The US beef industry has spent decades improving genetics, efficiency and productivity through research, but future breakthroughs will be harder unless public investment rebounds, Ronnie Green, chancellor emeritus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told the 58th Beef Improvement Federation research symposium in Boise, Idaho, The Fence Post reports. Drawing on 40 years in academia, industry and federal research, he said the industry must move from benefiting from public research to advocating for it.

'This industry cannot afford to give up the capacity that it has for public sector-funded research influencing production,' Green said, tracing crossbreeding, heterosis research, genetic evaluation and production efficiency to long-term public investment through USDA, the US Meat Animal Research Center (USMARC) and the land-grant universities. That leadership has weakened: China has expanded public agricultural R&D nearly nine-fold since 2000 while US spending has been flat after inflation, and of USDA's US$230 billion-plus annual budget less than US$5 billion goes to the Research, Education and Economics mission area.

Resources for beef research within that are shrinking. USMARC at Clay Center, Nebraska, one of the world's premier cattle research facilities, has lost purchasing power and staff despite nominal increases: when Green was a graduate student in the 1980s it employed more than 60 federal scientists; fewer than 45 remain, with many posts vacant. 'I don't say that to be an alarmist,' he said. 'The industry needs to have a wake-up call about the danger that this institution perhaps is in today.'

The returns remain exceptional: research cited in his presentation estimates that productivity gains from beef cattle science contribute about US$16.7 billion a year in farm-level value, letting the industry hold production with far fewer cows while raising carcass weights and feed efficiency.

Green's remedies: fully fund USDA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, protect the Hatch Act of 1887 and the Evans-Allen Act of 1977 that fund land-grant research, back a new national maternal-performance research initiative centred at USMARC, and get more producers and organisations into federal policy discussions. 'We need to have more voices at the table so that we don't continue to see the erosion happen,' he said.

Source: The Fence Post