From Merinos, to Dairy Cows, to Oysters and Shrimp- with Emeritus Professor Herman Raadsma

This week we have Emeritus Professor Herman Raadsma on the podcast.

Herman's career started by accident- after training, he received a job opportunity to work at Trangie, the Agricultural Research Center run by the NSW Department of Agriculture, known as one of the best sheep breeding centres in the world. The rest, as they say, was history.

Herman worked on pivotal research revolving around fleece rot, body strike and breech strike, which was the founding of the current Australian breeding values.

Mark and Herman both worked on the Footrot Estimated Breeding Value (EBV). From previous breeding programs, Herman knew natural genetic variation existed within the Merino industry in terms of sire groups that produced highly resistant or highly susceptible offspring when it came to health and welfare traits. They had also discovered in past research they could not find an individual gene marker for the Footrot gene. This foundation gave NZM and researchers a leap-pad to start from when developing the Footrot EBV value in 2013

Mark also worked with Herman with AWI on a Machine Learning project. With computing power, and large information data sets, machine learning can make sense of very complex data systems and make predictions that the human mind cannot make easily. There are multiple applications and Mark and Herman discuss a few that could make huge differences to the future of the agricultural industry.

Herman has more recently delved into the world of Aquaculture and is currently involved in Australian shrimp farming.

This podcast covers a huge range of topics that span the range of Hermans fascinating career and is one of those you'll listen to over and over again.

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