Work enables billion dollar industry

Olive Castle was a Mathematician who joined the NZ Dairy Board in the 1940s, who worked largely behind the scenes but whose work enabled a scheme which has generated billions of dollars to the New Zealand dairy industry and the country’s economy. 

Her contribution is recorded in a book that will be launched by dairy farmer cooperative, LIC, in Hamilton on 14 March 2012.

Author of ‘The Billion Dollar Scheme’ and LIC Communications Manager, Clare Bayly, said that acknowledging Olive’s contribution was a very important component of the book.

“We had to make this happen.  Olive was a ‘creature of the times’, a woman working in a male environment, a conceptual thinker who worked behind the scenes and solved a dilemma which enabled dairy sires to be accurately evaluated.

“Colleagues recall that she never sought the limelight however and, whereas today, she would seek to have her work published, in those days she ‘just got on’ with the next task at hand.  It therefore became important, when putting this book together, to ensure that her contribution was acknowledged, to avoid it fading into the mists of time.”


Bayly said The Billion Dollar Scheme is dedicated to five very special people who devoted their lives to improving the profitability and sustainability of dairy farming and whose work enabled the LIC Sire Proving Scheme. Those people are Olive Castle, Sir Arthur Ward OBE, Dr Patrick Shannon QSO, Jeff Stichbury and Harvey Tempero.