Agricultural News
Cattlemen Need to Manage Technology for Efficient Genetic Progress
Tue, 30 Jun 2015 16:28:07 CDT
No doubt cattlemen are producing more with less, but they'll have to keep on their game. New Mexico State University College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences Dean Lowell Catlett said cattlemen have to think about feeding a growing world population.
"If we are going to feed 9 billion people like we do right now 7.2 billion people, we have very intensive, efficient operations, Catlett said. "When I went to college, it used to be 6-8 pounds of feed to get a pound of beef, but operations now do it in 3-4. We have seen fabulous efficiencies and it is done by intensive management of livestock."
Applied technology allows the cattle community faster progress. Today D-N-A sampling helps cattlemen look at each animal and adjust management accordingly. That promises to bring out the best in each cow and breed.
"So we move to a situation where we just do instead of saying it's a herd of cows, we need to do this, every individual animal will be monitored and given regimes and the next generation that comes on that from people that grow corn and soybeans and feed grains is not just corn that will produce more ethanol, we will produce more corn that produces ethanol, but we will also produce a corn that has more of these enzymes and these particular things that Angus cattle might process better, but an individual cow might not process it as well as the breed will or vice versa," Catlett said.
Quicker genetic progress plus improved efficiency spell good things for the future, Catlett says.
"We are just doing what mother nature did slowly, or we did in agriculture slowly with molecular genetics, we can just do it like that and we are not doing anything other than what mother nature does by natural selection," Catlett said. "We just do it faster."
The takeaway: to feed the world's growing population farmers and ranchers must embrace new tools.
This video news is provided by Certified Angus Beef LLC and the American Angus Association.
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