A tradition of breaking with tradition

Since the old-world domestication of cattle some 10,000 years ago, many of the beef industry's most important bovine discoveries have taken place under the University of Alberta's watch.

The first of them came 40 years ago when animal science professor Roy Berg was able to show that selective cross-breeding of beef cattle - passing on desirable traits from a variety of breeds - could improve production.

If you look closely at a grazing herd of beef cattle, you are likely to see a medley of browns, blacks and whites. However, before Berg established the university's Kinsella Ranch in east-central Alberta, such variety in a herd was rare, as cattlemen traditionally strived for purebred uniformity.

What Roy Berg had in mind when he began his research was a comparison of the way a purebred beef herd and a hybrid beef population responded to a strict selection program. In both lines he envisioned the production of high-performing cattle, well-adapted to Alberta conditions. Emphasis would be on rate of weight gain, efficient use of feed, the merit of the beef carcass, reproductive performance and mothering ability. In addition, he planned to measure grazing performance and wintering ability.

At first, his cattle were dubbed "Berg bastards" by farmers who were offended by the researcher's pioneering research into mixed cattle breeds.

"Pure breeding in those days was kind of a religion," said Berg, a professor emeritus who began teaching at the university during the early 1950s. "If you were breeding a pure Hereford, you really felt good about it. And they thought that crossing them was just making a mess of it, because they didn't look nice."

Beauty being only skin deep, just below that superficial layer or rawhide, Berg's cross-breeding successfully modified the proportion of bone, fat and muscle and improved the growth rate in cattle, increasing productivity by 30 per cent or more. This meant more beef made it to consumers' plates.

Change doesn't come easily, however, and many beef producers were strongly opposed to Berg's ideas. It took more than a decade of carefully controlled cross-breeding to bring about change in the industry.

Berg's strategy eventually caught on.

"You drive through the country now, and you have a hard time saying what breed the cattle are," Berg said.

Once the cattle industry accepted change, there was no looking back.

These days, most breeders use cross-bred animals - a trend that has helped propel Alberta to its position as a world leader in beef production. Today, there are about 5.9 million head of cattle in Alberta, nearly double the province's population.

This industry-wide quest for excellence, carried over from Berg's genius, has once again placed cattle researchers at the dawn of a new era of breeding. This time around, the search for the model bovine is being conducted through the lens of a microscope.

Stephen Moore, head of the Bovine Genome Program in the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, has led a U of A contingent in helping to complete a biological map that is critical for the sequencing of the bovine genome.

"What we want to do is eliminate the inferior cattle through breeding and identify the superior animals and make sure they're representative in the breeding population," he said.

The hope is that this physical map of the bovine genome will serve as a tool to help improve cattle production and health.

"Eventually, we want to use this mapping to identify genes that are important in cattle," said Moore. "By that, I mean genes that affect health in animals such as resistance to diseases and things that affect the efficiency of the production system and product quality or specification."

This means identifying the genes that affect attributes such as fat profile in dairy milk or meat, increasing the good fats or decreasing the bad fats.

"We can actually find genes that affect the ratios of good and bad fats," said Moore, explaining that this information will lead to healthier meat and milk products and a more efficient production system. "There are limitless possibilities."

"We have been working a long time on a trait called residual feed intake, a measurement on how efficiently an animal grows."

For instance, Moore says two animals, identical in almost every way, may eat different amounts but grow at the same rate.

"One will be a wasteful animal and eat more than it should, and one will be an economical animal and eat less than maybe what we predicted it would eat," he said.

"This is important because the cost of feed for animals is being pushed up by things like ethanol production and other alternate uses of what we feed animals."

The bovine genome, expected to be completed in the near future, could even lead to a lighter environmental hoof print for the cattle industry.

"We already know that efficient animals produce as much as 25 per cent less methane gas than inefficient animals," said Moore.