Interpretive Summary: Harnessing genetic potential to advance sustainability in beef systems

By: Matthew A Cleveland, Julie Ojango, Raphael Mrode, Mike Coffey, Troy Rowan

Implications

• Genetic selection offers global beef systems an opportunity to generate permanent, cumulative improvement in traits that impact sustainability.
• The collection of phenotypes is the major bottleneck for developing new selection tools for sustainability traits.
• Direct selection to reduce enteric methane emissions is possible, but it will require clearer economic signals before it is included in breeding objectives.
• The maintenance of local adaptation is an essential pillar of sustainability, especially in production systems in the Global South.

Introduction

Global beef systems have undergone enormous changes in recent decades, steadily increasing in outputs while holding inventory relatively steady (Steinfeld et al., 2010). This progress has been in no small part due to improvements to genetic potential across many traits. As industries around the world work to produce high-quality protein while balancing economics, animal well-being, and environmental impact, genetic improvement will be an even more important driver. Genetic improvements are complementary and often additive to environmental and management interventions. Genetic progress is cumulative and permanent, meaning that improvements are not lost between generations and add up over time. This makes breeding a long-term solution to addressing ­problems or driving further improvement, provided the traits are heritable. Genetic progress often happens more slowly than management, medical, or nutritional interventions, but provides a long-term approach to improving populations, while other approaches bridge in the short term.

Read the full article in the latest edition of Animal Frontiers.