A quiet, modest and unassuming man, Mr Davis would hate such praise, but it was his patience and ability to see the wider picture that resulted in him playing a leading role in the discovery of prolificacy breeding genes in sheep.
Mr Davis retired last month after a 41-year career.
He leaves the sheep industry with a legacy that includes the discovery of the Inverdale prolificacy gene and the Woodlands and Wishart genes.
Mr Davis was not a trained geneticist, but colleagues said he had the ability to create a team and inspire others who had the necessary skills.
Speaking at his North Taieri farmlet, Mr Davis (61) said his lack of training might have helped his career.
"Because I wasn't formally trained in quantitative genetics, I was more open to look at these single genes," he said.
Basically he went looking for what he called freaks - sheep that had a natural genetic disposition to produce lots of lambs.
When he found them, he worked with geneticists to see what caused their fertility.
His discovery of prolificacy genes has the potential to change the face of sheep farming.
Farmers increasingly talk about genes rather than breeds, and while they have tended to slot sheep carrying the prolificacy gene into their existing farms, Mr Davis believes there is potential to change that so farmers here use the technology as they do in the United Kingdom and Australia.
He said specialist two-tooth breeders using sheep with prolificacy genes could produce lambs for sale to finishers, in the same way Australia had specialist finishing farmers who would buy merino ewes and cross them with a Border Leicester to produce prime lambs.
"[New Zealand] farmers have tended to grab the technology and insert it in to their existing system," he said.
There has been a major swing towards sheep fertility, but Mr Davis said there was still a need for the traditional breeder of pure breed sheep.
"For the last few years synthetics (or composites) have been very much the rage, but the question has always been asked - `where do you go after the first cross?"'The demise of the wool industry had hastened farmer uptake of breed prolificacy, he said, evident by the role-change for Texels.
The breed was introduced for meat, but it was now used as a dam.
In the 1980s, when wool was a large chunk of farmer's income, farmers did not want too many lambs, especially when they were storing sheep meat which did not have a market.
"If you had gone back 20 years ago, people were jealously protecting their wool, because they were being paid for it."
Mr Davis always viewed prolificacy as an efficiency tool.
It resulted in getting more lambs out of fewer ewes in a system that knitted perfectly with the growing season.
By having more fertile sheep, farmers could carry fewer ewes over winter, but when pasture came away from spring, there was more stock to control the feed.
His introduction to fertility work came after a three-year sabbatical to South Korea, where he helped establish beef cattle farming.
On his return to Invermay, the then head of the research centre, Jock Allison, asked him to oversee research involving the Booroola breed.
It was a time in his career he described as the first of two defining moments.
The other came soon afterwards, when his boss at Invermay, Rob Kelly, gave him responsibility for the highly fertile Romney, Perendale and Coopworth flocks at the Woodlands farm in Southland.
His inquisitive nature saw him look back in the flocks' records, where he discovered the famous Banks Peninsula ewe which had had 33 lambs in 11 lambings.
It was that ewe which led to the Inverdale gene.
Her breeding pattern appeared similar to the Booroola, where a single copy of the gene would increase the number of lambs born each lambing by one but a double copy would increase it by 1.5.
A subsequent progeny trial involving three grandsons of the ewe.
It was found only one passed on the prolificacy trait.
Later, it was discovered the gene was not passed on from father to son, but grandsons could get it from their mother's side.
"When I look back, I did not realise at the time what we had opened up."
He thought that limitation was a disaster for the industry, but reproduction specialist Ken McNatty could see wider industry implications from the discovery.
Sheep farmers were also fascinated, and Mr Davis said he received two or three phone calls a year from farmers with sheep they described as freaks.
They later found a high fertility gene in a Coopworth ewe run on the AgResearch farm at Woodlands, but it was a phone call from the late Peter Wishart, of Southland, which gave geneticists a new angle for their work.
Mr Davis said they found a prolificacy trait in the flock as well as a genetic disposition for high embryo survival which led to more twins but fewer triplets and singles.
Normally 100 ewes producing 200 eggs would typically produce 170 lambs, but a similar formula for sheep in the Wishart flock would produce 190 lambs.
Just 10% to 15% of the flock was having single lambs, and scientists believed the embryo survival trait could be wider than this one flock.
Mr Davis said the potential impact of this work for the sheep industry was huge, and similar in scale to the lamb survival research under way at AgResearch.
Not normally one to make waves, Mr Davis leaves with just one major gripe, but it was a gripe drawn from his genetic work.
Had he been subject to the same two-to-three-year project funding from the Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST) when he started his genetics work, he doubted the Inverdale, Woodlands and Wishart genes would have been discovered.
"No-one realised at the start where we were headed," he said.
The Woodlands gene was discovered after 20 years of performance recording, a time frame well outside FRST funding arrangements which required milestones be reached before more funding was considered.
"I could never have said 'give me some money and in three years I will have found a gene'."
More funding certainty was needed to ensure long-term but potentially significant research could be done, he said.