The $29.65 million Caprine Innovations New Zealand PGP between the Ministry for Primary Industries and the Dairy Goat Co-operative has been welcomed by the co-operative’s chief executive David Hemara for the horsepower it provides to the co-op’s efforts to implement a range of international clinical trials focusing on dairy goat milk’s nutritional value.
“For many years we have already focused on doing clinical trials showing goat’s milk is safe as an infant formula.
“What we want to do from here is to strengthen the research to show the additional, quantifiable features and benefits of goat’s milk formula and undertake trials so we can share the results with medical health groups.”
International multi-centre trials are known to be very expensive, being run in different parts of the world.
The co-operative intends to initiate a series of pilot trials in NZ then the large international trials will run with centres that focus on different aspects of infant nutrition and formulations.
At a farm level the funding also intends to deliver better tools to help goat farmers measure herd productivity and individual animal’s physical performance.
NZ has about 50,000 milk goats and the long-term goal, aided by input from the PGP, is to expand that to more than 100,000 over a 15 or so years.
Hemara said there are three or four other countries internationally with milking goat populations larger than NZ’s but the focus here is to aim at the premium, niche end of the market.
The unique supplemented diet NZ dairy goats receive with cut grass and silage is thought to contribute to the milk’s particularly high nutritional value and it is hoped the trials will also highlight that, making it a particular selling point for processed products.
There is added appeal in dairy goat systems as farmers look to reduce their farm’s nutrient loss levels and confined, cut-and-carry goat systems are one way to achieve that.
“There’s the opportunity to decrease the environmental impact of pastoral farming through conversions from other farming systems,” Hemara said.
MPI director general Martyn Dunne said a dairy goat research farm will also be established under the PGP to trial innovations alongside the high-value nutritional research.
“The Caprinz PGP programme meets our criteria for investment, such as an innovation focus, delivering economic and environmental benefits and a focus on the value chain.”
He believes programme developments will not be easily replicated overseas because of the uniqueness of NZ’s dairy goat farming system, retaining the benefits onshore.
The programme is one of nine business cases for new PGP programmes in the pipeline, developed before the announcement of the PGP review.
“We have been working on this for over a year. Such programmes take a lot of time to develop,” Hemara said.
