IF YOU thought the cattle business had reached its technical zenith with artificial insemination and embryo transfer systems, then hold on to your hats, because long term, it's going to get a whole lot more technical in the name of improving genetics, efficiencies and profitability.
Late last month, a gathering of beef producers and industry experts heard just what technologies Australian scientists are working on to help cattle producers, when Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries hosted a forum "Delivery of Genetics to the Northern Australia Beef Industry" in Rockhampton.
Among the guest speakers was Dr Michael Holland, director of research strategy and development at the University of Queensland's School of Veterinary Science, who also works with CSIRO Livestock Industries and has been heavily involved in the animal biotechnology field for 30 years.
Before he gave his presentation, Dr Holland warned the information he was going to deliver had "a strong element of Star Wars" in it, but that if producers took a 10 to 20 year perspective, they were the technologies that would impact on the cattle industry.
He said the use of reproductive technologies to improve the rate of genetic gain in cattle was a rapidly developing field, and one that producers needed to understand.
"What biotechnology has to do for you is either value-add to your product, in other words, give you better product, give you different product or it's got to save you money by increasing your efficiencies," he said.
"There are all sorts of ways to do that, but I'm talking about genetic application."
Dr Holland said embryo-based breeding schemes would become a part of Australia's cattle industry, and at some point producers would start thinking about embryos rather than cows.
"They're not going to come tomorrow and you're still going to use bull-based selection systems for a while yet but you are going to have the ability to amplify opportunities in a rapid way through embryos, and that's all going to lead you to capture the benefits of the female genetics," he said.
He said one of the most common technologies that will be used to get select embryos out is fixed time artificial insemination (FTAI), which is already being used, particularly in South America.
FTAI can save large-scale producers time and money by eliminating the need for accurate oestrus (heat) detection, and has already been commercially accepted and is widely adopted for use in predominantly Bos Indicus cattle throughout South America's major breeding herds totalling 300 million head.
Further field trials conducted by QPIF's Dr Brian Burns in collaboration with Queensland University researchers in northern Australia funded by the commercial partner Bioniche Animal Health Aust/Asia had successfully fast-tracked genetic improvement in Bos Indicus breeding herds.
Dr Holland also talked about stem cells and their potential for the industry through cloning.
"A stem cell is simply a cell that's capable of self-renewal - you can grow stem cells in a test tube and keep them growing," Dr Holland said.
"We've made stem cell lines from bovine embryos that are still growing, four years after we made them, and those cells can then be turned back into embryos, back into the animals that they originally came from.
"The other important property that stem cells have is that in their embryonic stem cell, they are pluri-potent, meaning they can be turned into any cell in the body.
"You were an embryo once. You look like you do now because of the stem cells that were in your embryo.
"You hear lots about stem cells and people worry about embryonic stem cells in the human context, but there are a whole lot of other sources of cells that you can generate.
"Cloning reproduces the animal - so if I clone an elite bull, the clone is indistinguishable genetically from the original bull. It is the same animal.
"A man in United States had a prize bull which damaged itself reproductively on a fence, so lost its value.
"They took an ear punch from that bull, put it in liquid nitrogen, sent it out to me in Australia and from the cells of that ear punch, I cloned that bull.
"There are lots of applications for cloning - that's a pretty far out application - but lots of people are interested in cloning of elite bulls on an insurance basis, so if anything happens to the animal, they haven't lost those genetics which have taken a long time to generate.
"What cloning does is allow you to operate from the high end of the market. So you're taking out all those animals that are marginally profitable or not profitable, and operating on a very elite end of the market.
"It allows you to focus the genetic pool and increasing the number of elite animals enormously.
"What a lot of people ask when it comes to cloning is, 'are they real copies?' - the answer is, yes they are.
"They are not different individuals; they're the same animal.
"It's a hard thing to get your head around but that's the truth of the matter.
"I did a whole lot of evaluation and obviously a lot of reproductive evaluation to make sure that's true."
Dr Holland is also working on improvements to sexing semen, developing a test that would allow producers to identify x and y variant sperm in the cattle yards, reducing the time and cost factor and improving accuracy.
"You won't ever get all boys or all girls - dairy farmers are happy if you turn the sex ratios into 70:30 female to male - that's a commercial product then.
"If it's done in a low-cost manner or on-site, those are the options that are going to happen, and it will allow you to look at how you want to manage your animal numbers in a different way."
But beyond all the technological advancements, Dr Holland said cattle producers needed to be informed and have an opinion on the scientific work being done.
He said commercialisation needed to be increased to allow producers to take advantage of the systems, but it was cattle producers and the industry which needed to drive that uptake.
Source: farmonline.com.au
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