The Country 15/05/26: Dr John Roche talks to Jamie Mackay

The chief science adviser to the Prime Minister and MPI looks back on his upbringing on a small Irish dairy farm and forward to Fieldays, where agriculture, science and AI will be to the fore at the MPI site. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
He is doctor John Rutch. He is mpi's chief Science Advisor.
If that's not enough, he's the Prime Minister's Science advisor.
He joins us on the country. It is dairy week
here on the country. John, You've got a good dairy background.
You grew up on a dairy farm in Ireland as
a young man. Mind you, dairy farm's in Island back
in those days weren't very big.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Good afternoon, no good afternoon, Jamie. Hey, thanks for having
me on. Yes, I did look, and I think that
stood to me my entire life. I'm still an early riser.
Most people think I'm crazy. I'm not walking the dog
at five o'clock in the morning now, roer milking cows.
But yeah, like it was a great way to grow up.
And back then we would have been regarded as a

(00:42):
relatively large farm in Ireland. My father would have been
milking just over sixty cows. My brother is still on
that farm and he's milking two hundred and twenty cows now.
So you know, the milk quota and the common agricultural
policy environment of the you created a very strange eco
system for dairy farming.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
I was lucky enough to lead a farming tour over
to the UK and Ireland in two thousand and three,
and the one thing that stuck in my head, other
than your smoky bars, because you hadn't been smoking in
bars at that stage, was the size of the cows,
John Rauch. They were like houses.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
They were look Many countries make poor decisions, and I
think one of the poor decisions was Ireland followed the
rest of the world in growing bigger cows because bigger
cows can eat more and can therefore produce more milk,
and the simplistic belief that more milk meant more profit.

(01:38):
We were fortunate in the early nineteen nineties we brought
in a number of New Zealand dairy advisors into the country.
Sharon and Alistair Rain were two that when I was
getting involved in dairy came in. Sharon and Alistair are
al farming in Canterbury themselves, but my brother joined one
of Sharon's discussion groups to learn more about how New

(02:01):
Zealand farmed grass and how they were an incredibly profitable
dairy sector without any subsidies, and of course through that
we learned the value of a multi trade index and
started breeding back towards a smaller cow more like a
New Zealand a robust, resilient cow that was highly profitable,
could get pregnant easily, could produce large volumes of milk

(02:24):
and cook grit as well. So that's changed a lot
as well. Used to have farms are very big cows,
but the vast majority of dairy farms across Ireland now
have a New Zealand type cow.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Ye're a year or so into your job as the
Prime Minister's Science Advisor. How's it gone. How do you
split your time between MPI and the Prime Minister's office.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, that's a good question. That varies on a daily
day basis. It really depends on the demands. But I
think it's gone. Well, look I go back, it is
just over a year. It's a year ago last week
actually that the Prime Minister announced it, and I was
in Ireland at the time for a private visit, and
you know, he had mentioned to me that he had
looked at the Irish system and he was really impressed

(03:08):
with how the science, innovation and technology system had helped
Ireland post GFC. I mean, everybody will know that Ireland
at a very difficult time coming out of the GFC
from it an economic point of view, and so I
said to him, I said, well, look, I'm over there
in a couple of weeks, why don't I repurpose a
week of leave and get to meet some of the

(03:29):
departments and the research funding agencies and just see what
they did. And one of those meetings was with the
former Secretary General of Science Foundation Ireland, so the funding agency,
and he also happened to have been the Chief Scientist
at the same time. And I've talked to the Mark Ferguson,
doctor from Marc Ferguson is his name, and I've talked
to him a number of times since, and just the

(03:51):
pearls of wisdom that he was able to provide to
me about what Ireland did in that time in prioritization
and what he was able to do for the Irish
Prime Minister. The t shock at the time gave me
a great sense of enablement. I felt like I wasn't

(04:11):
quite drowning. In the same way, I had a fair
degree of imposter syndrome, Jimmy, if I'm honest. When the
Prime Minister asked me to step into such a big role,
Mark gave me a bit of confidence that I could
probably do the role, but also most importantly the importance
of the role and the science reforms that we were
initiating in New Zealand.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
MPI, as always will have a huge prisons at Field
days when we look at the egg and science sector.
How do things like AI for instance come into play now?
Obviously more and more on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Absolutely absolutely. Actually I was at the South Island Area
event last month and we had a session on that
and a farmer from Taranaki Hid and Laurens spoke about
how he was using it in his own business or
just playing playing with it to see how we could
use it most effectively. It is coming in increasingly, we
will have it. One of the sites that MPI is

(05:07):
sponsoring alongside partners at Field is the Science for Farmer's site,
which you'll have visited with us last year. It's bigger
and better, but one of our modules this year will
be working with some of our partners to show farmers
how we can develop technologies for them in real time.

(05:27):
So we're going to try and run it in real
time with farmers coming through helping us improve some of
those products using artificial intelligence and some of the associated Technologies.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Hey doctor John Roach, mpi's chief Science Advisor, Science Advisor
to the Prime Minister. I could chat to you all
day with that lovely Iris slope, but I haven't got
all day, nor have you. You're a very busy man.
Thanks for some of your time today.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Look, I appreciate the opportunities Jammy, thank you.