Major beef cattle organisations joined a 14-person study tour to the United States and Canada with Beef + Lamb New Zealand’s (B+LNZ) genetics team for the Informing New Zealand Beef (INZB) programme.
A Beef Improvement Federation research convention in Calgary, Canada was followed by a whistle-stop tour of seven US states visiting farms, universities, research centres and businesses.
Among the highlights were learning about progress being made on methane emissions via cattle genetics at research ranches and Colorado State University.
The study group was impressed by the scale of the sector, research and allied industries around farming, as well as the vast amount of genetic science research and increasing technology.
The team work between universities, commercial companies, farmers and breed societies stood out.
"The big takeaway for me was how much collaboration and how much working across the breeds and across the various institutes, universities, breed societies and ranchers is going on over there and the rapid improvements they’re making in genetic gains."
He said there was little doubt that New Zealand was lagging behind in multi-group research compared with North America.
"Yes is the short answer. Obviously they’re on a different scale and there’s lots more money and a bigger local market, but in some areas absolutely we could work better together. One of the reasons for the trip was to look at what we can work together on and try and solve on behalf of our farmers."
He said many lessons could be learned from US and Canada developments in genetic gains.
Most of New Zealand’s genetic improvement was being imported from semen from countries such as the US, Canada and Australia and where they went typically we followed, he said.
The US cattle industry had a focus on meat eating with a national standard scheme on measuring particularly intramuscular fat for meat marbling. Ranchers can breed towards this because they are getting paid for meat quality.
New Zealand does not have a national standard scheme although Alliance Group has its Handpicked programme and Silver Fern Farms has Beef EQ.
"Meat eating quality is one area that we are not doing as well as them and another is there’s been a real big focus there on feed conversion efficiency," Mr Brier said.
He said the leaders came away from Colorado State University with a better understanding of work to reduce methane emissions and technology to increase the rate of genetic gain such as embryo transfer and the new generation of genomic testing.
"The challenge with cattle is that the genetic interval is slow and the time for a cow to be replaced in the herd by a daughter takes time and we need to work really quickly to make sure we can increase the genetic gain in our national herd as quickly as we can on these important traits."
The US beef industry was seeing signals from customers and consumers that methane was going to be important and had started working towards what they would need to do in the future. They were conscious of scope three emissions by companies such as supermarkets and banks wanting to reduce their emissions in their supply chain, he said.
"They see it as an opportunity so if they can reduce some methane from their beef herds and talk about agriculture being the climate saviour rather than a climate villain then there’s a real opportunity there for them and something they want to be part of."
Colorado State University was identifying some cattle were better at emitting less methane than others.
Mr Brier said this agreed with New Zealand’s sheep and dairy research.
"We know it’s a heritable trait that some animals will convert that feed and produce less methane than others. We have a pilot study under way ... and something we are going to have to look hard at is how we identify those lower methane cattle, just like we have with our sheep, and then try and give farmers the opportunity to breed them if those market signals are there."
At Kansas State University, the team learned about efficiency research work. The university has 1000 students plus 100 postgraduates dedicated to animal science, with methane emissions and maternal fertility growing areas of focus.
Mr Brier said the next step was for our breed societies to identify some of the opportunities that could be captured from the tour and to carry out more methane research including joint projects with the US and Australia.
An "eye-opener" was the extent of technology such as sensors and AI to collect information on animals to help make decisions and breeding technologies were being used to make rapid genetic advances without genetic modifying. New Zealand had to make sure it did not get left behind, he said.
On the study tour were representatives of major beef cattle organisations including Performance Beef Breeders NZ, Angus New Zealand, NZ Herefords, AngusPro NZ, New Zealand Beef Shorthorn Association and Simmental NZ.
