The next era of genetic improvement

Success, however, will be in closely linking genetic progress in beef and sheep to consumer outcomes, along with the ability to effect culture change both on-farm and further along the supply chain to drive adoption and return value to livestock producers.

This is the belief of those at the wheel of the National Livestock Genetics Consortium, a skills-based taskforce set up three years ago to provide a formal industry consultation platform for the investment in livestock genetics led by researchers and key industry stakeholders.

The NLGC is on track to increasing the value of genetics to the red meat industry by $400 million by 2022, through doubling the rate of annual genetic gain in the commercial livestock industry value chain.

To date, it has invested in 55 projects with cultural change to drive adoption and consumer outcomes the high priorities.

NLGC executive officer Michael Crowley said the investment portfolio was mapped across a number of different areas which all focussed on improving the accuracy of selection decisions producers make.

The majority of the portfolio currently focuses on both maintaining and building the essential reference populations needed to provide DNA tools to industry and enhance selection accuracy, he said.

"Examples are the hard-to-measure traits like fertility, new traits like net feed intake and carcase quantity and quality traits like intra-muscular fat and shear force," he said.

Cultural change - that is improvement in the acceptability, trust and use of genetic tools and technologies - will be crucial to realising the full potential of genetics work, the NLGC believes.

Adoption of genetic tools is currently lower than desired, said Meat & Livestock Australia's program manager for adoption David Packer.

The plan for genetics adoption hones in on demonstrating value and growing demand, pathways to learning, simplifying the language and tools and embedding adoption into R&D.

Projects currently underway which address culture change include proof of profit in northern beef, a review of valuing phenotypes and developing technologies to make recording measurements easier for stud producers.

Projects to simplify the process and language of selecting a sire, particularly for commercial producers are also happening. MLA released a genetics marketing campaign in June targeted at commercial producers.

Seamless transfer of information and provision of easy-to-use data sharing products and services will also be critical to future genetic gains.

"The goal here is an accessible data platform, which allows data collected across various R&D projects to be searchable, linkable and re-usable for the future," Mr Packer said.

Linking genetics to consumer outcomes is an ongoing priority.

"The focus is on developing traits that influence improved eating quality outcomes for consumers into a breeding value. This has successfully ensured we can provide tools (through genetic evaluations) for producers to rely on when selecting for both carcase quantity and quality within their flock or herd, and accordingly improved consumer outcomes without negatively impacting productivity," said Hamish Chandler, MLA's livestock genetics program manager.

There are currently 12 cattle and six sheep projects underway which collect both on-farm and off-farm measurements to reinforce the linking of genetics to consumer outcomes.

These include the Beef Information Nucleus (BIN) herds, a retail beef yield project providing predictions before slaughter and upcoming work linking genomics to Meat Standards Australia grading.

In sheep, research is developing technologies to underpin objective measurement and value based marketing.

Cut-based MSA lamb, for example, will underpin supply and price signals.

"Another example is the MLA Resource Flock which is designed to better capture eating quality measurements and consumer sensory data," Mr Chandler said.

"This will lead to more accurate breeding values for eating quality, allowing producers to better select animals which perform for both the producer, in terms of productivity, and the consumer, in terms of eating quality."

Looking ahead, R&D that will continue to focus on linking genetics to consumer outcomes includes sustainability and welfare traits and improved phenotype collection technologies.

The big areas in the research that will deliver the ambitious $400m goal include genotyping, repronomics and BIN projects.

Genotyping is developing and providing reliable DNA tools for improving the accuracy of selection for traits that are hard to measure.

There were now more than 50 000 Merino animals with a genotype used in the genetic evaluation and more than 21,000 of these had been added in the last nine months, Mr Chandler said.

Maternal and terminal breeds have seen similar rates of adoption of genomics.

"Genomics allows a breeder to select animals at a younger age with a higher level of precision, therefore driving genetic gain. It also allows more accurate selection of hard-to-measure traits or traits that are measured later in life, such as eating quality and adult traits respectively," he said.

"In terminal breeds, there is evidence that producers have been able to dramatically improve the rate of progress for eating quality traits through the uptake of genomic technologies."

The flock profile test has allowed commercial ram buyers to use genomics commercially to genetically benchmark their flocks, ultimately leading to more informed decisions around purchasing rams with Australian Sheep Breeding Values (ASBVs) coupled with the sire selection tool RamSelect.

"While reproduction trait improvements cannot yet be attributed to genotyping, we have seen significant improvement within some breed groups and individual flocks towards eating quality traits without detriment to productivity traits," Mr Chandler said.

Repronomics is the intensive recording of early-in-life female reproduction phenotypes using real-time ultrasound across tropical breeds with the aim of providing crucial data for boosting the accuracy of selection for reproduction, particularly in young bulls.

The BIN projects, run with breed societies, are about the development of the datasets necessary for reliable breeding values for traits that are not well measured within industry.