Dietmar Flock

Dietmar Flock (born July 8, 1934 in Kleve ) is a German agricultural scientist; He was a research manager, statistician and university lecturer for animal breeding at the Universities of Göttingen and Kiel .

Live and act

Born as the son of a teacher, Dietmar Flock went to school in his hometown of Kleve, which he completed with the Abitur at the state grammar school. This was followed by a two-year agricultural apprenticeship at the Halfmann farm in Pfalzdorf near Kleve. He completed his studies in agriculture at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn as well as an intermediate semester in Weihenstephan in 1959 in Bonn.

As part of a Fulbright scholarship , he was able to get to know modern animal breeding in the USA. Dietmar Flock started out with Carter at the Virginia Polytechnika Institute (VPI) in Blacksburg , Virginia, where he obtained a Master of Science degree with a thesis on beef cattle and qualified for graduate studies at Iowa State University . After in-depth studies in statistics with Kempthorne and in animal breeding with Hazel and Jay Lush , he earned his PhD there in 1964. with the dissertation "Selection among Holstein-Friesian cows".

After his return, Dietmar Flock took over the management of the statistical department at the Göttingen site of the former Max Planck Institute for Animal Breeding and Animal Nutrition Mariensee-Trenthorst. At that time, access to this data processing system represented an almost unique opportunity to evaluate extensive data from animal breeding with modern statistical methods and to develop appropriate programs for this. The University of Göttingen took advantage of these opportunities by giving Flock a teaching position for the subject “Mathematical Statistics for Farmers”.

In the autumn of 1968 he became a poultry breeder and went as a geneticist to the American poultry breeding company Heisdorf & Nelson in Redmond, Washington State, where he was trained for one year as head of the HNL breeding program at the European licensee Lohmann, Cuxhaven. In 1975 he took over the management of research and development at Lohmann Tierzucht GmbH for both laying hen and broiler breeding. A year later he was appointed co-managing director.

Research engagements

The central collection and evaluation of the data from the fattening and slaughter performance test in pigs was initiated as early as Flock's time in Göttingen, which created the basis for various suggestions for improvement in the test methodology and performance survey. The comparative measurements were introduced at the workshops of the experts at the testing institutes at this time. This data pool was evaluated in his habilitation thesis “Breeding planning for pigs based on the results of the station examination” (1968) at the Faculty of Agriculture in Göttingen with Fritz Haring . This work and the subsequent discussion gave the impetus to switch the tests from restrictive to ad libitum feeding and from groups of four to two.

Dietmar Flock was a particularly active member of the "Committee for Genetic-Statistical Methods in Animal Breeding" of the German Society for Breeding Science. Under Edwin Lauprecht's leadership, authoritative recommendations for breeding planning for farm animals were drawn up in the 1960s, and Dietmar Flock played a key role in developing them.

Although Dietmar Flock was fully involved in commercial breeding, he managed to document in numerous scientific publications which measures can be used to increase the efficiency of breeding programs. To further develop scientific findings and to implement them in zootechnical practice or to check their applicability was his personal goal during his active time.

A benchmark for Flock's breeding achievements is the competitiveness of the populations he looks after in the global market beyond his active time. After more than 30 years in commercial poultry breeding, Flock retired from active professional life in the summer of 1999 as co-managing director and chief geneticist of Lohmann Tierzucht.

His special services to poultry breeding were honored at an anniversary conference "40 years of laying hen breeding in Cuxhaven" on his 65th birthday in Bremen.

voluntary work

Dietmar Flock has understood how to combine the concerns of the private sector in the field of research and development with public research and university education and to pass on his extensive knowledge. In addition, from 1973 he was an adjunct professor for genetics, poultry breeding and husbandry at the University of Göttingen. By 2005, 249 publications and lectures at scientific congresses are signs of his scientific work, as are numerous doctoral and diploma theses that he has supervised.

Since the beginning of his “retirement” Dietmar Flock has devoted himself particularly to tasks of the World Association for Poultry Science - both on a national (President of the German WPSA Group) and on an international level. From 1996 to 2004 he was one of the vice presidents of the world association. In his function as President of the European Federation of the WPSA, he actively participates in numerous meetings of the 12 working groups and in the preparation of the next European Poultry Conference. In various committees outside the WPSA, he is involved in German and EU-wide projects that are related to the sustainability of poultry breeding and husbandry. He represents the poultry sector in the “Sustainable European Farm Animal Breeding and Reproduction” project. His wealth of experience also flows into the "Sustainable German Turkey Industry Initiative".

honors and awards

• 2005 Awarded the Hermann von Nathusius Medal from the German Society for Breeding Science (DGfZ)

Web links

• Ernst Kalm's contribution to Arch Anim Breed

literature

• Theophil Gerber: Personalities from agriculture and forestry, horticulture and veterinary medicine, NORA Verlag Berlin, 4th exp. Ed., 2014, pp. 198/99
• Gottfried Averdunk and Ernst-Jürgen Lode : Hermann von Nathusius Medal for Prof. Dr. Dietmar Flock. In: Züchtungskunde, 77, 2005, 6, 413–415

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dietmar Flock HvN Medal in Breeding Studies pdf, accessed on February 4, 2017