Staple of Island Nation’s Economy : In New Zealand, Sheep Are Big News, Big Bucks

About midway through the evening news on national television, the anchorwoman pauses for a message from a sponsor: WIPE OUT sheep-dip.

The commercial rises to a punning crescendo straight from Madison Avenue, or more likely Queen Street in Auckland: “WIPE OUT will last you a lice time!”

Ratings do not measure if any sheep are watching. Probably not. But the message is loud and clear.

Sheep are to New Zealand what hits are to Wade Boggs, broken hearts to Ann Landers, insomniacs to David Letterman. To the Kiwis they are bread and butter, cars in the garage, bucks in the bank. That’s why WIPE OUT is on prime time.

Yearly Dip the Law

If sheep are not dipped--by law they must be once a year--they get lice and spend their time scratching instead of eating and growing the meat and wool that keep this island nation fiscally afloat. Sheep jokes--are there any new ones?--are not funny when 3% of the 3 million Kiwis who are farmers produce 66% of New Zealand’s foreign exchange. And the biggest producers of all are the sheep ranchers.

People are only 5% of the mammal population of New Zealand, a land native to only two such species, both bats. People are outnumbered almost 20 to 1 by 68.5 million sheep: sheep in the hills, sheep in the dales, sheep everywhere, chewing across the landscape like a 1752134244for a lost contact lens in the grass.

“In industrial countries, agriculture is kept as sort of a pet, a political indulgence to keep the votes,” Prime Minister David Lange, a city boy, said. “In New Zealand it’s not a pet. It’s a working beast. It’s the guts of our economy.”

Sheep have been news in New Zealand since the first Europeans began arriving early in the last century.

National Animal

They came mostly from Britain, where the sheep takes a back seat only to the lion and the unicorn--and perhaps the steeplechasing or fox-hunting horse--as national animal.

One look at the green plains, the tawny hills tufted with tussocks of grass in the South Island, and the new immigrants knew without a word from WIPE OUT what they were seeing. Sheep country.

Australia had already reached the same conclusion.

“The colonists just tossed the sheep out into the wide, wide world and let them eat,” said Dr. Hugh Blair, professor of animal science at Massey University in Palmerston North. “Cattle are harder to transport, don’t grow wool to survive the cold, and if one falls off a hillside and breaks a leg, you’ve lost the whole animal. Pigs never made it here, because we don’t have enough area to grow grain. We need the grain for bread and beer and those important things.”

No Predators, Rivals

There were other advantages. Being mammal-free except for the bats, New Zealand had no predators and no rivals for the grass. The sheep, of course, had to be imported. The half-a-world trip from the Mother Country winnowed out the sickly, and only the fittest survived.

Early on, Kiwi farmers were exporting wool to Australia. With the introduction of refrigerated ships in 1882, New Zealand lamb and mutton carcasses joined their fleece to feed and clothe Englishmen back home.

Today New Zealand produces half the lambs on the world market.

“We can produce wool and meat cheaper than almost anywhere in the world,” Pat Morrison, chairman of the New Zealand Wool Board, said.

MacKenzie Upland

Morrison spoke at a seminar of sheep farmers at Clayton Station near here. The 15,000-acre spread was ringed by the rugged, middle-grade mountains of the Mackenzie Upland, where the fickle weather can bring summer and winter in the same week. It is wild, remote and beautiful country. But what Morrison and the farmers saw in the 15,000 or so sheep that dotted the hillside were 350,000 pair of wool rugby socks.

The Kiwis have filled their land with sheep with the same scientific intensity that the Dutch have devoted to their tulips.

New Zealanders introduced gorse to the island because it made nice hedgerows back home. It grew rampant Down Under. Rabbits and deer were brought in for sport. They almost ate the island whole. Kiwis, however, are resourceful enough to produce their own happy endings. Gorse is a splendid seed cover for new forests. Rabbits taste good, as does venison, and velvety new deer antlers are in great demand in China and Korea as aphrodisiacs.

The sheep were a better-known commodity. The Merino of Spain variety is a high-altitude producer of fine wool that thrives in a harsh, dry climate. Kiwis took them to the hills. The Romney from Britain prefers more temperate zones.

They went to the Canterbury Plains around Christchurch and the warmer North Island. Their coarser wool goes for carpeting.

Hardier Breed

The Kiwis improved on nature. Crossing the Romney with the English Cheviot produced a native breed, the Perendale, which is less woolly but hardier. A Romney-Border Leicester cross produced the Coopworth, a breed as meaty and woolly as the Romney, but the ewe is more fertile. If a farmer thinks wool is going to get more than meat in future markets, he might hedge his bets with another cross, the Corriedale, a fine producer of both meat and wool.

Breeding records have been computerized nationwide, but raising sheep is still as much of a gamble as raising the pot in a poker game.

“A sudden spring blizzard can wipe out your newborn lambs overnight,” Peter Rayne said. With his wife, Jenny, he raises 12,000 sheep on a 13,000-acre spread next door to Clayton.

A farmer who gambled on good meat prices on the basis of $23.50 for a sheep carcass in 1984-85 and tilted his herd accordingly from wool to meat, found the price was $14 the next year. This year, for the first time, lambskin at $10.38 is worth more than the sheep’s meat, $7.31.

Market Guessing Game

“If you’re breeding for wool, it takes a couple of generations of breeding to get a half-kilo more per animal,” a farmer at the Clayton seminar said. “If you decide to turn your herd around to meat when that is 70% of the market, by then the demand may be 70% for wool.”

Although they won’t be gnawed by coyotes because there aren’t any, the sheep of New Zealand can contract a flock of menaces, from liver fluke and lung worm to blood poisoning and salmonella. They pick up the last by grazing in manure-strewn pastures. That’s one of the reasons they move around a lot from one paddock to another, a paddock in New Zealand being a versatile description covering everything from a back yard to a sprawl bigger than Los Angeles.

Moving the animals about is the work of the sheep dog, a breed that yips and yaps and eyeballs sheep with a withering glare and with success rarely achieved by traffic cops on humans.

Rayne demonstrated one dewy morning by directing two dogs, one with only three legs, with a series of “yos” and “nos” to parade a flock as tightly as a band at a football game.

Work of Nine Men

“It took my father five hours a day on horseback just to get to the sheep and back,” Rayne said. “He had 10 men working for him. Today one man with a four-wheel drive vehicle could run my animals--plus the dogs. So you could say they do the work of nine men, if men could run that fast.”

To keep things straight, Rayne dyes his rams’ bellies blue or red on alternate months. That way the dye colors the ewe’s rump so he can tell which ewes are going to give birth when, and he can then bring them in without overcrowding the nursery.

A newborn sheep, of course, is a lamb. At childhood it becomes a hogget, and at 14 months two teeth break out leaving the open gums subject to blood poisoning. By then the animal has already been sheared twice by teams of men who can trim up to 400 sheep in a dawn-to-dusk day. At 26 months there are four teeth, at 38 six and at 4 years of age the sheep begins losing teeth, which means it has more difficulty and is fated for “the works.” That’s a Kiwi euphemism for the slaughterhouse, which follows a trip to the Soviet Union, whose citizens don’t seem to mind tough mutton.

The domestic sheep is generally regarded in its rather brief life as being too dumb to even look at television. It perversely engages in “fertility transference,” eating in the lush bottoms and then taking it up into the crags to leave the nutrients there in the form of manure.

‘Sheep Are Sheepish’

People who senselessly crowd each other are said to be “acting like sheep.” A wimp concentrating on his shuffling feet instead of looking you in the eye is said to be “sheepish.”

“Sheep are sheepish because we’ve taught them mobbing, to move in flocks. They’re not dumb, not at all,” said Alistair Bruce of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand in Wellington, who has raised sheep at home and studied them in college. “But they don’t have a lot of common sense.”

Wimp or wizard, the sheep is the unsung hero of New Zealand. He has the good sense to grow wool instead of eating prodigiously just to generate the energy to stay warm as is the case with cattle, which, as milk, cheese and beef producers in the North Island, are another economic mainstay of this barnyard nation.

Kiwis know that their well-being rides like a jockey “on the backs of our sheep and cows.” In gratitude, there’s a sheep on the national coat of arms, along with a lion and unicorn.

Jenny Rayne grew up in the hills that spear the clouds beyond the backyard of her comfortable home. As a girl she had to wade seven streams to get to school. She is a child of sheep country, as firm about it as the Merinos are.

Her brother died years ago in a blizzard while trying to break a trail for the sheep in the snow. He could have stayed home and lived.

“But here,” she said, “the sheep come first.”