Rationale for Creating a National Beef  Cattle Evaluation Consortium

The Importance of the Beef Industry

            U.S. beef production increased nearly 3 billion pounds (14%) from 1990 to the cycle high in 1996-97. According to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the increase in beef output resulted from growth in total cattle numbers, from 95.8 million head in 1990 to a peak of 103.5 million in 1996. Production of all meat and poultry is today at or near record levels, and average per capita consumption of red meat and poultry is projected to top 214 pounds, retail weight. Through the first five months of 1998, beef’s share of total meat advertising space was 47%, slightly above a year earlier and three percentage points above the five-year average for the same period. A trend to more open trade and growing demand for quality grain-fed U.S. beef in foreign countries has fostered growth in beef exports, which now account for nearly 8 percent of beef output. Exports of U.S. cattle, beef, and beef products in 1997 totaled $4.7 billion (compared to $2.9 billion in imports).

            Small businesses, like cattle businesses, are the lifeblood of the American economy, society, and rural communities, providing about 1.6 million jobs. The U.S. cattle industry is comprised of more than one million individual farms and ranches operating in all 50 states. Cattle producers form the largest part of the U.S. food and fiber industry, which is the largest segment of the U.S. economy. The total number of cattle on farms and ranches was 101.2 million on Jan. 1, 1997. In 1996, sales of cattle and calves totaled $31 billion, accounting for 16 percent of cash receipts from all farm marketings. Due to the multiplier effect, every dollar in cattle sales can generate $4 to $5 in additional economic activity.

            Beef is still the most popular meat in America, with per capita consumption in 1997 at 63.6 pounds (USDA-boneless weight), compared to 49.3 pounds for chicken and 45.7 pounds for pork. In 1997, U.S. cattle ranchers produced 25.4 billion pounds of beef with a total retail value of $50.6 billion. American consumers spent an average of $186.03 per person on beef in 1997.

            Beef has a larger share in total supermarket sales than fresh poultry, pork and seafood combined, representing 53 percent of meat sold in stores and 5.52 percent of total store sales. Beef’s share of fresh meat dollar sales is $22.1 billion, compared to $11.9 billion for poultry, $3.7 billion for pork, and $4.3 billion for fresh fish and seafood.

Beef Cattle Breeding

            For selective breeding, Expected Progeny Differences (EPDs) have been the most important tool available to seedstock and commercial producers of beef cattle. An EPD is a prediction of the average performance of the progeny from a breeding animal, compared to a theoretical reference animal (an animal with an EPD of zero).  To make this comparison fair, we assume similar environments and mates of the same genetic value.  An EPD is then a prediction of progeny performance to the same standard.  It is expressed in trait units.  For growth traits, the units are pounds.  For example, a particular sire might have an EPD of +1.5 for birth weight.  This means that he is expected to produce calves 1.5 pounds heavier on average than a sire with an EPD of zero.  He will produce calves 4.5 pounds lighter than a sire with an EPD of +6.0  (6.0-1.5=4.5) or four pounds heavier than a sire with an EPD of –2.5 (1.5-(-2.5)=4.0).

            In the beef cattle industry, like the plant breeding industry, most genetic improvement occurs through the selection of replacement breeding stock in elite breeding programs.  These elite breeding cattle are called “seedstock,” and the producers of these seedstock herds are called “seedstock producers.”  Commercial beef cattle producers purchase their replacement bulls (and some replacement females) from seedstock producers.  Both seedstock producers and commercial producers use EPDs in their selection and purchase decisions.

            Analysis of beef records for EPDs for the vast majority of seedstock cattle in the United States occurs at four universities: Colorado State University, Cornell University, University of Georgia, and Iowa State University.  These institutions have long histories in genetic evaluation (tracing back to the late 1970s and early 1980s) and are unique in their faculty expertise and ability to implement these programs.

            The success of genetic evaluation has also been greatly influenced by the existence of an established delivery system for making EPDs readily available to all producers.  This delivery system includes breed associations through their sire summaries reporting EPDs and AI organizations and seedstock producers through their dissemination of superior genetics based on EPDs. The beef seedstock industry, particularly the beef breed associations and individual breeders, have born the majority of the cost of this system.  United States beef breed associations paid in excess of $360,000 to the four universities in 1999 for research in and production of EPDs.  In addition, U.S. beef organizations spent more than $3,100,000 in 1999 to disseminate the information and educate producers through sire summaries, AI catalogues, web sites, magazine articles, advertisements, sales, and conferences.  Evidence for successful use of EPDs is the marked genetic trends for economically important traits.  The ability to influence the genetics of U.S. beef cattle has enhanced our competitiveness of beef production both domestically and globally. We estimate the investment in EPD production and research made by the U.S. beef industry since 1990 to be about $350,000 per year with no direct federal support.  This is in contrast to the dairy industry where the federal funding of genetic evaluation is approximately $1,500,000 annually to the USDA Dairy Genetic Evaluation Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland.

            As important as national cattle evaluations (NCE) have become to the beef industry and consumers of beef products, it can be argued that the infrastructure of the current system has duplication of effort and is fragile because of the few scientists actually doing most of the work.  It does not provide an efficient platform to accomplish the research necessary to meet the changing and increasing demands of the industry.  A remedy is to create an infrastructure that encourages the sharing of resources and expertise among the four institutions.  This can be accomplished by establishing a consortium devoted to research, development, and implementation of genetic evaluation methodology. The prime objective of such a consortium is to provide for systematic and coordinated efforts in research and implementation of new methodology for evaluations.  Sharing resources and consolidation of research efforts will reduce the inefficiencies that currently exist due to redundancy and alleviate concerns regarding the fragile nature of the current infrastructure.

            Development of a consortium approach is essential to meet the increased need for methodology to accommodate the products of biotechnology and to convert the explosion of data being experienced in the industry into information.

            Without this effort, it is likely that the U.S. beef industry will quickly loose the technical advantage that has been a key component in its seedstock production and industry viability.  Countries such as Brazil and Australia have made substantial investment of public funds into genetic prediction of beef cattle.  All of the countries use technologies that were primarily developed and first implemented in the U.S. beef industry.  Producing quality, healthful, profitable, and affordable products begins with the breeding decisions.  Without public funding to develop technology for identifying the genetic merit of breeding animals, U.S. beef producers will have a disadvantage competing with foreign products that are produced with technologies developed with public support.

Research efforts will focus on the following areas:

·        Developing predictions for new traits such as reproductive efficiency and carcass composition and quality along with decision-making software tools that will increase the efficiency and profitability of beef production.

·        Including DNA information in genetic evaluation programs to enhance the accuracy of predictions of genetic merit.

·        Expanding multibreed applications for genetic improvement programs.

·        Creating selection decision tools to improve production efficiency, product quality/safety, and herd health.

·        Managing databases, creating data mining strategies for handling the increased data being generated by the U.S. beef breed associations (informatics), and preserving these database resources.

·        Developing new methodologies to enhance the accuracy, reliability, and productivity of the EPD production systems.

Industry Perspective and Stakeholder Involvement

Industry Perspective: In presenting the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) Resolution at their convention, February 10-14, 1999, David Nichols, Iowa beef producer and chair of the Product Enhancement Committee, gave the following industry prospective (the resolution passed unanimously.

The U.S. has the largest economy in the world, and agriculture is the largest component of the largest economy in the world. The beef industry is the largest segment of the largest component of the largest economy in the world.  This year, the cow numbers will be the same as in 1951.  Today’s cows, however, will produce 50% more beef than the same number of cows in 1951. This increase in productivity, I believe, is a result of development, implementation, and use of Expected Progeny Differences (EPDs).   The breed associations of America and their members have provided the lion’s share of the real dollars to support research and development of EPDs in the past two decades.

EPDs are currently provided to the industry through programs at four universities; Colorado State, Cornell University, Iowa State, and the University of Georgia.  There are nine scientists at these four universities with the expertise and experience necessary to provide the industry with EPDs.  The average age of these scientists is fifty years of age.  I know of no other 30 billion dollar a year industry that would rely on such a fragile system to provide it with one of its most important tools. American consumers also have a considerable stake in the continuing use of EPDs, as sensory quality and health-leanness of beef products become more important in their lives.  These are traits for which the use of EPDs will expand rapidly in the near future.

The beef industry is experiencing a virtual explosion of data, including measures on new   traits such as carcass quality data and reproductive data and data from the application of DNA technology.  Our current system for research and development of EPDs is not adequately equipped to meet the challenges presented by this explosion of data.

With these concerns in mind, I am presenting a resolution to address these problems.  The resolution calls for NCBA to support the concept of developing a National [Beef] Cattle Evaluation Consortium for Research and Development of EPDs and to seek Federal funds to support the creation and maintenance of such a consortium.  The consortium will be created by combining the efforts of scientist at the four universities involved in providing EPDs to the beef industry.  I am not talking about building new buildings but rather building an infrastructure to provide for greater collaboration and sharing of resources and methodologies to improve the efficiency of research and implementation of these methodologies.  I might add that the deans of the colleges at these four institutions are supportive of the creation of this consortium.

  Stakeholder Involvement: The research from this project must lead to the implementation of new methodology and technology in the area of beef cattle genetic evaluation.  The principal investigators and collaborators from the institutions that comprise the consortium will identify priority projects.  Industry input into the identification of these projects will be provided by such entities as the U.S. Beef Breeds Council and the Beef Improvement Federation (BIF) Board of Directors.  A board of directors will be created for the consortium and be comprised of the principal investigators from the four institutions plus three industry representatives.  This board will prioritize the list of projects.  The industry representatives to this board will be selected from the NCBA Cow-Calf Committee, the NCBA Seedstock Committee, and from the BIF Board of Directors.  The prioritized list of projects as determined by the Board of Directors of the NCE will then be presented to various national beef organizations for affirmation.

Impact

            The impact of genetic evaluations on growth is well documented:

Genetic Trend for Growth for a Major U.S. Beef Breed

The cost, however, of sustaining this annual increase is growing and new avenues need to be explored, developed, and exploited. 

            For example, compared to growth traits, reproductive traits have not been successfully improved through selection.  Economic impact of reproductive performance in the beef cow herd can never be overemphasized, as shown by economist-geneticist Melton in a recent presentation to the Beef Improvement Federation.  Using two different multiyear economic models to determine time-adjusted economic values for various reproduction, production, product and consumption traits, the impact of genetic improvement in reproduction was highly significant in both cases.  In the cow-calf sell-at-weaning time model, the time-adjusted economic value of weaning rate overshadowed all production traits such as lactation ability and weaning weight.  A 1% improvement in weaning rate had an effect on profit that was 292 times greater than a 1% improvement in weaning weight.  In the second model of ownership from conception to consumer, weaning rate was also highly significant, being out-valued only by feed conversion efficiency and pounds of marketed retail product. There are heritable components associated with the complex of traits making up reproductive efficiency and the consortium will work with the beef industry to develop data collection programs and methodology to genetically evaluate this complex of traits.

            Carcass quality is another area where opportunity for improvement through selection programs has not been exploited.  The industry is striving to meet consumer demand for healthier products.  Programs are being created to generate data to use for genetic evaluations.  Methodology needs to be developed in anticipation of these programs maturing.  Carcass quality is an area that also serves as an excellent example of the potential use of DNA technology.   The industry has initiated a project to validate the existence of major genes for components of carcass quality measures.  The methodology to handle this type information appropriately is not ready for implementation.

            The continued success of U.S. beef producers in a competitive global market will depend on the ability to make correct decisions in their selection programs.  The development of selection decision tools that allow for selection on multiple traits consistent with their economic value will improve efficiency, lower the cost of production, and provide a leaner, more consistent product.

Mission Statement Consortium Organization and Management Executive Summary