(some names have been removed to protect the innocent)
-------Questions--------
I am writing to see if you can help me with
background knowledge for science class. The 6th graders have previously
studied evolution and with it artificial selection and are currently
studying the nitrogen cycle. Both of these are directly relevant to
cattle ranching. And as your family are ranchers (this is correct, no?),
I wanted to discuss with your son how these scientific concepts directly
affect his own family. Also, I am curious about the answers.
How
involved his your family in the breeding of the cattle on its ranches?
What qualities are selected for (size, ability to put on wait, etc)? Are
the genetics of the cattle examined? Have your family seen changes or
improvement in breeds over time?
A
big part of the nitrogen cycle has to do with feces and its
decomposition. Animals poop, it gets broken down by bacteria and fungi,
nitrogen compounds are released into the soil, etc. It's a whole circle
of life thing. However, as I'm sure you know excess fecal contamination
in aquifers and runoff is a bad thing. Does your family ranch deal with
cattle waste? What should one be aware of when thinking about this
issue?
I realize that you are very busy. Any help you could give would be much appreciated.
Have a good weekend.
Sincerely,
Mr. Science Teacher
------Answers------
Hey man, good to hear from you.
Yes,
the family business is very active in selective breeding and we
maintain multiple cow herds, for different markets, bred for different
traits.
On
a macro scale, all of the individuals in each herd have to fit a basic
standard based on economics and environment. The animals must be
structurally sound so that they can walk long distances to water, they
must be able to efficiently grow on the native grasses that are present,
be able to survive the relatively cold winters and hot summers that we
have in the Sandhills of Nebraska, and must be able to reproduce on
schedule once a year and raise the calf to weaning without assistance.
We
have a herd of registered Hereford cattle that is for seed stock
production. This is a small herd of females, about 100 or so, that are
selectively bred using AI to whatever bull we think will make a good
match. The offspring are then sold to other ranches that want to improve
their genetics. A smaller sub-group of these females are sort of the
"elite" group and they get super-ovulated a couple times a year, the
eggs are then flushed out and implanted into recipient cows (who are
good mothers that give a lot of milk, but don't have any of the other
traits we are looking for) so that the donor cows can have a litter of
anywhere from 2 -20 offspring each year. With this herd we are breeding
for a certain phenotype that conforms to our interpretation of a breed
standard. This means that the cattle tend to be larger than commercial
or "commodity" cattle, have a proper color patter, have good
pigmentation around the eyes and udder which reduces sickness due to
sunburn, nice shaped head, smooth neck, narrow sloped shoulders,
straight strong back, large depth of rib, be level from their hooks to
pins, have a square hip, and exhibit a medium amount of bone in the
skeletal structure. Additionally, we are generating a genotype that is
measured through a tool called EPD's (Expected Progeny Difference), this
is a data score that is generated using a central breed's database that
keeps records for traits like growth and fertility of different blood
lines.
Here is a heifer we have for sale:
We
also have a herd of full Hereford cattle that are for club calf
production. In a lot of rural areas of America, it is popular for kids
to buy a steer or heifer in the spring, groom the animal and take it to
competitions as they grow it out. There’s a bunch of different youth
organizations that do this that you might have heard of like 4-H, FFA,
etc. There are about 200 females in this herd, some are bred using AI,
but the majority are paired up with bulls that we own. The selection
criteria for this herd is nearly entirely devoted towards a certain
phenotype once baseline standards are met. With these animals we are
looking for more muscle, especially in the hind quarter, a more square
composition, shorter rib, wider stance, and the ability to grow lots of
fluffy hair. These animals look like this:
They
probably look the same to you, but the heifer on top is a lot longer
and much lighter boned. The steer in the second picture is built more
like a box, has a lot more muscle in his hip, and with a straight
shoulder like that, he won’t have as long a stride. The heifer will grow
up to be a cow that can move really easily over long distances and can
survive on little feed. The steer below only needs to live for up to 24
months, he will have every meal brought to him on a silver platter, and
just needs to grow fast and look pretty. As an aside, the vertical D, M,
underscore on the right hip is our brand.
We
also have a herd of Wagyu cattle from Japan. This was probably our most
challenging undertaking in that we had to take a small herd of seed
animals and adapt them to our environment while still maintaining the
aspects of the breed that make them desirable. Wagyu in Japan are the
perfect example of single trait selection breeding. They have been bred
for marbling, a trait which is controlled by only a couple of genes,
along with a couple more that influence they types and amounts of amino
acids that are produced. The first Wagyu that arrived on our ranch
looked like some form of experiment gone wrong. A doctor in Oklahoma had
done some sort of surgery on a minor member of the Imperial family and
as a thank you had been gifted a couple bulls and 6 heifers. These had
then been allowed to inbreed to the point that when we got them, they
were about 30 head, many with cleft palates, unsound mobility, and just
plain ugly. To grow the herd we out crossed those Wagyu with Hereford
and angus cattle, this gave us what is called an F1 cross, 50/50 Wagyu.
The best animals from that crop were then bred back Wagyu for an F2
which is 75%, then F3 which is 87.%, and so on. By F4 you’ve pretty much
come full circle and have pure bred and now our herd is all F4 and
above with all kinds of possible combinations, for example F3’s bred to
F4’s, etc. If you’ve done it right then you’ve added in enough genetic
diversity to get rid of the undesirable recessive traits and hopefully
kept the traits for marbling. All in all, with bull lease programs and
buy back options, there are about 2000 cattle in this herd under our
control Visually, these animals now look like normal black cattle and
they can survive in Nebraska. However they grow much more slowly,
whereas it takes 18 – 24 months for a normal steer to get to slaughter
weight, our Wagyu take 30 months and far less efficient at converting
feed to meat. They taste much better though and so are worth a lot more
money. Wagyu in Japan are raised in small herds, usually less than 10
animals, mostly indoors or in small grazing fields. They get a lot of
individual attention so they don’t need the ambulatory, maternal, and
survivability traits that we needed in Nebraska. We also bred the horns
off of them because horned cattle are a pain in the ass to work with. A
Wagyu cow looks like this:
She
looks like a grown-up black version of the heifer in the first picture,
small head, long smooth neck and shoulder (important for calving ease),
straight back, long body, light boned. This photo was taken in July,
she had a calf in May and hasn’t been given any supplemental feed since
March but she’s pretty fat so she can handle the range pretty well. The
difference in her and a commercial cow, is that her offspring will
produces carcasses that are marbled like this:
The
highest marbling grade given by the USDA is Prime, only about 2 - 3% of
all cattle are graded Prime. Our Wagyu are over 99% prime, in fact they
are off the scale in terms of marbling. When an animal does not produce
a highly marbled carcass, we then remove those genetics from the herd.
Breeding
for carcass quality is by far the most difficult of all traits. With
the show steer herd, evaluation begins at birth, the offspring are sold
within 6 months, and we can change what traits we are breeding for
within a couple of breeding seasons. With the seed stock herd, the
offspring are being sold at 1 – 2 years of age and it may take 3 or 4
years to react and bring about a genetic change in the herd. With the
Wagyu, the evaluation doesn’t happen until the carcass is on the rail a
full 3 to 3.5 years after conception, with 2 – 3 more calf crops on the
ground, so it takes 5 – 8 years to make any meaningful breeding changes.
We are keeping track of carcass data, tracking back to the breeding
stock, and then making decisions that we won’t know are right or wrong
for years down the road.
By
the way, a good exercise on phenotype vs. genotype is the genetic
determination of whether or not a calf will be horned, polled, or
scurred. You’ve got dominant versus recessive, sex-linked, and the
phenotype will only present for scurred if the animal is not horned.
(Maybe a bit much for 6th graders)
Run-off
is a big issue for feedlots. We have a very small (just a few hundred
head) dry lot on the ranch which is a back grounding dry lot. Since it
is not a finishing lot the concentration of animals and the type of
feeds don’t present runoff problems. At the feedlot that we use for
finishing, the utilize a lagoon system that catches runoff, stabilizes
it through microbrial action, and then pumps it out for fertilizer on
nearby crops. There are some pretty strict EPA requirements to minimize
the chance of spillage.
Here is a pic of the feedlot outside of Burwell, Nebraska that we use:
The
little dark dots are cattle. The big trapezoid shape at the top is the
waste lagoon. Our feeder is also a farmer so he is using the runoff to
fertilize his own crops which saves him money on purchasing nitrogen
fertilizers. So there is a form of market-based incentive for the feeder
to practice good environmental stewardship as the manure is a resource.
The
issue I have to explain to people far more often than nitrogen cycles
is carbon cycles. Ruminants do indeed produce large amounts of methane,
which is a green house gas, however it is part of a carbon cycle that
naturally occurs whenever plant matter is broken down by bacteria,
whether inside an animal’s gut or decomposing on the ground. It is very
different than methane pumped out of the ground which belongs to a
carbon from a cycle that has been sequestered for millions of years.
Sorry, this turned into a book.
-jp
*****************************************
Jason P. Morgan
President
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Bonus! Follow-up questions.
You said that you
keep close tabs on the genetics of your animals. I imagine you take
blood samples and have them sent of to a lab. Since when have ranchers
been able to do this? Has their been some sort of Bovine Genome Project?
How has this changed ranching, breeding, and meat production since when
only phenotypes could be observed?
It
is possible to run a variety of DNA tests on cattle to determine if
they are carriers of a specific gene or trait. But the technology is
certainly not at the level where you could look at an entire genome and
evaluate it. The technology is more often used to identify animals that
are at risk of being a carrier of a specific detrimental gene. For
example there was an Angus bull that was very popular a few years ago
that, through semen sails, sired thousands of offspring. It turns out
that bull was a carrier for a recessive gene that would cause calves to
be born with spinal issues, usually resulting in a dead calf. Now if you
want to sell an animal that has that bull listed anywhere in it’s
pedigree, you need to have a test done to certify that it’s not a
carrier. We don’t really have to worry too much about that, we focus
more on highly heritable traits like calving ease. If one sire tends to
throw a lot of dystocia issues, you don’t breed to him again and you
purge your herd of those genetics.
Also,
from your email, I have an image of a database where you keep track of
all your cattle's family line, its and their genetics, observable
phenotypical traits while alive, and quality of beef when slaughtered.
Is that correct? Is this what the EPD is?
We
have our own database for some traits include carcass traits that we
use. However the EPD data base is maintained by the breed registry so
it’s able to aggregate data from a blood line from all of the different
ranchers that are using that bloodline. It’s all done through
self-reporting and there is a lot of manipulation of data though.
With
the inbred Wagyu, it sounds like the one breeding with the angus
injects the needed genetic diversity to overcome the inbreeding and the
subsequent F2, F3, F4 breedings are to get you back to 100% Wagyu. Is
this correct?
My understanding of the process goes something like this...
The
Angus provides the needed dominant alleles to mitigated the homozygous
recessive genotypes that caused the problem phenotypes (cleft palette,
etc.) in the F0 Wagyu. However, the genotypes that provide for the
favorable Wagyu phenotypes (marbling, etc.) have to be bred back in
while avoiding the problem homozygous recessive genotypes. The
subsequent breeding of the F2, F3 generations accomplishes the former
while selection of the most desirable offspring accomplish the latter.
Do I have this right?
That is pretty much how it works.
Also,
I wanted to ask about GM beef. Does your family's ranch use GM
livestock? Why or why not? What should I be thinking about when I think
about GM beef?
There
is no such thing as GM beef or any food animal for that matter. The
technology is far too expensive at the moment and it’s likely that it
always will be on a first generation basis. For example if they could
modify a chicken to have four wings instead of two, while maintaining
normal fertility, then they would only need to create a few GM hens and
from then on just raise chickens like normal. But the benefit of the
modification would have to really be game-changing, i.e. four winged
chickens, to make this feasible. Plants are much easier to modify.
Another
question, it seems that the cattle your family raises are largely grass
fed and are free range. My impression is that is substantially
different from most of the industry which use high density feedlots and
uses corn feed. Any background on this would be appreciated.
Our
operation is not significantly different than industry standards,
except the scale is much smaller. Nearly all US beef cattle spend the
majority of their lives free range and grass fed. The final finishing
portion where corn is about 50% of the diet, with a mixture of other
grains, and grass in the form of hay and other roughage making up the
other 50%. Feedlot density is limited to how much feedbunk space you
have and there is no such thing as an “overcrowded” feedlot. If you
overcrowd, then not all the cattle can get to the feedbunk, and soon the
feedlot starts losing money and going bankrupt. Most of what you’ve
probably herd about the evils of CAFO’s and corn are the result of some
extremely ill-informed pseudo-journalist/pseudo-scientists. Here some
more reading on grass fed if you want http://themeatguy.blogspot.jp/2013/03/grass-fed-beef-its-probably-not-what.html
And
as far as the waste goes... how does the handling of cattle waste
compare to the handling of municipal sewage? Are the processes
comparable? It seems like the cattle waste is not as treated as
municipal sewage. What are the issues when it comes to waste?
I don’t know shit about municipal sewage. I flush the toilet and after that, it’s dead to me.
One
final question. We have also when studying the energy pyramid in class.
I've heard a lot from sustainability advocates that eating "down the
food chain" is more sustainable than eating up it... that one
kilo-calorie of tomatoes represents a much smaller investment in terms
of water, land, and energy usage and has a much lower carbon footprint
than a kilo-calorie of beef or chicken. What should I know about this?
I
really like to deal with things that can be measured and though I’ve
read lots of arguments from food “sustainability advocates”, I’ve yet to
see anything based on quantifiable hard science. With a system far less
complex, for example fossil fuels, we can measure with a pretty high
degree of accuracy how much we’ve pumped or dug out of the ground in the
last century, how much still remains, what rate we use them, what
impact it has on the environment, and whether or not the temperature
increase is going to kill us before we run out of oil. Even with all
that science, it’s still pretty hard to determine what the yard stick is
for sustainable versus unsustainable.
Agriculture,
on the other hand is far more complex than just energy. From a calorie
standpoint, yes, you can get calories more efficiently from eating corn,
than from eating cows that are fed corn, if you were to conveniently
ignore the fact that cows have the ability to turn a wide variety of
indigestible cellulose into tasty and nutritious steaks. However,
currently the largest threat to public health is due to calorie excess
rather than deficit. So calories are a pretty poor yardstick. Nutrients
might make a better measuring tool, in which case beef, which is one of
the most nutrient dense foods we have, might do a little better, but
even then, it’s really hard to measure and compare nutrients because
there are just so damn many of them. Too bad we aren’t koalas, things
would be much easier if we only had to keep track of eucalyptus leaves
in and eucalyptus leaves out.
There
are a few more issues with the “down the food chain” model. It ignores
our ability to utilize animals as an integral part of environmental stewardship. It also assumes that food and agriculture are a closed system. That
eating a pork chop means taking x kilograms of food and water away from
some other eater. Actually, a lot of animal feed utilizes left over
ingredients from other product streams. For example we feed distillers
grains which are a by-product of ethanol production (which may or may
not be a “green” form of energy, that’s an entirely separate, equally
complex issue). Finally, this top down model fails to equate luxury food
with other luxury items. Basically, anything more than a few greens, a
few grains, and a bit of protein is a form of luxury eating. Just like
anything more than a bicycle or scooter is basically luxury
transportation. The philosophy behind “down the food chain” that I have
so much trouble with is that it doesn’t allow for individual consumer
desire for something beyond a subsistence diet. If we were to apply that
thinking to all areas of human life, then the most sustainable way to
live would be for all of us to be housed in large dormitory dwellings,
wearing mass produced smocks, and travelling in big underground tubes to
work (I may have just described Japan). Nobody really wants that so I
think we need to look at food and judge it as we would any other luxury
product. A steak should not be compared to a bowl of beans, a steak
should be compared to a silk tie. Now if we only had some way to place a
value on all the labor and resources required to bring each in front of
the consumer so he could make an informed decision about which one to
buy…In short, I get annoyed when the meat industry gets attacked for
being “unsustainable” when industries like alcohol, or entertainment, or
jewelry are not called upon to justify their use of resources to
produce items that have no nutritional value. (For the record, I don’t
think we should get rid of any of those things)
Final
final question: the two pictures of the cattle you showed me looked
exactly alike. Even after reading your explanation of the differences I
am at a lose to tell the difference. How long would one have to work
around cattle to develop an "eye" to discern these differences?
I
don’t know, it’s probably a bit like language acquisition in that the
earlier you develop the skill, the better your chances of fully being
“fluent” in cow. There may be adults who, with no background in cattle,
have learned to visually appraise animals, but I’ve never met any.
Nobody ever goes into ranching, your either born into it or somehow grow
up around it. I’ve been away for so long that I am definitely rusty
which is very embarrassing when I go home. To a trained eye, the animals
all look different and ones of higher quality jump out just like a
pretty face in a crowd.
-jp
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