When Australian farmer Tony Knight first saw a purple-flowering plant growing across the bushfire-scarred terrain where his sheep grazed, his first thought was that it looked like “good stock feed.”
However, the “pleasant-looking plant” was far from the nutritious food his livestock needed after their paddocks were razed bare by the fires that swept through the northwest region of New South Wales state last year.
Instead, the native weed known as the “Darling pea” contained a toxin that affected the sheep’s nervous systems, killing hundreds by triggering mental and physical deterioration.
Photo: AFP
“To start with, they will do quite well when they first get on to it and their condition will pick up,” Knight said at his farm near the town of Coonabarabran.
“But once it gets them addicted, it’s just a drug — it goes from becoming their best friend to their worst enemy,” he said.
Knight said he had lost almost 100 merino sheep out of an 800-strong flock to the noxious pea in recent months, while his sister-in-law, Louise, who lives on the farm next door, said 800 of her sheep from a total of 14,000 had died after eating the plant.
Photo: AFP
A confluence of events enabled the outbreak, with the weed growing in an area where bushfires had wiped out its competition. The destruction of fences during the bushfires, which devastated 54,000 hectares of land, meant it was difficult to rotate the livestock on to non-affected fields as the animals roamed the mountainous terrain, chewing the weed as they went.
Australia’s sheep flock is estimated at 74 million, with about 79 percent of them Merino, bred for their high-quality wool, which is used in top-of-the-range clothing.
Australia is the world’s leading wool producer and exporter, accounting for 24 percent of global production, with annual exports valued at more than A$3 billion (US$2.79 billion). China is its biggest customer.
Knight, whose family has lived on the land beside Warrumbungle National Park for generations, said the affected sheep were easy to spot.
“You will see them in a paddock — usually they are on their own,” Knight said.
“They do a lot of stargazing. They do a lot of trotting around with their heads in the air. The dogs get very confused because [the sheep] don’t behave like they should,” he said.
As the sheep become more affected by the toxin, they lose control of their hind legs.
“They didn’t know which planet they were on. They were all spaced out,” Knight said of several sheep he had to load on a truck during the shearing season as they could not walk.
The Darling pea is mostly perennial, which means it has a life cycle of more than two years. While the weed regularly occurs in small amounts, rain on pastures stripped of their usual covering by droughts or bushfires can encourage it to sprout from its root stocks and infest the area, said Brian Sindel, an expert in weed science at Australia’s University of New England.
Such infestations, which can also affect cows, are uncommon and might occur once every five to 10 years in Australia, usually affecting a small number of livestock. While some sheep can recover from a short period of grazing the pea, those that are too exposed suffer irreversible degenerative changes to their central nervous system.
“Often weeds are the first species that come back after a bushfire as they have higher seed-bank levels. They have more seeds in a dormant state that are awoken,” Sindel said. “With little other feed available, the livestock are more likely to consume large quantities of the weed, which is of course poisonous, containing the alkaloid swainsonine.”
“Some animals appear to develop a liking for the plants and actively select them from the feed available,” Sindel said.
Veterinarian Greg McCann said the toxin attack an enzyme involved in metabolism in the brains of affected animals.
“They lose the ability to judge where their feet are. They become wonky, fall over, appear to be blind, walking into things,” McCann told rural paper the Land.
“They can assume funny postures, like head bent down or head bent back, but the one thing that was seen in the cases associated in the Coonabarabran area were twitching,” he said.
The growth of the weed under trees in bushland over large areas of undulating terrain also made it “impractical or uneconomic” to try eradicating them, Sindel said.
Using weed killers or pestcides to manage the problem is complicated with the pea a native plant and some varieties of it endangered. Permission may be needed from the New South Wales state government under its Native Vegetation Act. Similar acts are also in force elsewhere across Australia.
Knight said so far there appeared to be one solution to weed out most of the pea — by getting the sheep to eat them.
“It’s ironic, but it seems that the best way to control it is with livestock,” he said.
“It’s a perennial plant and if something eats it, it will shoot again. As it shoots, if there is something there to eat those shoots, it won’t take long before they kill a plant,” he said.
CHIP RACE: Three years of overbroad export controls drove foreign competitors to pursue their own AI chips, and ‘cost US taxpayers billions of dollars,’ Nvidia said China has figured out the US strategy for allowing it to buy Nvidia Corp’s H200s and is rejecting the artificial intelligence (AI) chip in favor of domestically developed semiconductors, White House AI adviser David Sacks said, citing news reports. US President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would allow shipments of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, part of an administration effort backed by Sacks to challenge Chinese tech champions such as Huawei Technologies Co (華為) by bringing US competition to their home market. On Friday, Sacks signaled that he was uncertain about whether that approach would work. “They’re rejecting our chips,” Sacks
NATIONAL SECURITY: Intel’s testing of ACM tools despite US government control ‘highlights egregious gaps in US technology protection policies,’ a former official said Chipmaker Intel Corp has tested chipmaking tools this year from a toolmaker with deep roots in China and two overseas units that were targeted by US sanctions, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Intel, which fended off calls for its CEO’s resignation from US President Donald Trump in August over his alleged ties to China, got the tools from ACM Research Inc, a Fremont, California-based producer of chipmaking equipment. Two of ACM’s units, based in Shanghai and South Korea, were among a number of firms barred last year from receiving US technology over claims they have
It is challenging to build infrastructure in much of Europe. Constrained budgets and polarized politics tend to undermine long-term projects, forcing officials to react to emergencies rather than plan for the future. Not in Austria. Today, the country is to officially open its Koralmbahn tunnel, the 5.9 billion euro (US$6.9 billion) centerpiece of a groundbreaking new railway that will eventually run from Poland’s Baltic coast to the Adriatic Sea, transforming travel within Austria and positioning the Alpine nation at the forefront of logistics in Europe. “It is Austria’s biggest socio-economic experiment in over a century,” said Eric Kirschner, an economist at Graz-based Joanneum
BUBBLE? Only a handful of companies are seeing rapid revenue growth and higher valuations, and it is not enough to call the AI trend a transformation, an analyst said Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering a more challenging phase next year as companies move beyond experimentation and begin demanding clear financial returns from a technology that has delivered big gains to only a small group of early adopters, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Taiwan said yesterday. Most organizations have been able to justify AI investments through cost recovery or modest efficiency gains, but few have achieved meaningful revenue growth or long-term competitive advantage, the consultancy said in its 2026 AI Business Predictions report. This growing performance gap is forcing executives to reconsider how AI is deployed across their organizations, it said. “Many companies
RSS