Riding Herd “The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.” – JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
February 15, 2021 • www.aaalivestock.com
Volume 63 • No. 2
The Superbull BY LEE PITTS
You aren’t going to believe this one. What if you could use the worst bull imaginable, a light-muscled, structurally incorrect mongrel that when mated to your cows would produce market topping, grid busting calves that would provide some of the best tasting beef in the world? Or, would you buy a Holstein x Corriente x Marchigiana bull that was born sterile if he could pass along, not his genes, but the genes of the finest multi-trait leading bull of your preferred breed? What we’re talking about here is technology that, if adopted, would turn the beef industry on its head. Forget everything you learned in reproductive physiology or animal breeding in school, this technology will mean you could breed a Charolais bull to a Hereford cow and get a black baldy calf that’s half Angus. This is sci-fi stuff and if you don’t think so just consider this: scientists have now found a way for you to produce your own sterile calves, and then have stem cells from a top bull of any breed inserted into his testes (ouch!) so that a bull from your own herd could sire calves out of a bull that might cost hundreds of thousands dollars at a sale.
Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in. find someone to inseminate cows seven days a week. It was just easier to buy range bulls. So, for decades academics have been searching for a way to create “surrogate sires”. These surrogate sires would find the cows in heat, store the semen from another bull at exactly the right temperature and then inseminate your cows in a timely manner. These surrogate sires would deliver the donor’s genetic material in a natural way which would allow ranchers to let their animals continue to interact normally on far flung ranges without bringing them in for heat detection or insemination. Now, for the very first time scientists have been able to create large meat animals that can serve as viable “surrogate sires” that carry the genetic material from donor animals. The groundbreaking six-year study was supported by the USDA National Institute of
Food and Agriculture, and conducted by scientists at Washington State University, Utah State University and The Roslin Institute which is part of the University of Edinburgh’s Royal School of Veterinary Studies in the United Kingdom. The research team was led by Washington State’s Jon Oatley who used a gene-editing tool to knock out a gene which was specific to male fertility in animal embryos that would then be raised to become surrogate sires. These males were born sterile and then researchers transplanted stem cells from donor animals into their testes and the surrogate sires then began reproducing semen that contained genetic material from the selected donors. Initially, surrogate male mice were used and they successfully fathered healthy offspring who carried the genes of the donor. Goats were primarily used in the study because they have
Surrogate Sires When I first started writing for livestock publications 48 years ago it was generally thought that in a few short years every commercial cowman in the country was going to be using artificial insemination on their range cows. Didn’t happen. It was just too difficult to heat check cows scattered all over the west. A rancher had to buy and store semen and then
The Keto Way: What If Meat Is Our Healthiest Diet? Eating high-fat, low-carbohydrate foods has helped many people battle obesity, diabetes and other health problems
NEWSPAPER PRIORITY HANDLING
BY GARY TAUBES / WALL STREET JOURNAL
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hoosing to avoid meat and eat a plant-based diet has never seemed so virtuous and necessary. Between the intrinsic cruelty of industrial livestock production and livestock’s climate footprint—estimated by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization to be 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gases world-wide, significantly greater than that of plant agriculture—it has become increasingly difficult to defend the place of meat and animal-sourced foods in our diets. Jonathan Safran Foer, the novelist turned animal-rights activist, may have best captured this thinking in his 2019 nonfiction book, “We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast.” As he writes, “We cannot keep the kind of meals we have known and also keep the planet we have known. We must either let some eating habits go or let the planet go. It is that straightforward, that fraught.” An essential part of this argument is the proposition that animal-sourced foods, and
a shorter gestation and reach maturity sooner than cattle, making it possible to see results faster. Utah State University animal scientist, Professor Irina Polejaeva’s team “knocked out” a gene specific to male fertility and developed embryos that were then implanted in female goats. The resulting male offspring were born with testes but were sterile. Once they were old enough to be weaned, they were moved to Washington State University where Jon Oatley’s team transplanted sperm stem cells from male donor goats into the testes of the “surrogate sires” and the animals began producing sperm that contained DNA of the donor animals. Oatley and his cohorts at Washington State are now busy refining the process of implanting the stem cells before trying it on large groups of cattle. Oatley, who is a reproductive biologist, stressed in a press conference that, “The current research does not put anything foreign into the animals’ genome. Humans have worked to achieve genetic gains and alter livestock by selectively breeding animals with specific traits for roughly 10,000 years and many desired changes are not realized for several generations. This technology has great potential to help food supply in places in the developing world, where herders have to rely on selective breeding to improve their stock.” continued on page two
particularly red and processed meats, aren’t just bad for the planet but harmful for the people who eat them. As the journalist Michael Pollan famously urged in his 2008 bestseller “In Defense of Food,” that is why we should eat “mostly plants.” This has become the lone piece of dietary counseling on which most nutritional authorities seemingly agree. It creates a win-win proposition: By eating mostly (or even exclusively) fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes, while getting our proteins and fats from plant-based sources, we maximize our likelihood of living a long and healthy life while also doing what’s right for the planet. But is it that simple? A growing body of evidence suggests it isn’t, at least not for many of us. The other food movement that has won increased acceptance over the past decade is the low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet—keto, for short—which has emerged as a direct response to the explosive rise in the incidence of obesity and diabetes. More than 70 percent of American adults are now obese or overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; nearly one in 10 is severely obese, and more than one in 10 is diabetic. An unavoidable implication of these numbers is that the conventional wisdom on weight loss—eat less, move your body more— has failed tens of millions of Americans. These are the people who, sooner or later, may well experiment with alternative approaches, venturing into the realm of fad diets. They may try plant-based eating—vegetarian or continued on page four
by LEE PITTS
Walking Around Money
I
never have liked money. Don’t get me wrong, I love having a big balance at the bank and all the nice things that money can buy; it’s the actual physical thing I hate. Paper money is filthy and coins just weigh you down. That’s why my wife handles all cash transactions and why I only carry one $20 bill in my wallet as “carrying around money” for emergencies. It’s the same $20 I’ve had for decades now and I think if I took it out of my pocket Andrew Jackson would squint in the sunlight and the brittle paper would crumble into a thousand tiny pieces. I’ve never felt comfortable carrying a lot of cash around and always thought that if you had money in your pocket you’d spend it. And spending money has always been against my religion. I’m sure you’ve seen big shots with huge round wads of paper money that would choke a horse from which they peel off $100 bills. Mobsters called such wads of cash “flash rolls” because if you wanted to impress someone you’d flash it around. Whenever I see someone reveal their flash roll I’ve always wondered if their entire net worth wasn’t tied up in that roll. It’s been my experience that the more money you carry around the less money you actually have. For example, England’s royals never carry cash and have lesser minions follow them around to pay for things. It’s a good thing I don’t like money because every job I’ve ever had working for other people didn’t pay much of it. I was the richest kid in my high school thanks to Grand Champion steers but I spent that money and the good money I made working in the oilfields in the summers all on a college education. I paid every dime of it without help from anyone and when I graduated in three years I was flat broke. I was one traffic ticket away from personal bankruptcy. I took a job the day after I graduated from college working as a cowboy on a registered Angus outfit working seven days a week and I got
continued on page four