More than 500 scientists, vets, policymakers and farmers from around the world gathered in Croke Park last week to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing the global agrifood sector. They were there to attend the British Society of Animal Science (BSAS) conference which was held in Dublin for the first time.
"This was the first year ever that the conference was held outside the UK," says Prof David Kenny, principal research scientist with Teagasc and chair of the local organising committee for the conference. "The BSAS has always had a very active Irish membership and they decided to bring the conference to Dublin this year. They have also been broadening out the conference in recent years to make it a one-stop shop for industry to see where science is at in terms of dealing with the various challenges faced by the sector."
The conference featured 35 speakers from Ireland, the UK, Europe, Australia, the United States and Brazil who addressed a variety of topics including feed management, sustainable livestock systems, global dairy systems and milk quality, animal breeding and genetics, bridging the gap between academia and the equine industry, and the economic challenges of Brexit.
Sustainability issues
A team of Teagasc researchers presented a paper which addressed key sustainability issues associated with beef cattle production. Continuing global population growth is leading to increased demand for beef but this in turn is generating increased costs and environmental pressures. The paper explored how these could be addressed through improved feed efficiency in beef cattle.
“This is an area of work in which we have been engaged for the past 10 years,” says Prof Kenny. “We are trying to look at biology to help us select for animals that eat less and produce the same amount or more beef. With feed accounting for 70 to 80 per cent of the costs of beef production worldwide there is huge interest in this topic.”
The challenge is to reliably and cost-effectively identify animals with the inherent potential to utilise feed efficiently in the context of a structured breeding programme. Greater knowledge of the molecular mechanisms regulating feed efficiency and the subsequent identification of biomarkers to assist genetic selection for the trait hold promise in meeting this challenge, according to the Teagasc paper.
The problem with the identification of these biomarkers is the wide range of factors involved in feed efficiency, including variation in feeding behaviour, digestion, absorption, nutrient partitioning, physiological stress response and cellular energetics and turnover, as well as the composition and function of the ruminal microbiome.
The Teagasc paper suggests that an approach known as gene co-expression network analyses may hold part of the answer. This approach can identify all genes associated with a particular trait and, more importantly, isolate the “hub genes” that regulate the expression of other genes within the network and may therefore act as biomarkers.
“Hopefully it will help us breed more Earth-friendly animals which eat less and therefore produce less methane per kilogramme of beef,” Kenny adds. “We are also working with UCD on machine learning to help us identify the differences between the more and less feed-efficient cattle.”
A paper which will be of particular interest to Irish dairy farmers was presented by Prof Michael Steele of the University of Alberta. He looked at the importance of a healthy gut to calves not just in the first days of their lives but for their long-term wellbeing.
His paper noted that even small changes to the feeding regimes of newborn calves can result in significant benefits to their gastrointestinal tract (GIT). This points to a need to consider other bioactive components that impact GIT development in the colostrum and transition milk used to feed the calves in order to provide them with the best chance to combat GIT ailments later on.
Daily gain
According to Steele’s paper, the amount of milk to be fed to calves has been a hot topic in the past decade, as it directly impacts preweaning average daily gain which may be associated with lifetime production. However, most dairy calves are fed only two meals per day and it has been thought that increasing meal sizes to anything greater than 2.5 litres may cause digestive upsets and hyperglycaemia.
However, Steele pointed to recent research which has shown that the calf GIT can adapt to meal sizes as large at four litres in the first weeks of life. Given the link between the amount of milk fed at this stage and lifetime production, this suggests that the advantages of feeding more milk in the early weeks of the calf’s life have been overlooked up until now.
This may have been the conference’s first time outside of the UK, but it will return to Ireland soon. “Everyone was very impressed with the standard of the conference and with the venue,” says Kenny. “It has been decided that the conference will move to a rotational basis and it could come back to Ireland every three years or so.”