John Matson

Lieutenant-Colonel John Matson

Born in England, educated on the Continent, came as a youth to relations at Cambridge, Waikato. Cadet on a sheep station at Kawhia. Entered Lincoln College as a student in 1895 and took his Diploma in the following year. He then took a 1,000 acre sheep farm at Maungatautiri, Cambridge but had hardly got started on this farm when the Boer War broke out. He sold the farm and went to war with the N.Z. Mounted Rifles. At the end of the war he joined the Regular Army and went to India. Shortly after his arrival in India a project to supply milk for the Indian Army was started, farms were purchased and a plan to improve the milking quality of the native cattle was entered upon. On the strength of his Lincoln College experience Matson got a job on the new venture.

As Assistant Director of Military Farms he was in con- trol of 31 farms of a total area of 8,000 acres carrying 3,000 ‘cows in 19 herds. He started with two widely dif- ferentiated types of native cattle and one breed of buifaloes (they gave more milk than the cows). Each was bred pure and also crossed with European breeds. The purchase of stock was done by agents, subject to rejection by Matson. He visited England, Scotland, Holland and U.S.A. to select stock and, in 1921-22, bought 17 Friesisn bulls in New Zealand, but owing to transport difliculties had to cancel the order. On these trips he met Crew, Buchanan Smith, Orr, Hammond, Boutflour. Mclntosh and others, and later corresponded with them. Several letters and references appear in the Bulletins of the Imperial Bureau of Genetics.

In connection with his investigations into the inheritance of milk production he carried out very extensive breeding experiments and studies of type and accumulated the largest collection in existence of photos and records of Indian cattle and their crosses (these were deposited with the Bureau of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh when Matson retired). He gathered a large mass of statistics on the subject of susceptibility to and resistance to contagious abortion during an investigation into the part heredity plays in this disease. He claimed to have seen more cases of foot and mouth disease than any other living white man and he made a prolonged study of the modes of infection and resistance of cattle to this pest. In consultation with Orr he worked on mineral deficiencies from 1912 until 1931. He went completely into the subject of diet and milk yield while establishing a system of complete diet relative to milk yield, each cow having its diet adjusted once a fortnight to its maintenance requirements and milk yield and percentage butterfat. A great deal of apparent want of constitution in the second cross was overcome by control of internal and external parasites.

At the beginning of Matson's 27 years in India the average daily yield of all the cows over the year was between 5 and 6 lb. per day and at the end the yield had been raised to over 13llJ. per day. In the last seven years, milk was weighed each milking and fat tested fortnightly, and also solids not fat tested fortnightly.

On his retirement he returned to New Zealand and took up a large farm at Oparua, Kawhia, running a large number of sheep and cattle in addition to a dairy herd. He started several breeding research projects but old age and ill-health overtook him before he got very far. Lt.-Col. Matson gave a paper on "Heterosis’i at the Sixth Annual Conference of the N.Z. Society of Animal Production, 1946, in which he referred to some of the results of his work in crossing European and Indian cattle.

Lieutenant-Colonel Matson is survived by his elder son, John, who is in the Colonial Service on the West Coast of Africa. A younger son was killed in the Second World War. Source: 1951 Canterbury Agricultural College Magazine (No. 76 October 1951)