As the ASAS Annual Meeting continued through the afternoon of its third day, there were a wide variety of sessions for attendees to choose from, including beef reproduction, growth, and development, companion animals, meat protein alternatives, and more. The Animal Well-Being and Behavior Symposium focused on production animal welfare and featured an awards talk by Dr. Jay Johnson (USDA). Johnson, who was awarded the Early Career Achievement Award by ASAS, discussed improving swine heat stress resilience in order to optimize productivity and welfare in a changing climate.

During the morning session of the third day of the ASAS Annual Meeting, Dr. Shawn Archibeque led the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Symposium, featuring presentations by Dr. Teresa Maria Linda Scholz (New Mexico State University), Aaron Sales (New Mexico State University), and Dr. Nicole Tillquist (UConn).

On the afternoon of July 17, the Small Ruminant Symposium was held as part of the ASAS Annual Meeting. The focus of this session was precision sheep management and moving from research to application to better support the industry.

As the ASAS Annual Meeting headed into full swing, the Monday morning session featured a discussion on Physiology and Endocrinology. The symposium entitled “An Update on the Brain,” focused on new insights into the inner workings of the hypothalamus and pituitary glands.

On Sunday, July 15, the ASAS Annual Meeting kicked off in Albuquerque, New Mexico with a Beef Symposium sponsored by the Western Section. The session was led by Dr. Glenn Duff of New Mexico State and focused on climate adaptation strategies for the beef industry of the Great Plains and Western United States.

Four growing-finishing feeding programs consisting of typical corn-soybean meal (CSBM) diets, low protein CSBM diets containing supplemental crystalline amino acids (LP), CSBM diets containing 30% corn dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS), and DDGS diets containing supplemental crystalline Ile, Val, and Trp were evaluated to compare their effects on growth performance, carcass composition, nitrogen and phosphorus utilization efficiency, and several environmental impact measures.

This infographic highlights a recently published paper titled “A Holistic Perspective of the Societal Relevance of Beef Production and Its Impacts On Climate Change” (Tedeschi and Beauchemin, 2023). A key component of the paper is the discussion about the relevance of the U.S. beef cattle industry to society and on its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

Fibers fermented in the gut result in the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) acetate, propionate, and butyrate. These postbiotic compounds, particularly butyrate, play an important role in colonic and host health. Fibers not degraded by the microbiota aid in stool formation and promote laxation.

High body weight in dogs is often considered to cause problems, for instance, resulting in hip and elbow diseases. Furthermore, there is a huge variation in body conformation and size between different dog breeds, which is related to breeding for specific appearances and genetic traits.

Milk is an important food source, consisting of a complex mixture of lipids, proteins, carbohydrates, and other factors, of which milk fat not only affects the flavor and nutritional value of milk but also plays an important role in the metabolism of nutrients during human growth and development.

We estimated genetic and phenotypic correlations and heritabilities for temperament indicators in growing pigs such as fearfulness (i.e., vocal and physical withdrawal response to an approaching human while isolated in an arena; attempts to escape from a weigh crate); boldness (i.e., biting, following or nosing a human walking inside their home pen) and aggression (i.e., skin lesions). Our results indicate that the studied traits were heritable, and some of these traits could potentially be useful for genetic selection.

In this study, we investigated the antioxidant effect of monoammonium glycyrrhizinate (MAG) on calf intestinal epithelial cells (CIECs) exposed to heat stress in vitro. Calves are sensitive to heat stress, and high temperatures can stimulate heat stress and produce a large number of reactive oxygen species (ROS) to induce oxidative stress.

In 1991, researchers in animal and plant sciences met at the International Symposium on Forage Cell Wall Structure and Digestibility in Madison, WI (Front Matter, 1993). At that meeting, seven sessions were organized, representing some of the biggest names in forages and ruminant nutrition, to discuss and debate the cell wall, its role in ruminant nutrition, and the advances made in the science of forage nutrition.

Forage degradation in the rumen is critical to producing ruminant animals. For many years, scientists were limited to biochemical techniques to understand how ruminal microbes degraded forage, impairing our understanding of which microbes were involved with degrading which forage components.

Mineral requirements for feedlot cattle are largely based on measured mineral concentration in the body at harvest. Fairly extensive research has been done quantifying Ca and P in the body of cattle, but data on Mg, K, and S are sparse. Serial harvest experiments are expensive and labor intensive and therefore not conducted frequently. A group of 115 Holstein steers was fed a finishing diet with serial harvest every 28 d.

Starch digestibility varies greatly depending on starch source (SS), grain processing, and potentially interactions between these factors. Four ruminally cannulated lactating Holstein cows were fed a total mixed ration that varied in SS and particle sizes (PS) to evaluate the interactions between SS and PS on ruminal fermentation, nutrient flow, starch digestibility, and lactation performance of dairy cows.

Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a potent toxin frequently present in animal feeds, which accumulates in the animal tissues for human consumption. This results in critical animal welfare issues, as well as food safety issues. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to show that OTA can be degraded by an enzyme supplemented with pigs’ feed.

The scale of the global pet food market is expanding daily, but there are relatively few evaluations that have been performed on many of the common ingredients in pet food recently. This study compares direct, difference, and regression methods of evaluating the effects of the energy values of poultry byproduct meal (PBM), which is commonly used in beagle foods.

Here, we report for the first time the molecular mechanisms of testicular regression in mink. Our results, together with studies on other animals’ characteristic reproductive features, identify a cluster of events crucial to the seminiferous epithelium regression process in mammalian seasonal breeders and highlight perspectives unique to the mink.

The United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai has requested dispute settlement consultations with Mexico under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). These consultations regard certain Mexican measures concerning products of agricultural biotechnology.