In 2009 an American Hereford cow named L1 Dominette 01449, made history as the source of the first Bovine genome ever to be sequenced. That discovery has, in the intervening 6 years, revolutionised cattle breeding around the world and marked the beginning of an important new chapter in a story that is as old as human civilisation itself.

Cattle breeding and the evolution of human society have been inextricably linked since man first domesticated the cow over 8,000 years ago. Cattle, possibly more than any other animal, have been instrumental to mankind’s success, as a source of food, clothing, power, heat, fertiliser, currency and medicine; the word vaccine after all being derived from
‘vacca’, the Greek for cow.

Evidence of organised cattle breeding can be found in historical records of most early societies, among them ancient Egypt, where the importance of cattle as a source of wealth and power is widely illustrated in preserved artefacts and in the tomb engravings of many prominent ancient Egyptians. 

In Britain, cattle breeding reached its zenith in the 19th and early 20th centuries when many of the breeds we know today were first identified and breed societies formed. Breed improvement was a favoured pastime of some of the wealthiest figures in British society, for whom ownership of a prominent pedigree herd was a symbol of success and status, not unlike owning a Premiership football team today.

Up until WWII, Britain was also a key source of genetics for many of the worlds leading beef producing nations, with breeds such as the Hereford, the Shorthorn and the ubiquitous Aberdeen Angus widely exported around the globe. They were particularly successful in North & South America, Africa and Australia where their influence continues to this day, both as purebreds or where crossed with native breeds of both Bos Taurus and Bos Indicus to improve meat quality and productivity.

But in the post war years, UK beef breeding seemingly lost its way. Genetic progress stalled, especially when compared to other livestock sectors such as pigs and poultry or even the dairy industry, whose rate of genetic gain in recent decades has far outstripped that of the beef sector.

Consequently Britain has seen its position as the ‘go to’ nation for elite beef genetics eroded; firstly by the rise in popularity of continental breeds such as the Limousin, Charolais and Belgian Blue, whose superior growth rates and carcass conformation found favour with commercial producers and buyers
of beef and more recently with the return to our shores of our own traditional breeds, improved and optimised for the modern market by our erstwhile customers in North America and the Antipodes.

So what can the industry do to regain this lost ground and what lessons can be learned from the experiences of other sectors?

I have been fortunate over the course of my career to have had exposure to a number of different sectors of the UK food supply chain and consequently have learned the importance of market focus and innovation in maintaining competitive advantage and ultimately profitability.

As a potato grower and marketer in the 1990s I witnessed the rapid rationalisation of that industry against the backdrop of rising the multiple retailer power and the removal of the potato marketing scheme. This necessitated a wholesale change of focus among UK potato growers, from a traditional trading mindset to one more focused on consistently producing what your customer wanted, when they wanted it, or risk losing your business to your competitors.

Innovation in terms of product, process and service provision were all key to success and those businesses that recognised this early on and adapted their business models accordingly thrived, whilst many others fell by the wayside.

As a producer of goat’s milk today,
I am also acutely aware of the need to consistently deliver a quality product and service to support the continued success and growth of the premium brand we supply. Yorkshire Dairy Goats and its customer St Helens Farm, the business from which Yorkshire Dairy Goats evolved in 2013, has built their 30 year success on this principle. 

We are a market driven business that lives and dies by our ability to establish and maintain customer loyalty by producing a consistently high quality product and we do this by constantly innovating and fine tuning our processes to improve performance in every aspect of what we do.

Genomics is now a significant component of this and is an area where the business has invested a significant amount of time and money in in recent years to build and improve the genetic base that determines the potential performance of the herd and ultimately the business.

Historically Yorkshire Dairy Goats has operated a successful in-house conventional progeny testing programme to identify potential elite breeding males. By keeping extensive animal performance and pedigree records, this enabled the business to deliver considerable genetic gain over the flat 25 years but the emergence of Genomics in other species provided an opportunity to harness this technology to potentially accelerate this process and more accurately select for desirable traits in the future.

Building on the experience gained from the dairy cattle sector and using the 30 years of detailed animal performance and pedigree records that the business has collected, Yorkshire Dairy Goats in partnership with Mike Coffey and his team at SRUC/Roslinand supported by funding from InnovateUK, have developed what we believe to be the world’s first commercial genomic evaluation platform for dairy goats.

In simple terms, Genomics works by analysing the DNA of an individual animal to look for the presence or absence of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms or SNPs within that animals genome. SNPS are one of the most common forms of genetic variation and are typically highly preserved throughout evolution within a population and as such a map of SNPs acts as an excellent source of genetic markers for research.

By cross referencing SNP markers with observed Phenotypes or physical trait data, reliable genomic breeding values can potentially be established for a wide range of traits and as such an animal’s genetic merit can be established effectively from birth, long before those traits have been expressed.

This potentially allows for earlier and more accurate identification of elite (and undesirable) breeding animals, thus shortening the generation interval and accelerating genetic progress.

It may sound simple but the reality has been a long process that has required very large data sets of reliable Phenotypic data. 

Modern High-throughput SNP analysis means that the cost of genomic testing is coming down rapidly and is now a relatively cheap and straightforward process. The challenge and cost lies in the production of a genomic ‘key’ that can reliably make sense of the genomic data generated.

The real prize however is that, provided sufficient high quality phenotypic data is available, it has the potential to identify genetic markers, not just for the more easily recorded traits such as milk yield or growth rate, but also for harder to measure but equally commercially valuable traits such as disease resistance, fertility and feed conversion efficiency.

For Yorkshire Dairy Goats, the first step has been to identify markers and establish Genomic Estimated Breeding Values (GEBVs) for milk yield, milk composition and functional conformation traits. 

Using current and historical phenotypic data we are confident that the GEBVs we now have for these traits are sufficiently reliable for us to use them as the principle selection tool for our in house breeding programme. This allows us to confidently use younger high genetic merit males and females earlier than we would have historically been able to, as we no longer have to wait for the results of progeny testing. 

We have also begun validating the genomic key on other populations of dairy goats, with reliable phenotypic data, in other countries. Blind ranking of these animals using GEBVs alone and then comparing the results with their actual phenotypic performance has yielded encouraging results, which when combined with the actual performance of the first daughters of genomically selected sires coming into our own herd, has given us the confidence to invest further, looking for GEBVs for more complex composite traits such as Mastitis resistance and Feed conversion efficiency.

However this has been a long and resource hungry process that would also not have been possible without the extensive and detailed production and pedigree records of thousands of goats going back many years.

Few, if any, individual UK beef producers will have the size of data sets or indeed the resources to conduct such a programme in house, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done.

Genomics has the same potential to revolutionise beef breeding as it has in other species. The key to success in the beef sector, in my opinion is co-operation, co-ordination and clarity of vision at a breed society or supply-chain level, to identify what traits really drive value going forward and how they can be measured, selected for and improved on an industry scale.

As I mentioned earlier the genotyping component of the process is now relatively inexpensive and straight-forward, but to quote Prof Mike Coffey ‘In the age of the cheap Genotype, Phenotype is King’.

Accurate and reliable trait measurement is key to unlocking the potential of genomics in any application and setting up the infrastructure to capture, collect and process this data is the big challenge for the beef sector.

However if this can be achieved, then the opportunity for rapid genetic improvement and with it, better physical and financial performance are indisputable.

Beyond simple genomic analysis, the emergence of other advanced breeding technologies such as Ovum Pickup/IVF for cattle and the increasing use of sexed semen to amplify the numbers of elite female animals produced, will help exploit the benefits of genomic selection by further accelerating the rate of genetic gain achievable, thus im-proving the efficiency and ultimately the profitability of the sector.

All this requires a level of investment and commitment which at an individual farm level might seem extremely daunting during these economically challenging times, but if the industry is to face the future and all the opportunities it offers with confidence, it needs to start co-operating now.

And help is at hand. The UK has a great depth of established and well proven expertise in this field and novel sensor and trait measurement technology is evolving at a rapid pace, as is the ability to process the huge data sets that this will generate.

The UK government has also invested considerable money in recent years through the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) and more recently via the Agri-Tech Strategy to support commercially led innovation partnerships between businesses and the research community to develop the means of exploiting these opportunities.

The emergence of a number of Innovation centres over the coming months, and in particular the Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock – CIEL in York (www.cielivestock. co.uk) will provide a focal point for the industry to access a broad spectrum of research capability to support their ambitions in this regard.

The future for beef breeding in the UK is bright. We have all the components for a world leading industry and the time for that industry to act is now. Co-operation, Co-ordination and Clarity of vision are the three key principles that will make beef breeding a profitable business again.