it's an extraordinary business. They do have big testes, as we know, but if you can increase the weight of the testes, each gram of sperm is producing. Each gram produce about 14,000 sperm a minute. Yeah, it's really an extraordinary performance really.

Mark : 14:43

So to do that? Is that you talking, genetically increasing sclerosal comforts, or nutritionally making sure they're good to go?

Professor David Lindsay: 14:50

Nutrition the trick. That's the extraordinary thing that you know we did with Chris Ollum in particular. We did a lot of feeding of rams in the last six or seven weeks before joining and we could increase the size of testes by about 20 grams a week. Yeah, right, now put that in perspective. The human testes is about 20 grams, and so you can increase the size of the thing by that. The big thing now is that sperm hunt impacts. You do need a lot of sperm. You need at least 60 million sperm in order to get reasonable production.

Professor David Lindsay: 15:38

But when you start to work out what one way a ram can do the concept of having one ram per 100 years, which most people are very wary of because they say that's too low so they put in two rams or even three rams per 100 years in order to make sure that they get enough sperm. That's really not the problem. I think the problem is to get the rams that you do put in to be good enough to produce the numbers, and when you do, there is absolutely no doubt that 1% rams is enough. Now that alone can save most sheep farmers an enormous amount of money, except the stud people, of course, who are interested in selling their rams, and it means expanding a little bit of feed over a two month period before mating. But the cost of doing that, compared to the cost of doubling in number of rams, for example, is very, very small. So this is something that we worked on quite a lot and it really hasn't taken on all that much.

Professor David Lindsay: 16:53

People tend to say, well, we've got to be careful, so we'll put some extra rams in. Now, clearly, if you're using a single ram with 100 years, that's a little dangerous, just in case he's genetically inferred or for some other reason maybe a pathological reason he's inferred on. But people never actually check out their ram testings very much at all, but you can grow them like mad. The interesting thing is that what we found after a six week mating period that the testers, the size of the testes of most rams, reduces to about half what it was when they started. So the test is an incredibly mobile thing and an incredibly productive piece of machinery that their sheep has got. And in fact, another fact that people don't realize is that, apart from some pygmy shrew or something or other, the ratio of the size of the testers to the weight of the animal in the ram is higher than every other species on earth. They are designed to produce enormous amounts of sperm, and the farmers should be taking advantage of that.

Mark : 18:29

Yeah, you've only got a follower, a group of rams down the track and well, a follower of bulls or a set of bulls or whatever, and obviously a very different ratio. And yeah, I think 100% right in the opportunity there. What I guess we see and definitely try and change, is people paying the hunger games in their rampatic. People kind of chuck them in the rampatic or the windmill paddock or the swamp paddock or whatever and they get chucked there for sort of 10 and a half months and then they get dragged out and send in with the use and haven't had that sort of pre-planting and pre-nutrition. So I think maybe that management sort of contributes to this need for all this sort of people putting out 2% because they're only putting out half a ram on both cases, kind of things. But if the protocol like to summarize that protocol of feeding, what does that look like? To get your rams to grow to a particular tissue? What is that? That was lupins or is that just any nutrition?

Professor David Lindsay: 19:29

Well, yeah, I'm not in Australia because lupins are available. So that's the sort of thing we use. It's our protein, high-energy diet. It's wonderful, wonderful feed lupins, and we've never been quite sure whether it's the protein or the energy or whether it's just the combination of the two that does it. But the main thing is the ram. If you're going to wait for six weeks, the sperm that they're going to use in that six weeks has already been made. It's in, the cells have already been produced and they're now in the process of maturing. So any feed you give them during the mating and they probably won't eat much of it anyway, and that's why they lose so much of the testicular weight. They're not interested in food during the mating period, so the amount of sperm they produce is already been in train.

Professor David Lindsay: 20:32

At the moment they go in the gate, so the time to feed them is. It takes 54 days, in fact, between when the first cells divide to produce the sperm and the certolic cells. It's 54 days before it's ready to be ejaculated, and so if you can feed them for the last 54 days before mating, then that's the time you should be preparing your rams. After that you can then with confidence put them in. Providing you're putting more than one ram per mating group to cover the infertile ram, then you can get away with 1%, and people in New Zealand have been doing that for 50 or 60 years some people in New Zealand anyway, and with obviously no problems whatsoever, but certainly in Australia. The idea is that you should put. 2.5-3% is the sort of thing that people would talk about, and they will probably need that number if they're using rams that haven't been properly prepared.

Mark : 21:44

Yeah, definitely, and we see half a percent, 0.3%, over here and people put one ram out with a couple hundred to use and no trouble. And you also see, I think every farmer's got a memory of where a ram got in for overnight or a couple of days or whatever, and somehow it's so high 200 lambs or whatever, like there's insane what can happen when one jumps a fence. So there's obviously plenty of capacity.

Professor David Lindsay: 22:11

Yeah, that's right. One for 100 is quite conservative. You can get away with less than a dump, sure, but of course it's a little bit. You only have one chance per year to get it right, so people will be on the safe side. But being on the super safe side is a very expensive thing to do.

Professor David Lindsay: 22:34

The other thing is that most people think that what happens is the ram runs around chasing the years all over the place. Not 100% like that. The years actually chase the rams too, and initial things done by Enixter I think it's Enixter anyway in New Zealand showed that, and we did it well. If you chain the ram up on a three meter chain in the middle of somewhere in the paddock and put in Enixter's use with him, they still get made it just as well as if he were running around free. They all chase the ram and you often see under the tree or something a ram with four or five years around and it's used to be chasing the year of the ram, and there's something worth knowing as well.

Mark : 23:29

Definitely, and that's the only explanation I can give for a ram We've talked a little bit about, who's tag number is actually 180141, who notoriously doesn't get maidens pregnant and he only gets out using them while pregnant.

Mark : 23:44

When you mix them up and I'm down the, the only sort of conclusion we can draw from that is that it's the fact that those older, older user more likely to seek the ramp and therefore that's what's going on, because I can't see any other reason. But it's been replicated in a couple different years, so it's definitely definitely a feature. A Quick interruption here to remind you of head shepherd premium and our consulting services at next in Agri International. If you love this podcast and want to hear more of them, visit the hub next to Agri dot com and sign up for head shepherd premium and get an extra podcast each week. If you're listening to this and thinking you really do want to maximize the journey gain of your lifestyle and feel more confident around the decisions You're making on farm, then send me an email at mark at next to Agri dot com and we'll get in touch and see see where that takes us.

Professor David Lindsay: 24:34

I think that's absolutely correct, mark, it's. You know, the maiden user got a thing on this being, you know, slightly different and we, you know, I think the old idea that you put the Make sure you put all the Rams in with the you made news your maiden Rams in with the older use is pretty is probably a Pretty sound. Yeah, but it's, it's. I don't know, this is a bit of an aside, but it's an interesting one of one of the experiments we did. We reckon we had a fantastic way of finding out just what happens how many Rams mate with with use in in commercial conditions, where you're talking about flocks of five, six, seven hundred sheep, eight hundred sheep Use and and you put in several Rams. But you can't do you. We wanted to trace which ran Work the most and how many worked and how many use got sort of by each Ram and so on. And we had this fantastic idea we use rattles but you can use it with different colors and then you can see the different colors, but they've only come in a handle and had four colors and rattles and, and sometimes I got a bit mixed up, not the red and the blue but the yellow and the, and the blue Turned out to produce green metal and all sorts of stuff. But what we found was it's fantastic. I'd if we used sort of fairly rare metals like titanium, zirconium, things like that and put them in the rattles and then cut the wall off, we could put in and we did put in ten different of these rare metals into the end of the rattle mixture. We made up the rattles and ourselves and and and then put them out with the rim. So then we cut the wall off and tested it in a Atomic absorption spectra of automata, which was a new instrument at the time, and we could find out when you got a peak of any of these rare metals in the wall sample after you've asked it. And that was fantastic. But one place where we were using ten different metals we found that in a flock of 700 years that Two of two Rams actually made it every year and we said this has just got a bit it fun Terry Knight, who you would know pretty well from New Zealand.

Professor David Lindsay: 27:12

He went to New Zealand and did quite a lot of woodwork there. But Terry Got the. He said well, let's just trip some wool off the body of the animal when there's no sign of any rattles at all and see what's on there. And there was a zirconium and titanium in the wall itself and it turned out that the plug the blokes place had to zirconium and titanium. So he pegged the place because you thought he might have a Mine on his hands. Apparently was in the clay and apparently the extraction system they're so bad that you can't use it. They the the mines that they use, the conium and titanium mines, mainly in sand. So he couldn't use it. They did show that but many Rams did. We were actually mating over 300 years and there was a big variation between the number of Rams, sorry, the number of years that each Rams, but some of them did that many.

Professor David Lindsay: 28:17

But we had to reduce our numbers down to. Actually and it's never been tried, I don't think but that's a fantastic way of mineral exploration.

Mark : 28:33

That's right. Run the superman? Yeah, exactly.

Professor David Lindsay: 28:35

The small stores and get a sample from everywhere. And when you find a place that's got a particular, particular Element in it from the dust that's in the wall, then you know and pegged the place.

Mark : 28:53

There's still time. Yeah, he heard it here first. Back to that, that 54 days that means that we shouldn't be doing anything in that. In certain terms of management, anything that causes any Any grief to the ram in that 54 days before going out is is a no. No. It does that include sharing?

Professor David Lindsay: 29:14

sharing shouldn't hurt the sharing not a deal. And the the the only thing is putting them in a shed and feeding them up so that they're they're in a shed, completely artificial conditions. So I think that's a bit of a problem and some people that buy Flash-looking rams that have been then spent all their life in a shed, put them out with the use off and have a bit of trouble because they get out, then they they're not used to the outside conditions. They're not. They don't play heat up too quickly. Then the test this has got to stay about four or five degrees Celsius, cool the rest of the body and it's designed put outside and got sweat glands and all sorts of things to keep itself cool. But if they, if they aren't used to that and don't have the systems in place to do it, then you can have rams where they seem as, in fact, infertile because it's too hot Cures it.

Mark : 30:16

Yeah, I know. So at some stage in In your career you decide you'd have a crack at burning a few rams, and we're we're burning octophons. How did, what did you get up to and how'd that go?

Professor David Lindsay: 30:27

Oh, yeah, it was a most enjoyable thing about 1990. I think we sweet, we got a few. Well, they were cool superfines at that time. They were about 17 microphones. We got a few of those because they tend to resist moisture.

Professor David Lindsay: 30:44

Where we're on the coast in Western Australia, the sheet we had before used to get a lot of, a lot of police walking stuff. So we got these for that reason. And then we decided we'd find See what we could do about producing the finest of the wall without without producing the police way. And we didn't stick to any one bloodline. And I remember the first, the first semen.

Professor David Lindsay: 31:12

I got to try this out. The, the offspring of the semen, was one micron finer and One kilogram heavier than the sheath I had, you know, on average, so that enormous. It paid for the semen without any trouble at all for one year and we kept doing that until Getting the best, the best semen on figures, evv's and so on that we could. We could get until our own sheep were Pretty well as good as any semen we got in. But we used to keep doing it for comparative purposes. But we got down to we sold a bale of wool at 13.4 migrants and we found that we could. We had increased the police weight on those animals by over the years by probably Two and a half kilos and decreased the micron from 17 down to about 15.

Mark : 32:10

We'd cull anything over 15 and yeah, you know same before the show that your wife used to class the wall. But obviously, yeah, better things to be doing these days than than standing in a workshop.

Professor David Lindsay: 32:27

Yeah, as I said to you earlier that she, she didn't mind standing around the table for a house, passing the wall, but Cooking for this year or at the same time.

Mark : 32:41

Yeah, excellent, that was one of the influences, yeah so if we yeah, I guess we'll chat a bit more about the scientific writing course and and, yeah, how, where's, how far, how widely is that taking you over over the years? Over the last 20 years, since 23 years, I suppose, I?

Professor David Lindsay: 32:58

Became a different career and so I've lectured in every state in Australia, 18 different universities, one way or another To people from. An interesting thing is I do very little lecturing to people in agriculture anymore. It's it's medical science, and in fact I was made a Honorary professor at the University of Southern Queensland because of the help I gave into writing in Astrophysics Rockets. I think it doesn't matter what the what the subject is, the principles are absolutely the same. You know, einstein said if you can't explain astrophysics to Abar made, then you probably don't know enough about astrophysics, and I think that was pretty. It's summery, so I learned an enormous amount of thing about it. Mostly, mostly useless stuff for me, but In all sorts of fields and as they spike them it's been a fascinating journey that I've been on.

Mark : 34:10

Yeah, I guess, if we Just briefly, because we can't give it anywhere, neither just requires. But what are the? It's like if you could give you a top, top three mistakes people right make when they're writing? What would? What would they be?

Professor David Lindsay: 34:22

Well, mostly the. The most important thing is to always consider your reader, because that's the only reason anybody puts anything on paper is for somebody to read it, even if it's they themselves, and after reading later on. So you got to think of the reader every time. So if you say, if I were reading what I've just written here and would I, would I understand this crap in front of it? And if you, if you think it's crap in front of you, then you got to rewrite the thing. There's no question about that. And and the the idea that if you Say something that sounds terribly important, using words that you're not used to, you chances of making an error Like the one that I sometimes illustrate is the one that says Table six shows the number of teachers broken down by six, and they thought was was you know a good way of expressing it, but in most people would read it, something I do, that's the sort of thing that happens.

Professor David Lindsay: 35:36

They got to think about the reader. But by and large that's the big thing, and in the more recent years I've been very probably since you did. One of those courses is getting more and more fluency into your writing so that it follows all the time and people don't have to read twice, because if they read a sentence and don't quite understand it, they've got to go back and read it again to find out. They do that too often, but their mind just shuts down, and most people will recall times when they've said I'll look, I'm terribly tired, I'm not concentrating. Well, I seem to, I've just read a paragraph and I can't remember what, any of it at all, and I've just read it. It's not your fault, probably it's the fault of the writer, and so the writer's got to be conscious of those sort of things.

Mark : 36:33

Yeah, for sure, and it doesn't really matter on what level, what level of your writing. We've interviewed a few. Well, we've had a few jobs open recently and I had a bit of a rant on our internal podcast about the quality of the writing and I think people really need to think hard about what, how they go about writing a resume, how they go about writing a cover letter and things. If you can't explain yourself in those ways and make right that with some fluency and without spelling mistakes, it doesn't lend yourself to be considered for that job, really depending on what the job is, of course. But yeah, I guess over your years you would have seen the decline in English.

Professor David Lindsay: 37:17

Well, I don't know whether there is a decline, but certainly what I have been seeing is a decline in the status of scientists in the world. I mean, if you look at the news and I'm sure it's exactly the same in New Zealand as in Australia you look at the news every night. There's somebody on there who's an economist from somewhere. Are they giving an opinion? And scientists don't give opinions. They've got to give. They've got to give, they've got to. Or, if they're giving an opinion, they've got to actually put the data behind it. They've got to base it on evidence, and scientists find that extremely hard to do so they're back off. So, in fact, scientists who were believed, you know, 40 or 50 years ago because they were scientists, are now no longer believed because enough people give opinions that tell them to say that scientists are a bunch of idiots, but who can talk with opinions only have taken over.

Professor David Lindsay: 38:16

I think that there should be in all science courses now a unit or two of communication in order that scientists can actually defend themselves much better than they've tried to do in recent times. So you know there's a whole lot of things around the world to get STEM going science. What is STEM science? Technology, engineering, mathematics or these subjects in mathematics, all that sort of stuff. I think you ought to have communication in there as well, because no sense in them being great, great scientists if they can't tell anybody why their science matters, and I think that's an obligation that scientists have now. So communicating is far more important than we thought it was 20, 30 years ago.

Mark : 39:15

Yeah, for sure, and we, on that note, we might leave it there, but it's the contribution you've made to make writing or reading a lot easier by making people write better has been enormous and we're all very grateful for that. And yeah, hopefully the second retirement goes well, now that you can do a bit less of that and enjoy the hate of a WI summer.

Professor David Lindsay: 39:38

Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks, mate, Thanks very much.

Mark : 39:44

Thanks again to our mates at Honega, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. They understand that their customers rely on the quality and performance of their products each and every day. Also, thanks to our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflix, the AlfaNc extensive livestock product portfolio focused on animal health and management, all backed up by exceptional service. Both of these companies are wonderful supporters of the Australian and New Zealand livestock industries and we thank them for sponsoring the HIPAA podcast.