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No trait in the past half century holds greater promise for Canada's beef industry, says a leading animal scientist.

Canada's beef industry stands to gain well over $200 million annually in feed savings by adopting technology to select animals for "net feed efficiency," says a leading beef scientist with over 25 years experience in beef cattle production and management.

"In all my years as in the beef industry, I have never seen a trait come along with higher potential than net feed efficiency," says Dr. John Basarab of Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development (AAFRD).

"If we can get the technology broadly adopted to measure this trait and use that as a basis to select animals, we'll be looking at dramatic gains in feed savings for the feedlot industry, the cow-calf industry and the breeding industry. I would argue, and many of my colleagues would agree, this is the greatest opportunity we have at the production level for increasing the profitability of beef production over the next 10, 20 and 30 years."

The next great trait

Net feed efficiency is a relatively new trait, but it's rapidly gaining recognition internationally among researchers, private industry and innovative producers, says Basarab.

Australia was the first to develop commercial technology for measuring individual animal feed intake in the mid-90s - a key measure needed as part of the calculation for net feed efficiency. But this technology was prohibitively costly to produce and operate.

Following a trip to Australia to investigate this development, Basarab and colleagues Dr. Bob Kemp and Dr. Warren Snelling approached Alberta-based GrowSafe Systems Ltd. about developing a less costly and more efficient model.

The result was a new standard in feed intake measurement equipment that could be produced at one-tenth of the cost of the original Australian model, and operated with less than one-fifth the labour.

The researchers also established a proof of concept for net feed efficiency as a valuable measurement tool, in a series of studies funded in part by the Canada Alberta Beef Industry Development Fund (CABIDF). (For more information on this research, click here.)

New level of bull evaluation

Fast forward to 2006, and the technology and approach have made great strides in commercial adoption. Innovative operators are partnering with researchers and GrowSafe to test their animals for net feed efficiency, and those operators are seeing increasing marketing power with that information.

"More people are testing commercial bulls, and those bulls are going into industry and in many cases being sold at a higher price," says Basarab.

Among leading examples, Deseret Ranches of Cardston, Alta., one of the largest ranches in southern Alberta now tests all of its bulls every year at Olds College, which offers the service to commercial operators, and uses those bulls in its breeding program. Cattleland Feedyards near Strathmore, Alta., the largest bull test station in Canada, is also testing bulls for net feed efficiency using GrowSafe technology. Beefbooster, a large seed-stock producer, is also using the technology extensively - one of its strains has been tested at the University of Alberta Research Ranch at Kinsella, Alta, over the past three years.

"If we are to take advantage of net feed efficiency, one of the priorities for the beef industry over the next three to five years will be to identify the best bulls that have the trait," says Basarab. "Right now in Alberta, the approximately five percent of industry that represents the leading innovators is taking the lead, and we'd like see use of the technology gradually broaden throughout the industry."

As with any new technology, there are hurdles to broad adoption, he notes. GrowSafe and other industry players are continually honing strategies to facilitate broader adoption. In the meantime, there are opportunities for bull test stations and operations to partner with GrowSafe and / or use feed intake technology in cooperation with public partners offering testing such as Olds College and the University of Alberta.

Basarab himself has been involved in several partnerships, providing an advisory role to ensure good data and calculate the actual net feed efficiency values. "The people using net efficiency programs are placing a lot of importance on the trait," he says. "Typically, when I get the raw data, the owners of the bulls want the data so quick that it's sometimes very hard to respond. Often, they want it this week because their bull sale is next week and they know the information can give them a big price boost. So there's no doubt it's making an impact."

Landmark shift

Net feed efficiency represents a new landmark shift in the impact beef genetics on industry success, says Basarab.

"Most of the progress we have made in the area of feed efficiency over the last 30 years has to do with feeding management, balancing of diets, use of growth implants and use of different type of feed additives, rather than genetics."

The major genetics-driven change to production efficiency occurred just prior to that period, when the North American beef industry moved from purebred breeding towards cross-breeding as its main method of producing beef, notes Basarab. "We forget how huge that was, because the effect was long term and subtle. But essentially with a crossbred you're getting about a 30 percent boost in production efficiency relative to a purebred."

That shift has arguably remained the high water mark in genetics progress related to feed efficiency in the beef industry, he says. Meanwhile, other types of livestock production have continued to make great strides.

"There are many of us at the research level, and there is evidence to back it up in the literature, who suggest that we have made no progress in the beef cattle industry in terms of selection for efficiency of feed utilization. In fact, some say we may have gone backwards. The reason is we've selected for faster gaining animals and they've gotten bigger, and bigger animals have higher maintenance requirements. Whereas competing meat, like pork and poultry, have made tremendous improvements in efficiency of feed utilization."

Leveling the playing field

Other types of livestock production have the advantage of greater vertical integration and production facilities that readily allow for feed intake measurements for individual animals. "An owner can control everything from breeding until processing, and can make all the decisions that limit the type of strains or breeds that are used. As a result, there have been huge improvements - almost 50 percent increases in efficiency of food utilization in the pork industry and poultry industry."

The beef industry has fallen behind in this regard, he says, but the new feed intake measurement technology offers a tremendous opportunity to gain ground.

"At the pen level in the beef industry, what we have traditionally measured is the feed-to-gain ratio. That is what we call a gross measure of feed efficiency. And when we're doing economics, like economics on a pen basis, that works pretty good, because we can say this pen of cattle had pretty good gross feed efficiency and it means something. But when it comes down to making progress in the industry in terms of selecting individuals that have better feed efficiency, feed-to-gain ratio is actually quite a poor measurement."

The reason is that feed-to-gain ratio is a composite trait - comprised of many component traits such as daily gain, body weight, body composition and appetite.

"When we use feed-to-gain ratio, we end up getting animals that are larger and, yes, faster growing, but they don't use their feed any more efficiently. More often than not, they have the same maintenance requirements, so you're not gaining anything. You've essentially selected for an engine that is bigger but proportionately has the same fuel efficiency as a smaller engine."

GrowSafe feed intake measurement technology and other similar technology allows for a much better indicator of performance advantage - net feed efficiency.

"The GrowSafe System essentially allows us to measure individual animal feed intake in groups of animals that are in a pen, using radio frequency tags and other components. With this system, essentially you can put 80 animals in a pen that co-mingle and do as they please, but when they come up to feed you get individual measurements of who ate and how much, every second of every day."

True measure of efficiency

Because net feed efficiency (also called residual feed intake) is independent of growth and body size, it is a very good indicator of the maintenance requirements of an animal. "This system essentially allows you to select animals that have equal body size, equal body composition, equal daily gain and equal reproductive capacity, but lower feed requirements. As a result, using the information as a selection tool, you select animals that either use less feed to get the same results or end up producing more on the same amount of feed."

Research to date shows a significant degree of variability in net feed efficiency within modern beef cattle genetics and conservative estimates indicate selection programs based on broad adoption of GrowSafe-type technology could boost efficiency of food utilization by 25 to 30 percent over the next 25 years.

"The economic potential is tremendous," says Basarab. "That type of improvement would amount to around $100 million in feed savings annually to the feedlot industry in Alberta alone. If you extend that across Canada and into other beef industry sectors, you're looking at well over $200 million in savings annually."

Those savings will not be realized tomorrow, he cautions. But they are well within reach with a long-term, industry-wide commitment to progress with this trait.

The trait also has great promise to reduce the impact of beef production on the environment, further strengthening the sustainability of the industry, he says. "One of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about this particular methodology is that we're talking about true efficiency. By improving feed efficiency through net feed efficiency, we're not only saving feed costs, we're reducing the amount of methane and manure released into the environment."

Capitalizing on potential

On the research and development front, Canada has quickly caught up with Australia and the two are generally viewed as co-leaders in progress with net feed efficiency.

"In some areas we're ahead of the Australians and in some areas we're a little bit behind," observes Basarab. A key area where Canada leads is in investigating DNA-based "molecular markers" for the trait. This effort has been lead by Dr. Stephen Moore, Chair of Beef Genomics at the University of Alberta, who has collected data from the major Alberta net feed efficiency intake measurement efforts of the past several years.

High-impact markers - which would allow for fast identification of desirable animals at an early age through blood samples - are years away, but Moore and his team have realized great progress towards that goal. This has included a major project funded by CABIDF, in which the researchers gained new knowledge of the genes and gene pathways affecting feed intake and efficiency. (For more information on this study, click here.)

"The work on genetic markers will be extremely important to capitalizing on the potential in this area," says Basarab. "To use a computer analogy, the markers we have now are kind of like version one of the old DOS computer system, but over the next five-to-10 years we expect to have markers and systems that are far more sophisticated."

Another research focus is on understanding the biochemistry and physiology behind net feed efficiency.

"We're moving in the right direction, but obviously the key to future success will be industry adoption," says Basarab. Feed intake measurement technology and similar systems not only offer the potential of greater production efficiencies, they can help the industry address emerging demands such as traceability and value-tracking, he notes. "There's no doubt the Canadian beef industry stands to gain a lot by moving forward with this technology."

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