Sheep Breeders Round Table

Date: 1st November 2013 - 3rd November 2013

A highlight of the Sheep Breeders Round Table in November, held in Nottinghamshire and attracting more than 170 pedigree and commercial farmers, scientists and industry representatives, was a debate over whether genomics is cost effective for the UK sheep industry.

Genomics is the use of DNA to predict the performance potential of an animal before it can be assessed itself or has progeny to be assessed. New Zealand is often seen as the sheep genomics front runner and this was certainly the impression given by NZ speaker John McEwan, Senior Scientist in Animal Genomics at AgResearch.

Before the debate began he provided an overview of what was being done in New Zealand, including the DNA screening of huge numbers of lambs looking at traditional traits and new ones, such as yellow fat, myomax and the GDF9 fertility gene. He said genomic technology was partly responsible for the 84% increase seen in kilos of lamb reared per ewe between 1990 and 2013, despite the national flock being pushed to more marginal land as the dairy industry expands. Genomics were allowing whole populations to be screened easily and cheaply and molecular breeding values to be used to provide ‘instant progeny testing’.

Mr McEwan said genomic testing for a number of traits was far more advantaged than tests for specific genes (such as the MyoMax and LoinMax tests developed 10 years ago) and meant a new trait could be added at very little (or even zero) cost. It could bring a ‘three-fold improvement’ to the New Zealand sheep sector if its full capability continued to be explored.

In anticipation of the debate ahead about the cost of genomics, Mr McEwan said: “In New Zealand this had been funded consistently for a long period of time. And we could do even more if we had more money.”

The debate opened with Mike Coffey from EGENES and sheep breeder Rob Hodgkins arguing that genomics was cost effective for the UK, and Geoff Pollot of the Royal Vet College and Will Haresign of Aberystwyth University arguing it was not, before the audience was invited to participate too.

Those in favour of genomics spoke of the ability to speed up genetic improvement and select for difficult-to-record traits, such as meat quality, feed conversion efficiency and disease resistance. Those against it said the technology came from the dairy industry where less genetic diversity meant genomic predictions were easier to make.

Mr Haresign said the UK sheep industry had too many breeds and was too focussed on breed type over performance recording to able to justify spending money on genomic technology that might not reap any rewards. He reiterated a common theme from the conference, that the industry must do more performance recording, not less, with the rise of genomic technology, as the reliability of genomics (the genotype) relies on the crunching of actual performance data (the phenotype) to ensure accurate predictions.

Mr Coffey acknowledged this but argued phenotypes could be bought from overseas or funding used to incentivise recording. Having been hypothetically offered £1m a year for 10 years, he said £10m over four years would be enough to source enough phenotypes and establish a system where a select number of sheep farmers/companies collected phenotypes each year to feed into the database and ensure reliability of genotypes for the whole industry. “We cannot afford not to do this,” he said. “We’re losing money already by not doing it.”

Mr Pollot injected a shot of realism, saying we had to adapt the technology to the current situation, not change the whole farming structure to be able to use the technology.

While it was clear no consensus was going to be reached, there was agreement within the audience that the lack of feedback from the meat processors was holding the UK back. Another area of general consensus during the day was in the area of across-breed EBVs – i.e. EBVs being applicable to all breeds, rather than the current system of a Texel EBV, for example, not being comparable a Charollais or any other terminal sire breed.

In an interactive session delegates look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of working in this manner and concluded that the industry needed the best genetics, whatever the breed. It was also felt that pooling the data would allow better EBVs to be created because of the greater volume of data.

There were some concerns about accuracy and robustness, and a feeling that some commercial farmers were wary of EBVs without changing things. However, at the same time there was a positivity about improving the perception of EBVs and the ability to rate crossbred rams.

The conclusion was definitely a green light for Signet to look at running a single BLUP run for all terminal breeds and use that as the starting point to develop across-breed EBVs for the future.

Sheep Breeders Round Table is a biennial conference organised by Biosciences Knowledge Transfer Network, Eblex, HCC, NSA, QMS and SRUC. The next event will be in autumn 2015.