He talked to about 100 stud and commercial farmers, as well as beef industry stalwarts, at a Beef Expo celebratory breakfast, in Feilding, last week reports The Manawatu Standard.Professor Goddard said EBVs work, but there are unknown factors.”We know how EBVs work. But the genes that contribute to them – we don’t know.”He said there were many genes that contribute to factors such as growth rate, meat yield, and fertility, for example, but only one for colour.As if that is not enough of a problem, when it comes to beef breeds, markers need to be relevant across many breeds.

“The problem is that we are measuring a marker, not the actual gene that causes the effect. The marker might be a good predictor for the gene in Hereford, but not in Angus.”Prof Goddard said that means markers have to be really close to the causative gene, that way they have more chance of working in other breeds.People buying bulls for commercial use don’t need to know about DNA at all, he said, rather they could just buy based on EBVs as they do now.”But for stud breeders, they have to decide whether it is worth getting DNA tests for their bulls or cows in order to get more accurate EBVs.”

Getting DNA tests could allow breeders to ascertain whether an animal is good far earlier than usual, Prof Goddard said.”If you want to select a bull whose daughters are fertile, for example, at the moment you have to do a progeny test on the bull and that takes years. Whereas the DNA test is available at birth, so if you had a good test for female fertility, you could select bulls for that when they were calves.”"At the moment, tests are about $200. Our calculations say if it was reasonably accurate, that would be worthwhile.”He was hopeful the cost would come down as the test becomes more common in the future.

From the Livestock Improvement Corporation’s (LIC) website, the dairy industry is using DNA results to come up with better dairy cows.

A steak from a limousin-angus heifer raised by sisters Kathy Child and Yvonne Hill, of Whangarei, was judged the overall winner while an angus steak from Chef’s Choice, Whanganui, won the overall best of brand section for retail and wholesale butcheries. Angus also took out the first three places in the best of British breeds section. The four-day expo in Feilding is a shop window for many breeders who will be hoping to lure breeders and commercial farmers to their on- farm sales over the next two months reports The Dom Post.

Scottish cattle judges and angus breeders John and Marion Tilson chose a hereford as their champion bull of the sale, with an angus as reserve. The hereford, owned by Charles and Margaret Lee, of Leelands, Elsthorpe, was described as “a powerful bull with a lot of meat on it”, and later sold for $9000 to Bruce Robinson, of Kokonga Stud, Waikato.

When the angus bulls came up for sale the auction venue was filled to overflowing, reflecting the breed’s sudden lift in popularity since its steak of origin success in recent years and last year’s McDonald’s angus burger deal which has seen a premium paid for beef meeting the AngusPure contract conditions. The high point of the angus sale was a line of bulls from an evaluation trial, a group of young bulls gathered from throughout NZ and run together for 12 months while they were weighed, analysed and evaluated. One of the best of these, Turiroa Power, from Rick and Andrew Powdrell’s Turiroa Stud at Wairoa, fetched the sales’ top price of $26,000. The buyers were Colin Williams and Charlie Dowding of Kaharau Stud, Gisborne.

Auctioneer Bruce Orr, of PGG Wrightson, said the bull had good growth figures and was well- muscled, but what most excited bidders was what he described as its x-factor, an air of supreme self- confidence. Nine other angus bulls sold for five figures and the sale average for 34 bulls was $8425, well above last year’s $6650 average.

The expo’s other sales, of shorthorn, murray grey, simmental, south devon and charolais, were tame by comparison. The simmental sale was the most disappointing, with only seven of the 14 animals catalogued selling.

Data was collected on nearly 50,000 cattle from 18 Iowa feedlots over eight years, to 2009. Using a six-point scoring system, calves were grouped into three categories – docile (DC), restless (R) and nervous to very aggressive (NVA). Calves in the study had similar arrival weights, but the DC and R calves were on average 10 days younger than the NVA calves. DC calves made up for their age, gaining 1.45kg/day compared with NVAs 1.36kg and outweighing them by 17.69kg in final liveweight.

Mr Fike said docile calves ate more and gained weight faster as they were spending more time feeding and did not react to every disturbance.The gains were also reflected in the carcass. There was a 30.7-point difference in marbling score between the most and least docile cattle. After accounting for quality, yield, cost of grain, death, loss and treatment costs, the DC calves showed an average profit of $46.63 per head, while NVA calves made $7.62.

Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) sheep geneticist, Dr Alex Ball, Armidale, told the gathering the correlation between fat covering (PFAT) and intramuscular fat (IMF) was far greater than anybody had imagined – in fact, three times greater than the link in beef.“Up until three months ago we (the industry) didn’t know what it was doing (to tenderness),” he said. The data had come straight out of the sire nucleus (comprising every bloodline available to commercial producers), half of which fell within the dry-eating-to-tough territory.

The sire nucleus had provided the data for researchers to collate the eating quality of 190 sires from 2007 to 2008. And this had potentially wide implications for commercial breeders.“There is not a bloodline you can buy this year we don’t know about,” Dr Ball said.From previous studies the industry had found the best eating lamb contained between 4.4 per cent and 5.1pc IMF, with lower concentrations requiring more shear force (ie, chewing).

“Anything less than four per cent and consumers will call it tough and anything less than 4.3pc is getting a little dry – half the sire nucleus falls into this territory,” Dr Ball said.“If you want to know how tough four is, take off your boot and bite the end of it.”One sire had returned a 3.7pc IMF.Dr Ball said the trend was potentially damaging.“Consumer surveys tell us if someone eats a tough piece of lamb they won’t try it again for six months,” he said.

Current tests allowed breeders to predict a sheep’s future muscle growth, but the new test would accurately show from birth everything from the sheep’s future growth rate, to its resistance to disease. The test would also give a complete genetic picture of individual animals, allowing breeders to see every genetic variation and mutation in the sheep’s genetic make-up.

Sheep productivity had risen 70 per cent since 1990, and Mr McEwan hoped the test would allow for further improvements and for breeders to make better decisions about which animals to select for breeding. “I hope it can double the rate of genetic gain.”

A blood or tissue sample is taken from a lamb at birth. Within a month, the test result shows the lamb’s complete genetic makeup. Current tests show limited genetic information. The new test will show breeders which animals are genetically inclined to grow faster, be more resistant to disease, have more lambs, eat less feed and possibly produce less methane.

Co-founder and part-time chief executive Brent Ogilvie said he’s hoping to  confirm Androgenix’s technology works this year. If successful, Androgenix will be able to offer semen sex-sorting technology to  livestock insemination companies that is relatively low cost but with high fertilisation rates  two problems that have plagued others attempting to control the sex of livestock born.

Artificial insemination is  big business, with the OECD market alone estimated to be worth more than US$2.4 billion (NZ$3.4b) a year. Dairy accounts for 63 per cent (US$1.5b) of the market. Effective sex selection could  speed up the genetic improvement of herds, increasing  productivity through the production of more genetically elite heifers, while reducing the time good milking cows are out of production. It will also reduce calving difficulty for younger cows.

Even if only 10 per cent of New Zealand dairy farmers harnessed the gains of using effective sexed semen, it would generate another $100 million of export returns a year for the dairy sector, said Ogilvie, whose  firm Pacific Channel established Androgenix along with biotechnology research scientist Keith Hudson. “It’s a significant prize, a really high value marketplace if we can get it right. And it’s not just dairy. Our process could be applied to other livestock, such as swine,” Ogilvie said.

Sharl Liebergreen, the company’s technical service regional manager, said the technology was leveraged off the bovine genome sequencing, which allowed geneticists initially to use 50,000 DNA markers at once but would soon grow to 500,000 markers. By comparison, the dairy industry was using 500,000 gene markers reports The ODT.

Progress was a bit slower in sheep, with geneticists using 50,000 gene markers to determine molecular breeding values. Mr Liebergreen told a Silver Fern Farms sheep and beef forum in Gore that, by themselves, most of those markers had small effects.

Cumulatively, those effects were large and influential, allowing selection of animals for diverse values, such as carcass weight, numbers of offspring born, survival or beef tenderness. The information for beef cattle has been extended to include previously difficult-to-measure values such as average daily weight gain, dry matter intake and net feed intake.

In the dairy industry, the two large artificial insemination companies – LIC and CRV Ambreed New Zealand – had already adopted SNP Chips, but Mr McEwan said sheep farmers in general wanted to see how others adapted it. Historically, each of the top 40 bulls used in artificial insemination programmes would have be rated following testing of 80 to 100 daughters, by which stage the average age of each sire was five years.

Since using SNP Chip technology, just three of the top 40 sires have progeny in milk, with the others ranked on DNA and parental information. “That allows generations to be shortened, more accurate breeding values and greater genetic progress,” he said.

Organiser Peter Allan said velvet weights had doubled in each deer age-group since the 1990s and that was reflected in competition. It was former organiser David Stevens who drew much attention on the night, winning the 5-year-old red section with antlers weighing in at 12.3kg. “The heaviest ever, I believe,” Mr Stevens said.

Ranfurly farmers John and Mary Falconer’s set also placed well in the competition, taking second spot in the open section at 13.68kg. Bill and Jill Oliver, of Christchurch, won the open section with a set weight of 14.60kg.

Johnes is spread by the faeces of infected animals and blocks the absorption of food, causing them to waste away and die. Bacteria infect the walls of the intestines, causing a malabsorption syndrome, protein loss from the inflamed bowel, anaemia, and the collapse of the immune system. It can not only mimic other health problems such as chronic parasitism, trace element deficiency and poor nutrition, but also interfere with tests for bovine tuberculosis.

The disease can also infect mustelids such as ferrets and stoats, and New Zealand scientists are also looking at whether such species are spreading Johne’s disease between different species of farm animals, and different farms. Johne’s Disease Research Consortium chairman Dr Andrew MacPherson said the science was focused on fundamentals of Johne’s disease, developing better diagnostic tools that enable farmers and veterinarians to more easily identify infected animals, and examining how the disease spreads.

“Genetics is another important research area,” he said. “We are working to identify a gene marker that does not compromise production but will allow farmers to select for stock that are resistant”. Increasing use of DNA screening would make it relatively easy for animals to be selected according to their level of susceptibility to the wasting disease.