Newsmaker

Award for lasting contributions

Late last year, the Ministry for Primary Industries’ principal scientist Gerald Rys was awarded the Ray Brougham Trophy by the New Zealand Grasslands Association, recognising an extensive career and his advocacy for pastoral agriculture and the research behind it. Colin Williscroft reports.

GERALD Rys says he was surprised but happy the Grasslands Association presented the trophy to a core public servant who has taken a different path to many scientists, having spent 45 years in the public service, including 35 years in MPI and its predecessors.

Rys grew up on a dairy farm in the southern Rotorua Lakes area, but his father wanted him to get an education rather than stay on the farm, so he headed off to Massey University in Palmerston North to do an agricultural science degree.

He says in those days human resources staff from what was then the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries interviewed graduates every year, which was how he joined the Ministry as a district scientist and was initiated into grassland science in Taranaki, Manawatu and Hawke’s Bay.

During that time, Brougham was director of the Grasslands Division of DSIR and Rys says he was a larger than life director, instrumental in raising the profile of the division, both nationally and globally.

“He was a strong advocate for grassland agriculture, so I’m honoured to receive this award in his name,” Rys said.

Reflecting back on his career, Rys says it has been a sequence of thirds and all have involved grassland science to a greater or lesser degree.

The first third was as a district agricultural scientist out in the field doing applied agricultural research in the southern North Island.

Next, he was dealing with science for agricultural and natural resource management policy in Wellington.

It was in the early 1990s and he was working for the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.

Rys remembers looking out of a 12th-storey window and wondering whether he had made the right decision giving up fieldwork.

But after spending 10 years working on national science policy development, in particular evidence-based policy with the right science behind it, he is sure it was.

The final third, which includes his current role that he was appointed to in 2012, involves providing advice on national science policy, particularly in agriculture.

His career has taken him to a variety of places overseas, including the Maldives, Easter Island and the Altiplano region of northern Chile.

He is the author or co-author of more than 170 scientific, technical and conference publications, 11 major departmental reports, and commissioned and directly supervised more than 250 significant external contracted science reports.

His areas of research have been many and varied, including grassland nutrition; grass and legume cultivar cultivation, the best known being the Droughtmaster perennial ryegrass; grass species establishment and management, particularly in hill country; nitrogen fixation by white clover, including selecting for white clover that continues to fix nitrogen under high nitrogen conditions; and identifying the impacts of drought.

More recently, he has been involved in work around climate change in agriculture, particularly approaches to account for and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and also the effects and adaptation needs of agriculture to climate change.

Rys says there have been a few areas of key successes, including early work on supplementing dairy cows with magnesium with the late Peter Young from Ruakura, where cow death rates were reduced and milk production was increased.

He was also involved in establishing two research centres to develop, demonstrate and extend agricultural knowledge – the Poukawa Research Station in Hawke’s Bay that is now managed by On Farm Research, and the NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre.

More recently he has been involved in the establishment of a NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Inventory, which has been mandated by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

He says there is a statutory requirement for NZ to report what its greenhouse gas numbers are and initial work on an inventory included a lot of work done overseas, particularly in Europe. However, NZ agricultural systems are different and the inventory needed to reflect that.

“It’s important to do research in your own country,” he said.

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure, so getting the greenhouse gas numbers right is very important for our farmers.”

Rys is confident that agriculture will continue to play an important role in NZ for a long time.

He says on a global level the need for food production continues to grow and NZ is in an ideal position to help with that.

Although on a global scale NZ is relatively small, he says our livestock-based grassland system puts us in a unique environmental position but we need to sell our approach much better.

He says unlike most other farming systems, NZ’s does not use much in the way of crops to feed ruminants that could instead be used to feed humans, with our pasture-based approach more efficient than many others.

“That’s a feature we need to stress more,” he said.

LONG SERVICE: Gerald Rys has been involved in agricultural science in New Zealand for 45 years.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, so getting the greenhouse gas numbers right is very important for our farmers.

Gerald Rys Scientist

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