Cutting-edge technology could transform industry

Two Texas Panhandle natives are at the heart of an effort to use cutting-edge technology to transform beef production, an industry with deep roots there. The program entails cloning cattle that produce carcasses on the high end of superior. “We’ve been trying to get to this point ever since somebody started raising cattle,” said Jason Abraham, a rancher and cloning expert with roots in the Canadian area. Through the years, selective breeding has mostly moved the quality of cattle and the meat they produce ever upward, but very slowly. Then came artificial insemination using semen harvested from superior bulls and embryo transplanting from top females fertilized by semen from equally special bulls. Those embryos go into less expensive females to incubate, producing multiple desirable calves instead of one at a time. Artificial insemination and embryo transplants played a role in the birth of 13 calves at West Texas A&M University in March, but there was a key difference. The calves came from mothers and a father that were cloned by WT, Abraham, Timbercreek veterinarian Gregg Veneklasen and genetics company ViaGen. The cloned parents were made from tissue taken from carcasses that met the top beef grade of Prime Yield Grade 1. That grading system measures the fat marbling, thin ribbons of fat in muscle tissues, without excess outside fat and the size of the ribeye from a carcass. “We want taste fat without waste fat,” said Ty Lawrence, professor of animal science and director of the Beef Carcass Research Center at WT. The plan now is to raise the calves without special treatment and slaughter some next spring to test the team’s hypothesis that making the top grade is a genetic trait that can be passed on...more