Research leads to breeding better bovines, cuts carbon footprint

Braking his pickup in a pasture, Joe French rolled down his window and grinned.

“Smell that?” he asked as a chilly breeze wafted a sweet aroma like cured tobacco into the cab. “What does that smell like?”

Too delighted to wait for a guess, French answers himself: "Smells like money!"

Cattle ranchers would likely recognize the fragrances of sorghum and silage, chopped and fermented and mixed with a bit of corn and soy bean meal. To French, this fragrant feed recipe smells like money because it is one of the keys to a 50 percent increase in cattle productivity and a 25 percent increase in feed efficiency.

On 900 acres formerly part of the Chinqua Penn Plantation near Reidsville, N.C. State University operates the Upper Piedmont Research Station, one of 18 research facilities scattered through 15 counties experimenting with more than 80 commodities ranging from cattle to crops.

French, the research operations manager of the Upper Piedmont station, and his staff of five breed and research a herd of 200 Angus cattle. The research station has two main data quests. The first focuses on genetically identifying cows that eat less and gain more weight. The second, a project that began just this year, seeks to genetically identify cows impervious to a physiologically damaging Fescue endophyte.

The results will end up on local dinner tables and in national data banks.

Sandy Stewart, the director of the research stations for the N.C. Department of Agriculture and N.C. State University, said the university and other researchers have been pooling their data in a national system for years.

“The genetic base of knowledge we have is to the point that we can make selections for breeding at a very early stage to increase the efficiency of how to handle and feed those cattle throughout their life and their offspring’s life,” Stewart said.

That data, he said, is an extremely powerful tool for reducing the carbon footprint of cattle breeding and feeding a world population projected to reach 10 billion by 2050.

“We can take a blood sample from a newborn calf, and, based on the genetic profile of that calf, we can predict with a fair amount of accuracy what that calf will produce when it’s full grown and slaughtered, whether that will grade USDA prime or choice, and at what percentage,” Stewart said. “With the female, we can predict with accuracy what her offspring is going to grade.”

By selectively breeding the cows that grow bigger faster, the research has increased feed efficiency by 25 percent over the past 25 years, Stewart said.

“Twenty-five years ago, it took 8 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of additional weight (on a calf),” Stewart said. “Now it’s 6 pounds of feed to produce 1 additional pound of weight.”

For pasture-raised cattle, the genetic selection and breeding research has doubled the amount of meat produced by the same amount of pasture land.

“That’s about 50 percent less of a carbon footprint,” Stewart said. “Those cows are eating the same amount grass, producing the same amount of methane gas, but we’ve doubled their output.”

The goal of the Fescue endophyte resistance research is to develop a genetic test that determines if an animal will be tolerant or susceptible to Fescue issues. This will allow still more productive breeding, further increasing productivity.

In a world whose farmland is shrinking while its population is increasing, Stewart said, “these are things that are going to have to happen.”

About 20 percent of the research station’s cattle crop goes to Firsthand Foods in Durham, which sells only beef that is pasture raised without growth-promoting hormones. The rest go to traditional meat wholesalers.

And the reproductive process begins again.

January brings French’s team its busiest time of year - insemination of the cows, also performed for peak efficiency.

“If we can get 50 to 60 percent of our cows pregnant the first day of the breeding season, that saves a lot of labor,” French said. “You save a lot of time in the beginning, and within a 20-day range, we’ll have 60 percent of our total calf crop born.”

French, who also raises his own herd of cows, grew up near Wentworth and worked summers at the research station during high school. After getting his master’s degree and doctorate in beef cattle reproductive physiology at Texas A&M University, he realized he was not built to work in an office laboratory.

Easing his pickup over the lumpy pastures of the research station, French smiled and professesd, “I am hopelessly in love with cows.”