Combatting Global Warming With A $4.3 Million Heifer

To many in the beef industry, Viatina-19 FIV Mara Mové is both a golden calf and the harbinger of a new era. At over six feet tall and weighing in excess of 2.400 pounds, Viatina is twice the size of average adults in the Nelor breed (Bos indicus)^1,2. Her impressive stature has made her a prized member of her species worth roughly $4.3 million, qualifying Viatina as the world’s most valuable cow. But the true source of her worth comes from her DNA and the potential future it encodes.

The Duality of Food Production

To meet the needs of a growing world population, it’s expected that, by the year 2050, the global food system will need to increase its output by 50%³. Doing so will be a complex task, not least of all because current farming practices significantly accelerate global warming. Estimates suggest that 21-37% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be traced to food production, with 9-14% attributed directly to crop and livestock activities³. Farmers thus find themselves increasingly pressured—both by governments and consumers—to produce more food while reducing their environmental footprint.

Fortunately, they don’t have to start from scratch: Since 1961, the food supply per capita has increased by more than 30%³. And though over this time the total amount of GHG emissions have increased, the amount of emissions produced for every unit of food made has decreased by nearly 60%. Put another way, food production is growing more sustainable, in part thanks to selective breeding practices in the dairy and beef industries which have generated more productive cattle.

Viatina’s record breaking value comes from the hope that, coded in her DNA, is the genetic blueprint for a far more productive—and sustainable—beef industry.

Cultivating herd genetics

The rise of Brazil’s beef industry has been meteoric. Since record keeping began in 1997, the country has seen a steady increase in beef export that reached new heights in 2022 and 2023 with a reported 2 million tons of beef shipped out each year¹. This has elevated Brazil to become the world’s largest beef producer and home to roughly 230 million cattle, including Viatina.

Genomic selection has nearly doubled the value of dairy cattle in the US

Viatina belongs to the Nelore subspecies of Zebus cattle which make up nearly 80% of Brazil’s cattle population¹. This diverse breed is known for its ability to thrive in tropical climates like Brazil’s, demonstrating high heat tolerance, resilience to parasites, and efficient metabolism⁴. Since their arrival in 1868, Brazilian farmers have been cultivating the Nelore breed in the hopes of selecting for desirable traits, a task that’s been significantly aided by the introduction of genomic selection⁴.

Genomic selection is the process of using genetic data to inform breeding programs. By surveying an animal’s genome, specific traits can be associated with underlying patterns of (presumably causal) variants. Testing of bulls, dams, and their offspring for the presence of these variants can help farmers rapidly stabilize desired phenotypes in their cattle population with far greater efficiency than traditional selection programs. For example, enhancement of dairy cattle productivity in the United States through genomic selection has enabled traits to get fixed within farm populations twice as fast as it used to, increasing the rate of value gain for each generation of cattle from $45 per cow to $85 per cow⁵.

The National Association of Breeders and Researchers (ANCP), a Brazilian coalition of researchers and breeders founded in 1996, aims for similar results with the Nelore cattle. Through genomic selection, they hope to generate more productive and sustainable cattle for one of the nation’s largest export industries. Genomic selection is particularly effective for traits that have low heritability and can be invaluable as the food industry works to improve its sustainability⁶.

Genomic Selection As A Tool In Sustainability

There are many opportunities to reduce GHG emission in food production, from changes in fertilizer use to decreasing overall food waste³. One potentially significant step is to cultivate more productive cattle populations, which currently account for 65-77% of global livestock GHG emissions³.

A more productive cow is one that produces larger amounts of economically valuable material with fewer invested resources. For beef cattle, this might mean a cow that grows larger than average in a short amount of time. In theory, a shorter lifespan means fewer invested resources. Multiple studies suggest that improving the productivity of cattle can reduce overall methane production, as well as decrease land use effects^6-8. As many productivity features (such as relative feed intake and feed conversion ratio) have low heritability, genomic selection may prove critical for global efforts to reduce GHG emissions⁶. ANCP now provides multiple reports a year on genomic enhancement of Nelore cattle in Brazil, with a focus on 27 such traits. These types of efforts have helped the country realize moderate to high gains in the overall population’s productivity⁹.

”Improving productivity of cattle can reduce overall methane production”

However, genomic selection in beef cattle is more challenging than in dairy cattle, in part due to the higher heterogeneity among breeds used for beef, longer generation intervals, and a relative dearth of genomic data^10,11. For this reason, individuals like Viatina draw considerable attention. In the time that it normally takes an average adult of her breed to reach 1.000 pounds, Viatina has grown to 2.400 pounds. This suggests that some combination of variants in her genome enables Viatina to remain healthy at a large weight and to convert food into body mass with far greater efficiency. Her valuable traits are exciting breeders, some of whom have paid $250.000 for one of her eggs in the hopes that her offspring will seed new, more productive populations of beef cattle¹.

An Evolving Genomic Selection Toolkit

The value of Viatina lies in the genetic variants that increase her productivity. With this type of information, breeders around the world may begin to improve beef cattle productivity in order to meet the growing demand for food while also reducing the industry’s GHG emissions. Therefore Viatina represents an ideal that breeders the world over will look to emulate through genomic selection, possibly starting with Viatina’s clones or offspring.

If breeders are to improve the beef cattle industry’s productivity, they will need tools that enable the in depth study of cattle genomics, as well as the low-cost surveying of herd genetics for selective breeding. For this, many are looking to next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology.

Traditionally, bovine genomic selection has relied on the use of NGS for initial genome sequencing and variant discovery, followed by the use of microarray technology for widespread variant detection. The low cost, simple, and user-friendly nature of the microarray has made it an accessible tool for breeders and agricultural scientists alike. However, microarrays are also rigid: they are limited to detecting only the genetic variants encoded in their original design. When new gene-phenotype associations are discovered—such as those underlying Viatina’s physique—updating microarray designs can be cumbersome and costly. Breeders may have to order entirely new microarray chips to incorporate novel information, a process that is neither time-efficient nor scalable for large breeding programs.

NGS technologies offer a powerful alternative. Approaches such as low-pass whole-genome sequencing or custom target capture can be less biased, cost-effective ways to survey bull, dam, and offspring genomes for known and unknown genetic variants. And, unlike microarrays, NGS assays can be updated dynamically: new genetic variants can be easily incorporated by ordering low-cost spike-in content, eliminating the need for a full redesign.

The beef cattle industry will continue to evolve towards a more productive and sustainable future, likely one where Viatina is no longer remarkable. To do this, the industry’s genomics toolbox will have to evolve with it, and transitioning from microarrays to NGS-based assays is a key part of that.

Referencias bibliográficas

1. BILLER, DAVID. “She’s the World’s Most Expensive Cow, and Part of Brazil’s Plan to Put Beef on Everyone’s Plate.” AP News, 4 June 2024, apnews.com/article/brazil-cow-cattle-breeding-zebu-nelore-amazon-deforestation-9d58844f3e695ce878da838c10280f0d.
2. RBZ Editor. “Mature Weight of Nellore Cows from Selection Herds in Brazil.” R. Bras. Zootec., vol. 30, no. 3 suppl.1, June 2001, pp. 1027–1036, rbz.org.br/article/mature-weight-of-nellore-cows-from-selection-herds-in-brazil/.
3. IPCC. “Chapter 5 — Special Report on Climate Change and Land.” Ipcc.ch, Special Report on Climate Change and Land, 2019, www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/.
4. “Nelore.” Thecattlesite.com, 2022, www.thecattlesite.com/breeds/beef/75/nelore/.
5. Wiggans, G.R, and José A Carrillo. Genomic Selection in United States Dairy Cattle. Vol. 13, 9 Sept. 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9500184/, https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.994466.
6. Silva, R. M. O., et al. “Accuracies of Genomic Prediction of Feed Efficiency Traits Using Different Prediction and Validation Methods in an Experimental Nelore Cattle Population.” Journal of Animal Science, vol. 94, no. 9, 1 Sept. 2016, pp. 3613–3623, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27898889/, https://doi.org/10.2527/jas.2016-0401.
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8. Fresco, S, et al. “Genetic Parameters for Methane Production, Intensity, and Yield Predicted from Milk Mid-Infrared Spectra throughout Lactation in Holstein Dairy Cows.” Journal of Dairy Science, vol. 107, no. 12, 5 Oct. 2024, pp. 11311–11323, https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.2024-25231.
9. “Nellore Genotyping Allows Brazilian Beef Industry to Flourish.” Illumina.com, 2020, www.illumina.com/science/customer-stories/icommunity-customer-interviews-case-studies/lobo-ancp-interview-nellore-genotyping.html.
10. Navid Ghavi Hossein-Zadeh. “An Overview of Recent Technological Developments in Bovine Genomics.” Veterinary and Animal Science, vol. 25, 1 Sept. 2024, pp. 100382–100382, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vas.2024.100382.
11. Esrafili, Maryam, et al. “Selective Genotyping to Implement Genomic Selection in Beef Cattle Breeding.” Selective Genotyping to Implement Genomic Selection in Beef Cattle Breeding, vol. 14, 17 Mar. 2023, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10064214/, https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2023.1083106.