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OCTOBER 18, 2012 | WWW.PRODUCER.COM | THE WESTERN PRODUCER
UNIVERSITY | HOMECOMING
GENETICS | DNA
Giving a nod to the real homecoming king COWBOY LOGIC
RYAN TAYLOR
Father’s sacrifices paved the way for family’s first university graduate
Y
ou probably wouldn’t guess it if you saw me on the ranch working cattle with manure on my jeans or stuck under a hay baler scraping bloody knuckles to change a few pick-up teeth, but I was a king once. No, I don’t have blood in my veins from any British royalty, even though Taylor is an English name. And although three-quarters of my heritage is Norwegian, I can lay no claim of relation to King Olav, or Harald, or Haakon. My Norwegian ancestors probably wouldn’t have come to America if they were royal. They came because they were dirt poor and looking for a better life. I was no European king. Heck, I’m not even a burger king. No, I was the king of the bison. Not the American bison, also known as the buffalo, shaggy headed herbivore of the great plains. I was king of the NDSU Bison, the students and faculty of North Dakota State University, land grant university of our beloved North Dakota. This was 21 years ago, my senior year of college, as I aspired to fetch degrees in agricultural economics and mass communications in a reasonable time while working a job, applying for scholarships and signing the dotted line on the student loan papers. I was the first generation in my family to have such a lavish opportunity, to be able to go to college and graduate with degrees of higher education. Dad left school after the 10th grade to go to work for area ranchers and help support his widowed mother and siblings. Mom graduated from high school in 1950, but being a first generation American, child of the Depression, she never even thought of college as a possibility. But we make progress here on the great plains of North Dakota, and one generation later, there I am at NDSU, going to class, making good grades, having more fun than a guy ought to, and winding up on the homecoming court of possible kings and queens. We had interviews to get on the court, and then the students voted as to who their king would be. So, it wasn’t a traditional monarchy or lineage that got me the crown. It was the democratic process of voting. That’s a good thing since I was no multigeneration legacy on the campus. So it all came together: the cowboy/ cowgirl voting bloc, the ag school, a few honour society friends, and others. There I was —king. Tonight I go back to NDSU’s homecoming to relive some of the glory days, and wonder if anyone really bothered to remember when the
cowboy was king. What I remember most about that senior year was not the crowning, the parade, my reign over the festivities or the win over the South Dakota Coyotes. What I remember most vividly from that year was graduation day, when my father, who never came to homecoming, never came to any other college event, came to my college graduation. This rancher, who didn’t drive four hours away from the ranch for much of anything, came to commencement, and as I walked by him in my cap and gown, I looked up in the bleachers and saw that stoic cowboy with a 10th grade education with tears running down his cheek. Surely he figured that our family had made it. He had a son graduating from our public land grant university. Maybe I was the king who had won the crown, but Dad, I think, was the real king that day because he got to see the results of his sacrifice to raise us and help us as best he could, so we could get an education more valuable than any crown. He made a fine king. Ryan Taylor is a rancher, writer and senator in the state legislature from Towner, North Dakota.
New GM production method may encourage new uses BY DAN YATES SASKATOON NEWSROOM
New technology is being used to create genetically modified livestock for medical research, but a University of Minnesota researcher wielding the genetic “scissors” is also eyeing food animal production. Scott Fahrenkrug is the lead author of a recently published paper that describes how a technique using licensed technology called TALENs allows for cheaper and faster alteration of an animal’s genetic material. Fahrenkrug is also chief executive officer of Recombinetics, which was created to commercialize technologies from the U of M. The university has the rights to the technology for biomedical and agricultural applications for swine, cattle and sheep. He said the company wants to sell these animals first into the biomedical market, which already exists, and eventually to genetics companies. The technology could be used to produce disease-resistant animals,
improve feed conversion efficiencies and address animal welfare concerns such as dehorning, he said. “The potential impact on the ag side, I think, is much bigger,” he said, although the company hasn’t yet presented a product to regulators. Previous attempts to bring a GM animal into the food market, such as the Canadian-made Enviropig or salmon, have been met with regulatory hangups and opposition from a strong anti-GM lobby. The breeding program for the Enviropig was shut down earlier this year. It was an animal genetically modified at the University of Guelph to better digest phosphorus. “We’re certainly aware of all of that and I’ve been involved with the field for a long time, so we’re not naive about the barriers to either public acceptance or to regulatory approval, but we do emphasize that this really is qualitatively different,” said Fahrenkrug. “This is not a typical GM animal.” The report documents how researchers have employed the tech-
nology to make genetic modifications in the Ossabaw miniature pig, which will be used as models to study human diseases. The animals will be used to study cardiovascular disease. “We’re not adding genes in this case. We’re not adding any recombinant DNA or anything like that,” said Fahrenkrug. “We’re treating embryos or we’re treating cells with something that’s essentially a pair of molecular scissors.” Recombinant DNA results from laboratory work constructing genetic material that wouldn’t otherwise be found. “We call it editing. We don’t like to call it genetic modification.… It’s simply an accelerated breeding technique,” said Fahrenkrug. “We’re not interested at this point in creating versions of genes that people don’t already eat. We apply new technology to accelerate breeding programs.” He said the technology could be used to cross livestock to promote or discourage a certain trait.
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