Category: Livestock

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Linking up livestock databases

The object of most biodiversity web sites in animal agriculture is the ‘breed’ or population, and not the individual animal within (an exception are some breed societies which present individual animal data on some of their most important breeding animals). With the linkage of CryoWEB and FABISnet, for the first time, production type databases with individual animal records are directly linked to the global breeds database network, thereby creating breeds statistics in FABISnet which are directly derived from production data. Perhaps the procedure can also be a model for other data in the biodiversity databases.

That’s from a piece on animal genetic resources databases by Elldert Groeneveld of the Institute of Farm Animal Genetic in Germany, published as article of the month in the Globaldiv Newsletter. It’s entitled Databases and Biodiversity: From Single Databases to a Global Network and you can find it on page 8. I suppose there is a similar problem in crops, where you might have evaluation data for various different lines selected from a single population. But somehow you don’t hear so much about it. Is it that the links between conservationists and users (that is, those doing the evaluation) are better developed in the livestock field?

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Nibbles: Vegetable seeds, Colorado potato beetle, Castanea, Pigs, Condiments, Porpoise, Biofuels, Mouflon, Blackwood

  • European are growing more vegetables. But how much of that is heirlooms?
  • Canadian boffins grow wild potatoes for the leaves.
  • Chinese wasp going to roast Italy’s chestnuts.
  • The genetics of swine geography. Or is it the geography of swine genetics?
  • The diversity of sauces.
  • Cooking Flipper.
  • Genetically engineered brewer’s yeast + cellulose-eating bacterium + biomass = methyl halides.
  • Wild sheep runs wild in Cyrpus.
  • “It can be planted in farms because it does not compete for resources with corn, coffee or bananas and acts as a nitrogen-fixing agent in the soil. The mpingo is also considered a good luck tree by the Chagga people who live on the slopes of the Mt. Kilimanjaro.”
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Cats and dogs and maize: A Darwinian view

The Rough Guide To Evolution lists the entire content (with linky goodness) of the current early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences of the USA. As Mark Pallen notes, it “is chock full of articles on evolution from a recent colloquium”. Two that we’ll be reading over the weekend are:

  1. From wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication, and
  2. Tracking footprints of maize domestication and evidence for a massive selective sweep on chromosome 10.

Who says we don’t know how to have fun round here?

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The boom in heritage turkeys

I sent my post asking what is behind rocketing turkey numbers to DAD-Net and received this interesting comment from Marjorie Bender, Research & Technical Program Director, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, which she kindly agreed to share here:

The growth is reported as occurring in the US, but the reported numbers are much larger than make sense to me.

The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy has been actively researching and promoting non-industrial, naturally mating turkey varieties for over 10 years. ALBC has periodically censused this population. In 1997 the breeding population (male and female) of naturally mating turkeys was 1335. In 2003, the breeding population had more than tripled, rising to 4412. In 2006, the population had more than doubled again, reaching a total of 10,404 breeding birds.

I don’t know where their numbers came from, or how they are counting. ALBC counts breeding stock, not number of head raised.

In 1997 ALBC initiated some research on the health of the immune systems of several varieties of naturally mating turkeys and an industrial strain. The naturally mating turkeys had a significantly more robust immune system. At about the same time Slow Food USA contacted ALBC about getting ‘heritage turkeys’ on their members’ dining tables. We provided them with contacts for hatcheries and breeders and they linked them up with consumers. The main food editor at the New York Times taste-tested several and LOVED them. She wrote a wonderful article raving about them. People started looking for Heritage Turkeys, and folks started raising them but with trouble. ALBC developed a production manual and workshop — How to Raise Heritage Turkeys on Pasture — which has educated a number of people. ALBC also conducted breeder selection clinics to improve the quality of the varieties – most of which had suffered from lack of selection of the decades. The market has continued to grow, as has the motivation to produce these.

Thanks, Marjorie.

And W. Stephen Damron, a professor at the Animal Science Department at Oklahoma State University had this to add.

I’m guessing that part of this is better reporting (perhaps just separating out the turkeys from chickens in the counts) and part of it is that turkey is perceived as a “cut above” chicken as a food and is probably being used more in some developing countries (those with population segments that can afford it) as a stepping stone to “better” diets.

If you look at heirloom breeds of turkeys (not the modern big breasted type), you find that the turkey is actually much hardier than it is given credit for and can forage for itself in situations where the chicken can’t.