With worldwide consumer demand for chemical residual-free fruits and vegetables on the rise, it is more important now than ever for producers to use natural solutions to produce more food of a better quality. Nicolas Body, Alltech Crop Science European technical manager, details Alltech’s global trials on industrial crops and how natural solutions, such as biostimulants, have increased the genetic potential of plants.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Nicolas Body. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              Nicolas Body, Alltech Crop Science’s European technical manager, is here today to talk about the “Alltech effect” and results from the field. Thank you for joining me today, Nicolas.

Nicolas:          Thanks for inviting me.

Kara:              Alltech has trials set up around the world for crop science research. Why is it so important to have active trials globally?

Nicolas:          This is connected to the way Alltech operates. We look at today's farming problems and we try to find innovative, natural solutions. The trials are the best way to integrate this innovation into the farmers' practices, day in and day out, and to showcase how it can impact their bottom line at the end — the profitability of the farm.

Kara:              Which is, of course, a priority for every farmer and every agricultural business. In regards to research trials, I know that Alltech has had trials in Europe and California to look at the complex fungal disease attacking wood. What have been the initial results of those trials?

Nicolas:          This trial is very exciting because we are totally changing the approach on esca, the wood disease you are referring to. We focus on the plant health and not the pathogen. That's not the way farmers have been doing it in the past. Our results have shown that we can have grapevines that are fighting back the pathogen by themselves. They are stopping the development of the disease and the spread of the disease, and they are still producing healthy grapes. We have the same approach for citrus greening, for example. That would be well-known in the states, especially in Florida, where we're using the same technologies to help the plant fight back on that issue.

Kara:              So, the approach is to take preventative measures instead of reactive measures to these diseases in this research, right?

Nicolas:          Yes, exactly. We discovered through our nutrigenomic research that we can elicit the natural defense of the plant, and inducing that resistance allows for the plant to not be totally under the pressure of the disease and to stay healthy, even if the disease is present in the field.

Kara:              That's a wonderful approach. Consumers worldwide are demanding residual-free vegetables and fruit products. I understand recent trials have explored ways to better meet this consumer demand.

Nicolas:          On this subject, it is clear that the consumer is driving the changes. We do trials here to show to the farmers that we have solutions for them to meet that consumer demand. For example, the producers that are already engaged in reduction of their chemical residues found at harvest, on the fruits and vegetables, down to zero residues, which is the norm for baby food, for example. Our natural alternatives are of great value. In these trials, we want to show that it's working already and that the farmers can feel confident using them on their farms. And with the help of other tools to assess what are the different issues, they can get the best of all the different tools they have in their toolbox.

Kara:              Again, this is another tool to help our farmers and agribusinesses improve their bottom line, which is what they're looking for, as well as providing a healthy product to consumers.

Nicolas:          I think the new step here is not only the bottom line; it's also the possibility for the farmer to engage with the consumer on these practices — the fact he is using natural technologies, the fact that he is avoiding chemical residues. If he is using one molecule, that's because there is one specific problem and he has no choice. I think these natural options are a good way to increase the transparency and educate the consumer, at the end.

Kara:              What exactly are biostimulants, and what benefit can they provide to industrial crop farmers?

Nicolas:          The global definition of biostimulant that has been accepted is — they are defined as products from natural origins that are stimulating the plant growth, but with a mode of action that differs from a fertilizer. They would be to the plant what coffee is to me. It allows me to perform, but it's not bringing any nutritional value. I cannot live on coffee. The two together — a good fertilizer program and a biostimulant product, used at exactly the right time — allow for the plant to be at its best genetic potential, and that's where we get the best fruits, a good uniformity among the different fruits or vegetables, and a better quality of them, as well.

                        On industrial crops, like tomatoes and potatoes, where we are positioning our biostimulant with a lot of success, we are increasing the quality characteristics of these crops. We will see better uniformity — more, bigger tubers on the potatoes for French fries, for example. We'll have more sugar and better color on tomatoes. We would see more oil out of olives, using a biostimulant at the right time.

Kara:              There are many technologies out there that Alltech is researching in the crop science field. How are these advancements changing the future of farming around the world?

Nicolas:          Biotechnology, the way Alltech is doing it — based on natural solutions derived from microbial solutions — is clearly helping us produce more nutritious food for a growing planet while being less dependent on chemical solutions, so we are changing the world to be more natural and produce more food of a better quality. I think that's what everyone wants globally.

Kara:              Consumers are definitely concerned about where their food comes from, and they're concerned that it would be raised naturally. Are there exciting research projects out there that would build upon what Alltech is currently doing, and maybe interesting research for the future in this field?

Nicolas:          We are on many exciting projects. One subject I think that's worth knowing from the consumer standpoint, but also from all the producers, is what I call the Brown Revolution — the focus we have on soil health and how we can foster all the beneficial microbes that are in our soil in order to get the best out of our fields. That's an area where we, I would say, focus 50% of our research today in order to discover how the microbes are working in the soil and how using these microbes and all the molecules they produce in the soil, is impacting the plant growth and, at the end, the yield of the product. Taking care of the soil is very important for future generations, and we don’t want to be producing more food while we are depleting our soil and not be able to do that in the long run.

Kara:              The Alltech Crop Science research team is taking care of the soil, looking at ways to produce healthier crops around the world, and we thank you for taking time today to talk with us about the research and everything that Alltech is doing in crop science.

Nicolas:          Thanks a lot.

Kara:              That was Nicolas Body, Alltech Crop Science European technical manager.

Want to learn more about natural solutions for your crop production?

What is the best strategy for sustainable dairy farming that not only benefits the environment but is also profitable? Charlie Crave, a founding partner in Crave Brothers Farm and Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese, explains how his family-owned dairy operation has grown with the addition of a methane digester and cheese plant, all while keeping sustainability practices at the forefront.

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with Charlie Crave. Click below to hear the full audio.

David:            We're here today with Charlie Crave of Crave Brothers Farm. How are you doing, Charlie?

Charlie:          I'm doing well today, yes.

David:            Well, thanks for joining us.

Charlie:          You're welcome. I had a great week there in Louisville and, of course, like anything, it's always nice to be back home, too. What an energetic, wonderful time that was at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference.

David:            Yeah. Thank you. It's always a lot of fun, really.

Charlie:          Absolutely, yup — a great place to meet and connect and, certainly, reconnect with so many wonderful folks throughout the world, yes.

David:            Great! Well, I've been on your farm several years ago, on a tour, and I thought it was a pretty fascinating place. I wonder if you could give us a little bit of the history and describe your operation there.

Charlie:          All right. Well, we have a family farm that was founded by my brothers and I, and we've expanded now to the point where — we have a total of four brothers. I have two sons and a nephew, so we now have seven principals in the business. We have the agronomy portion of our business, where we crop 3,000 acres and we raise our young stock replacements. We milk 1,900 cows and have a biogas plant for capturing methane gas. Then we also have a farmstead cheese factory, which is a separate business located directly across the road from the farm. So, in a nutshell, we have a farm, a digester and a cheese factory.

David:            That sounds great.

Charlie:          Yeah, a lot of family, and a lot of employees involved, too.

David:            Yeah, that's nice.

Charlie:          It is. The family — not only the partners I've mentioned, but then we have some other family members that are employees. Our dad — although he's never been an owner of the business, he's here every day. Even though he's in his 90s, he helps with chores and mowing the grass and all those things that 90-year-olds do, so what a great journey it's been for him right here in Waterloo as well.

David:            And your dad had a farm when you guys were kids growing up, right?

Charlie:          That's right. My dad ran a farm that was owned by my grandmother, and he decided to quit farming when I was 19. And somewhat because of the times and somewhat because of his wisdom, he felt that it'd be better to get out of the way and let us farm our own business, not necessarily on his coattails, and that's what we did. So, now, 41 years later, we started with 43 cows, and we've grown up into the bigger numbers I just shared with you and brought in many more family members and resources along the way.

David:            Well, that's probably been a lot of fun and a lot of work and some serious challenges over 41 years, I would bet.

Charlie:          Yes, it has been. We've had, of course, the weather challenges that everyone has, and we have family challenges and relationship challenges like every relationship or family has, and we feel it's important to lean in and really embrace (each other) the very best that we can so that we can have those wonderful, lifelong relationships. And while not every day is warm and fuzzy, we do want to make sure we're in a point where we can share Thanksgiving dinner together without being encumbered in conversations and the like, so it's important to have a business that works not only for the family and the community and the environment, but it must, of course, work financially, too. If it doesn’t work on all of those factors, it becomes stressful for all involved, so we really work at that.

David:            All of those things that you just mentioned — you mentioned people and the environment and the economic factors — and those are, really, all the things that go into sustainability. I know that's a big focus for you guys, for you and your brothers. A lot of times, when people think about sustainability, they just think about the environmental aspect and trying to minimize our impact on the environment, so why don’t we start out and talk about that first, and tell me a little bit about your anaerobic digester and how it works and how you got that.

Charlie:          Well, we partnered with — another firm built it initially, and it didn’t quite pan out for them financially and with their corporate structure the way they had hoped.

                        In the meantime, though, it has produced a lot of power. The methane gas is captured every day in these tanks. Just to back up, if folks aren't familiar with a methane digester, we capture the manure from the farm, from the cows and the heifers, in our situation. We do add some substrate, which is a byproduct of industry, and together, they're warmed up to 100 degrees using excess heat off of an engine generator. So, the excess heat — just like we would capture the heat in our automobile to defrost our windows, for instance — is captured, and that's used to warm off the manure. So, we have two tanks of three quarters of a million gallons each, so that means we have a million and a half gallons of warm manure at 100 degrees, and that's at temperature. That's body temperature.

                        At that temperature, the bacteria will grow. It's got the food, it's got the moisture, and it's got the temperature. The bacteria is working in there, and it gives off methane gas and other gasses. The methane is captured and used to power a large engine. That large engine turns on an electric generator, which produces electricity, which is sold to the power company. So, there are three products off the digester every day: it's the sale of electricity to the power company; it's the excess heat off the engine, which helps keep the digesters the proper temperature; and it also helps us out on the farm for heating our buildings, such as the office, the shop, the hot water for the nursery, and even the farmhouse.

                        Then, the third product, or the revenue source, would be the manure fiber. After the manure goes through this digester and it comes out, it goes through a squeezer, a press that removes the fiber, and that manure fiber is then dried again using methane gas off the digester, and then we use that fiber for bedding the cattle on the farm. It's a very closed-loop system, but methane production is equivalent to a thousand gallons a day of diesel fuel in terms of BTUs, so it's a substantial amount of power, substantial amount of heat that's captured, and electricity and fiber.

                        The electricity, in theory, is enough power for the farm, the cheese factory and 300 homes. My little jingle that goes with this is, “The sun is shining, the river is flowing, and this produces totally renewable energy every single day,” and that it does. Unlike some systems, such as many of those in Europe, we use 100% byproduct, the manure or byproducts from other industries, to provide the tool for the digester. We do not raise any corn silage that would be fed directly to the digester or other energy sources fed directly to the digester. Everything is a byproduct. So, in a nutshell, we still have all the nutrients. We still have all the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, and those elements are tied to an elemental form, and they are located in the liquid manure, which we apply to the field.

                        For field application, we have a consistent manure product that's got some of that manure fiber removed, so it's much easier to agitate from the manure basin, and we can apply a good, even amount of liquid manure to our fields to meet our nutrient needs for our crops. So, we get a little better return on our manure application, as well as the other three products off the digester, and that's where I'm going to stop for now.

                        Not only is the digester important for our business, but really, it's what we do before we even get to the digester. Are we really conscious of our groundwater? How are we setting our wells, our water table? Are we conscious of our soil aggregates and what we're doing to build soil health? Are we conscious of our grazing procedures or our harvesting and our various types of erosion and cover crops and interseeding and all those factors that go into a successful agricultural and agronomic business?

                        Those are discussions we have had for many, many years, and we've realized it's important to really lean in on them, not just to rely on the laurels of saying, “Well, we have a lower carbon footprint.” Well, it's just part of it. What are we really doing to be leaders? Those are topics that our family takes very seriously. What can we really do to lead, in terms of sustainability, with our agronomy, our manure digester, recycling? How do we improve? I've even sat in on some meetings with sustainability leaders from the likes of Harley Davidson and Miller Brewing Company, and they like the farm story, but believe me, I like their stories, too, and I think we all can learn from each other, and that's where we want to be for our business, is really engaging with some of the very best. All right. I'll leave it there.

David:            Okay. Well, I think it's great that you mention (that) it's not just the carbon footprint. If we don’t keep our soil healthy or rebuild our soils that need help, and if we don’t keep our groundwater at a good level, then it's not going to matter if we solve our carbon footprint. We're still going to have some serious issues, and we won't be sustainable.

Charlie:          Absolutely. We participate in a community-based farmers’ and lake owners’ alliance, so rather than the lake owners saying, "Oh, our lakes are turning green" and the farmers saying, "We have a lower carbon footprint," there's a lot of unknown in that conversation. So, my son, myself and some of our other family members, we've engaged with some of the lake owners and the conservation groups in the area. We engage with some of the folks that might be considered, well, not quite tree-huggers, but pretty close to it, and share our story, and we learn from them what are other concerns. Are they viable concerns? Then, we, as farmers, in our case — our family, our business — what can we do to address those viable concerns? Those are topics we engage in and take action on.

                        Some of the action involves cover crops. It involves different forages for our livestock herd. It may involve using different hybrids so we can harvest earlier, maybe taking a bit of a reduction in yield, but then allowing us more time to get our nutrients prepped for the little crops, seeded — how do we do cover crops and handle manure? Last year, we did close to 30 million gallons of liquid manure. Well, that covers quite a few acres, so, indeed, if you're going to incorporate manure, cover crops, forages, grains, small grains, not only is it an investment financially and in time, but management — and you're dealing with Mother Nature, of course, too, so you really have to put on the thinking cap, leaning in on that. That's what we're up to, and I think that's where a lot of our industry is heading, thankfully.

                        It's not easy to say, “Yeah, we have lost perhaps more of our topsoil than we want to recognize.” Even though I'm a dairy farmer, yes, I totally have a fair amount of erosion compared to being just a crop farmer. I may not understand my soil bacteria to the level that I should. I may not understand the history of my soils the way I should. These are all topics that go on for years and years, but they do require rigor to make some headway in management and understanding — but it's a great place to be, though. It really is. It's a conversation we relish, so that covers part of the environment and the family that can pull that off. It involves being active in the community, whether it's in your local town or with the lake owners, so we've covered the sustainability portion there.

                        You've got to make a little money on it or you're going to disappear in a very painful manner, but we've been doing that for 41 years. We've been working at it, and we have a plan to continue on for more, so that’s good news. That's what makes me excited about even speaking at the conference or sharing that news with this podcast. As an old guy, I'm still excited.

David:            It is exciting. I think it's good that you're excited about talking to all the environmental groups and trying to understand their concerns because, in the process, when you're having a conversation with them, they're understanding what you guys do, and a lot of times, people don’t understand what farmers are doing, and that’s a dangerous thing.

Charlie:          It is. It really is. We've seen a lot of misperception in terms of where our food comes from and what's healthy for my family or my children or my community, and really, most of the fear is based upon ignorance, which has been very well-proven. Some of the concerns are definitely based upon lack of knowledge on the consumer side, but some of it is based upon lack of knowledge on our producer side as well. So, I think we, as producers, really need to learn to lean in, perhaps, more than we have. It would be one of my take-home messages as a producer: really step up to lean in with all the environmental actions that can be taken, not just one or two, but really lean in.

David:            Yeah, and in the long run, it's going to keep your farm profitable as well, so it's not just a matter of jumping through a hoop. I know that, probably, there are plenty of environmental regulations that might feel like just jumping through a hoop, but the things you're talking about — really looking at your soil health closely — that's so important for your long-term survival and all of our long-term survival. Talk a little bit about some of the conservation techniques that you use. You guys grow all your own forages, right? So, you really are crop farmers as well. What are some of the things you do to protect the soil and build up the microbial health of it?

Charlie:          Well, we really try to keep something green out there, growing, year-round. I long remember someone's quote that “if your soil is exposed, it's like having a hole in your fertilizer tank, and it's just leaking out, never to be recovered.” So, we think it's really important to keep some green growth out there. Learn to do a little better every year, whether it's with the cover crop blends, the seeding procedures, the manure applications onto the cover crops, the manure applications onto the fields, taking proper credits for all manure harvesting, yields, nitrogen efficiency ratios — all of those things all enter into our conversations.

                        At the harvest's end, it's important that you don’t feel losses. Preserve that feed well in the bunker silos. We've got a whole system of wrapping our silo walls in drain tile to remove any rainwater and keep our feed just at the very best quality that we can, keep down that feed shrink, and keep feeding to the cattle preservation there in the bunks — even the use of propionic acid so you have better feed conversion. For instance, in the summer, when the weather is hot and muggy, we apply propionic acid to our total mixed ration, and even though it would keep for a day in the mangers, by using propionic acid, 3% of the feed that the cows don’t eat is still good for the next day, and we're able to feed that back to the heifers and capture more of that feed value in our livestock. It's been working very well. Now, all of this is not revolutionary, but it does take commitment. It takes a feeding system. It takes training of employees. It takes monitoring of your feed and going into the storage, coming out where it's being fed. The amounts of feeds shrink every day, but you're in and you're out.

                        We've been proving that it works. Well, we might think of conservation as being all water waste, or grass and some fields. It's a whole variety of interaction, all the way from the soil microbes through the fields, through the harvest, through the preservation, the feeding, the financial management of all that. That's all part of the system we embrace here at the Crave Brothers; granted, we're not alone in the industry (in) doing that, but we need to be a leader at it, not just another producer doing the same old thing. That's where we're at, and it's a great place to be, too.

David:            That's awesome. Tell me a little bit about the — let's talk a little bit about the people aspect of sustainability, or the social part. What do you guys do to make sure that everybody has a good quality of life and they're not just working 90 hours a week, and they have time for their families?

Charlie:          Yeah, that's a great point. Well, we really try to give each of the partners an area where they can take a certain amount of responsibility and to provide them, too, with a budget, so they can have the help they need so they can get done at a decent time. For instance, we all know that a dairy farm such as ours, we milk three times a day, around the clock. Well, that means you need a good parlor manager. You need good training for the people that might be bedding the cows. They need good machinery. They need a place to store that machinery so it works every day. They need an opportunity to talk with the mechanic — and a mechanic that can respond. For instance, if their bedding wagon is not working, they (should be able to) get it fixed in short order so the cows can be bedded, and then the fellow doing that work can put in a decent day and go home at a respectable hour.

                        One of the things that separates our farm from many others is (that) we try and have most of the folks that work here — other than milkers or the nighttime crew — they would start between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. and go home in the afternoon, between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. Well, for a farm, for a dairy farm, those aren't paid hours. If we can go home at 5:00 p.m. and maybe have supper or get our lawn mowed and then have time in the evening to go to a ball game for our kids or a meeting at church or school board, that's not bad, especially when we think of when we were younger; you'd do well to be in the house by 7:30 or 8:00 at night and you still hadn't eaten supper.

                        So, it's been very much a focus on how to have the right people in the right places so we can all be successful. Try and take a day or a day and a half off or two days off every week, depending on the time of the year and the weather. That works. We take time and a half for about seven holidays a year. It helps to write a little incentive for folks to do a little extra work or sign up to do chores on those days. And, of course, it's only fair to them; their families have to make some sacrifices, too, so we want to be fair.

                        Has it been easy in the last few years, with lower milk prices? Absolutely not. We have some of the same conversations others do, but in the meantime, we're still getting our cows bred and producing good-quality milk and a lot other — having manure applied, all those things that go into every day without having the wheel fall off — and still get home at a decent hour at night, and that’s been a real focus. So, a sustainable workforce that can stick around, maybe work here for a generation — or two, even — that's important, and that's who we really want to be. We want to be a preferred employer, not just a default employer, and that can be said for many industries, but do you have a plan to be that preferred employer? Well, we do, using a lot of those things that I just described, and it's been working, thankfully.

David:            Yeah. That's great. That brings us, maybe, to the third part of sustainability, which is the economic aspect.

                        You can't do any of this if you're not profitable, and you mentioned some of the challenges, certainly, in the dairy industry. It can be really rough, and prices go up and down. You guys have insulated yourselves from that, to an extent, by having your own cheese factory, right?

Charlie:          Yes, we have. About 21 years ago, we undertook starting to spend time and money on investigating how to add more value to our farm, and we looked into doing more with what we had, such as: do we do more machinery work? Do we do more forage harvesting? Do we buy more land and raise corn and soybeans in addition to dairy cows? All those things, I think, enter into many, many conversations throughout the world and, of course, at the career.

                        Finally, we took a deep breath and decided to build a cheese factory here on our farm, not knowing much about it. We consulted with some folks throughout the industry and decided to build a cheese factory a hundred yards away from our milking parlor. So, we pump the fresh milk underground from the farm to the cheese factory and, from there, it's stored and pasteurized and used to manufacture award-winning cheeses. So, we really have a whole system of procedures and investments, financially and human-wise, in place that has allowed us to become a real leader in quality cheese production. We have primary products of fresh mozzarella and mascarpone. We do some other cheese curds and Oaxaca products, and we'd market those nationwide. We work with brokers and distributors in the food industry to get our product out and try to capture enough value to make it worthwhile of all our investment. So far, after 20 years, I'd like to say yes, it's been working.

                        One of the things I often point out is (that) I would hope that, for many of us, if we bought a farm 20 years ago, we would've had it paid off by now or made some pretty good headway on land improvements and such, and it's the same thing with the cheese factory. A lot of folks say, "Wow, I really like your cheese factory," but I just ask them to pause and reflect that, indeed, we have been at it for 20 years, and I would hope that, for 20 years, they would have some success with it, too, but now, it's been a great part of our family story: the farm, the digester and the cheese factory.

David:            Yeah. Do you think that's also helped keep the next generation involved in your operation?

Charlie:          I would think it has, yes, especially — I have a niece that probably would not be too interested in milking cows. While many families kind of enjoy some of the show cows or the registered portion of your business, it takes some real income to support the land purchases or building a cheese factory or a biogas plant, and the cheese factory has helped provide some solid financial returns, especially as the milk price has been soft. Yeah, it's been better than taking some of those wholesale prices that we've been receiving otherwise, so yeah, it has provided a lot of energy for the next generation, no doubt.

David:            All right. Well, thank you so much, Charlie. That was a great conversation. We've covered a lot of ground here. I really appreciate your time.

Charlie:          Well, you're welcome, David. If you're out this way again, get a hold of the Alltech folks, and I'd love to spend some more time with you.

David:            All right. I definitely will.

Want to learn about solutions for your dairy operation?

Just how different are pigs today compared to twenty years ago? Dr. Tom Rathje, chief technical officer at DNA Genetics LLC, discusses his work with advanced technology in the swine industry and how commercial swine genetics has and continues to increase sow productivity and improve litter size.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Dr. Tom Rathje. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm here today with Dr. Tom Rathje. He is the chief technical officer at DNA Genetics, the second-largest provider of swine genetics in the North American market. Thank you for joining me today, Tom.

Tom:               Well, I'm very pleased to be here. It's been a very enjoyable couple of days.

Kara:              Wonderful, wonderful. So, Tom, we're going to discuss today some advancements in swine technology within the industry. DNA Genetics has led the way in several different areas. Why don't you tell me a little bit about DNA Genetics and what your focus is as a company?

Tom:               Yeah, I'd love to. DNA Genetics had its roots back in 1995, actually, is when we first got started, so we've been in the industry a long time. We've grown, over that time period, from a company that hadn't even sold one pig in 1995 to the second-largest supplier today.

                        I think a couple of very unique things about our company is that we are producer-owned, and what that gives us is a unique perspective as a genetic supplier, because our owner is a pig producer and they are certainly the first to let us know if there are any issues that we need to be challenged with. I think that brings that constant feedback that we need as a genetic supplier, so our focus is really on producing the best pig. If you look at the way our company has grown, it's grown through people trying our product. They do their own trials and they make their own decisions based on the economics. There's not a lot of hype or sexiness with that, but it's all about performance, and I think that stems from, I guess, our outlook on the industry. We're here to serve the producer.

Kara:              And the producer wants a pig that will perform.

Tom:               That's right.

Kara:              So, in the 20-plus years that DNA Genetics has been producing quality stock, what have you seen evolve from the genetics side? How different is a pig from 20 years ago to today in the breeds you're using?

Tom:               I'll answer that second question first. Certainly, the breeds have evolved. On the maternal side, we're still really focused on the Yorkshire and Landrace as the two dominant breeds, but we've seen a significant shift in at least the North American industry, and I think it's starting to happen worldwide toward the Duroc as a terminal line. I think a lot of that stems from the emphasis on export markets (and) higher-quality porks, so the Duroc breed will bring that over some of the other breeds that are out there. We've seen that change, and we are in a great position to take advantage of that in our growth, because we have a Duroc line that not only brings that meat quality but excels in performance.

                        I would say, when I first started — of course, this dates me a little bit — but in the '90s, we were still focused on producing a leaner pig. That's when packers first began to pay for carcass quality and leanness. That's really kind of ended, almost. I would say that, for the most part, we're being told the pigs are lean enough today. We don't need to put increased emphasis on reducing back fat, but it's starting to shift a little bit toward, I would say, more quality-oriented traits, and also, perhaps, if you're running a plant yield and some of those types of things that we've never looked at before, so that's been a significant change.

                        Obviously, another one is sow productivity. We've been very successful in improving litter size. Even the talk I gave here at the meeting (ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference), we've improved litter size, and now, we need to get more of the pigs wean than we're already producing — so how does that shift our emphasis toward a quality of the pig that's being born, its ability to survive and thrive and go on to wean, and what type of a sow do we need to do that with? So, those are some of the big changes I've seen.

Kara:              Does DNA Genetics' AccuGain Genetics Program fold into this development over the years and focus on the new direction for pork production?

Tom:               I guess the way I would describe AccuGain is it's a commitment of our company to our customer, the producer. That program will, if you will, fold over the top of any type of trait or direction that we're going to go, so it's a commitment to having the discipline to implement the genetic program, measure the animals that we need to measure.

                        If I could elaborate on that in a minute, there aren't a lot of secrets in the genetic business. It takes large population size. There are no shortcuts to measuring the traits. For instance, birth weight is a trait. We've really looked hard, and that's part of our selection program, and you have to measure that on every pig. You can't do a litter; you can't do a few pigs here and a few pigs there. You have to commit to doing everything for every animal.

                        Really, AccuGain is that spirit of doing what it takes to produce the product, so whether it's collecting a phenotype, our database system called Helix that supports that, having the population size that we need. The larger your genetic nucleus, the more progress you can make, so we're committed to having a nucleus that's very competitively sized. All of those things wrap together at what AccuGain is all about. It's that commitment.

                        We use a lot of football analogies, and it's the blocking and tackling. You can have a great West Coast offense, you can have a great passer and receiver, but if you can't block and tackle, you're not going to be successful.

Kara:              Well, DNA Genetics produces one of the most widely used terminal lines in the swine industry. It influences over 40% of the (total) pork production. How does it feel for you to know that your company, that you've worked with for over 20 years, has this much influence on the pork industry?

Tom:               It's very humbling to think of the impact that that product has had, and it continues to grow. We, as a team, our company is really focused on teamwork and working together for the right outcome. I really believe that's a reflection of that effort to listen to our customer and produce the product that they need, and really, it's proof, if you will. The reason it's grown, as I mentioned earlier, is because people try the product. They evaluate it on their own economics and their own system, and it makes them more money. It makes them more sustainable. Again, it's very humbling. We want to continue to listen to our customers and make sure we're delivering what they need, but if I could point to the success of the product or the reason, those are it.

Kara:              You talked about the company being a family business, owned by families. It's based in Nebraska, and you've grown throughout North America. What is your goal on a global scale? How are you growing beyond North America?

Tom:               Well, our commitment with growth is that we're committed — our business is based in North America. As we've grown here, we have a commitment to our customers never to dilute their genetics or to grow beyond our means and ability to serve them, but having said that, we do have ambitions to continue to grow. We've started a business with a partner in Spain, so we have expanded there, and we'll certainly look at other opportunities around the world. We've moved into that one international market in Southern Europe. That's a new business. It's about a year and a half old, so it's just getting started, and we're excited to see what they're going to be able to do.

Kara:              Well, as with all industries, technology has an impact, and that is especially true in the swine industry with the advancements in genetics. Why is it still a big dream to reach both a large litter size and have (adequate) birth weight? You mentioned both of these genetic traits earlier, and some people might wonder why you can't achieve both easily.

Tom:               Well, there are challenges there. Litter size, in and of itself, is what we call a lowly heritable trait, so in order to make genetic improvement, you need to have large nucleus herds with lots of data, and you need to select those families accordingly, so it's taken us a long time. Litter size selection began in earnest, if you will, in the early '90s, and it's taken us a long time to build up the genetic potential that we see today. Today, we would have top producers that are capable of 17 and 18 pigs born alive on a pretty consistent basis. The talk that I gave today really addressed (the issue that) along with that litter size selection comes other challenges. As litter size goes up, on average, your pig birth weight goes down. That's highly related to survival.

                        Today, we're really in a situation with our top lines of having sows that produce enough pigs, but we really need to wean more of those pigs. We don't need more pigs. We need to wean more of what we already have. That's where birth weight comes into play. Litter size, to me, if I can make an analogy, is about what is the rate-limiting step. It used to be that pigs born was a rate-limiting step for a number of wean. I'd say, at least today, we're onto another rate-limiting step, which is quality and survivability, and we'll focus on that as well as some characteristics of the sow, like teeth count and milking ability, as well.

Kara:              So, it appears (that) you have more research on these traits you're trying to reach. Are there any other research objectives you have ahead? Where do you see swine production needs or challenges five years, ten years down the road?

Tom:               Well, I think one of the areas that is our customers' largest economic value trait — and, probably, largest loss — is just survival and mortality. As genetic suppliers, as a whole, we haven't paid a lot of attention to that. Typically, the herdabilities are nearly zero, so it's hard to find a place to make genetic improvement. I think, in the future, we'll be looking at, maybe, additional traits or additional ways or phenotypes that we can use to measure and find those animals that convey more robustness to our population's better survivability, so I would look for that (to) be coming. I would also look at the integration that's taking place between producers and packers. We saw packers move into hog ownership years ago. Now, we're seeing it go the other way as well.

                        Today, your average genetic suppliers — or most genetic suppliers — produce a pig that'll be essentially dropped off at the plant. I think that's going to change, where there'll be a value proposition for genetics within the plant down the road, so those are certainly areas that we need to be paying attention to. And then, of course, some of the other technologies that are exciting would be gene-editing, for example, to create animals that are resistant to various pathogens. Those technologies are really in their infancy. I would look for a number of years to go by before they're used routinely. I don't want to predict how many because, even today, we haven't figured out what the regulatory environment is, but there's certainly an exciting promise with some of that technology that will benefit the animals we work with, our customers, the producers and society as well.

Kara:              It looks like DNA Genetics has lots still to look forward to in the growth of the business and the growth of the industry, so we thank you for coming and sharing with us today.

Tom:               Thank you very much. I appreciate the time.

Kara:              This was Dr. Tom Rathje, the chief technical officer at DNA Genetics.

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Are you looking to improve the efficiency of your cattle? Studies have shown that organic trace minerals outperform inorganic minerals when it comes to cows and their calves. Dr. Anne Koontz, Alltech research scientist, discusses the benefits that organic trace mineral supplements can provide to the calf immune system and average daily gains, as well as how they affect cow fertility and reproductive efficiency in cattle.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Dr. Anne Koontz. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm joined today by Alltech research scientist Dr. Anne Koontz to discuss organic trace minerals in beef cattle. Thank you for joining me today.

Anne:             Thank you for having me.

Kara:              Anne, trace minerals: are they that secret weapon in our feed that everyone knows exist but we don’t fully understand what they do?

Anne:             I think we've always known the importance of trace minerals, but what we're really seeing, with new research that's coming out, is we're diving into things that we didn’t know they were doing for us, and we're seeing some benefits and really putting data to those benefits and understanding them a bit better.

Kara:              So, when you're talking about the benefits, what are the minerals specifically that we're talking about? And tell me about some of the benefits that they're providing to our animals.

Anne:             Right. When we're talking trace minerals, we're really talking about things like zinc, copper, cobalt, selenium — those minerals that are in very small amounts in our feeds. They get a little bit overlooked. We all toss them in, but really understanding the levels and the forms that are important is something new.

                        What we see with trace minerals is we've always known that you have to have them there at a certain level, and especially in beef cattle. We've gone, "Well, there are trace minerals in the grass, so I'm not going to worry about it too much," but there are a lot of surveys that are showing that trace minerals in the grass are actually at levels that aren't sufficient to really promote the benefits we know that trace minerals (provide that) are important for us — so immunity, health, metabolism and reproduction, which is really what I focused on recently.

                        When it comes to reproduction, we know that low amounts of trace minerals in the diets of our cattle can cause problems in both the bulls as well as the cows. When we're talking about cows, we're seeing issues like lower fertility. Pregnancy maintenance rates aren't as good; we get good conception rates, but it's that maintenance of pregnancy that we're finding, if we focus on the minerals, we actually get better pregnancy maintenance.

Kara:              So, you're saying that, when you're looking at different animals in the sense of calves versus mama cows versus your bulls, you really have to take that into consideration when you're looking at applying trace minerals to the feed.

Anne:             Absolutely. All of your animals are going to need trace minerals, but the levels and the amounts that they need are going to vary depending on their life stage — and especially when you're talking about your cows. They're going to need different levels of minerals when they're pregnant than when they're lactating and than when they're dry and waiting for that next calf to come to the ground. Their mineral needs fluctuate, and we need to take that into account, but always be aware that they do need minerals pretty much all the time.

Kara:              How do Alltech's organic trace minerals, Bioplex and Sel-Plex, hold up in the gut in regard to stability, and how are they used in the different animals like you're talking about — different stages of life or production?

Anne:             This is another one of those areas that's sort of cutting-edge, and we're really starting to see some new things coming out here, and the stability area is really interesting. What we're finding is that, both in premix situations as well as in the gut of the animals, organic minerals hold their form and shape far better than inorganic minerals. Inorganic minerals are bound to, generally, some sort of an ion, and once they hit the gut, they break apart from that ion, and then they have the ability to bind other things. They can bind up important parts of your diet or other minerals so they're no longer available to the animal, and so the nutrition ultimately becomes less in that diet.

                        With the organic minerals, they don’t break apart and rebind and that sort of thing, and so, they're more stable and they're more available. When we really look at the availability as far as the bioavailability, what we find is that organic minerals can be as much as 130–200% more available than a sulfate form, and even more than that, from an oxide form of a mineral. So, we're able to use organic minerals at lower levels in the diet but get the same benefits, or use them at the same level and get higher benefits when we might be addressing a subclinical deficiency where we didn’t realize we had a deficiency because we didn’t see any outward effects of it, but the animal has the ability to respond to that slightly more available or slightly higher level of mineral in the diet.

Kara:              So how is this used on the farm, and how are farmers embracing this transition, possibly, from using inorganic — which I know has been used for years — to the organic minerals and more natural solutions in their production?

Anne:             The feedback from farmers has been incredibly positive, and it mirrors what we've seen in research. We've had research on this from the early '90s in bits and pieces, where we did larger-scale research looking at other issues but we just happened to collect a little bit of reproductive data on the side.

                        Starting about a year and a half ago, I started pulling out those bits and pieces of reproductive data and putting them all together in a response to a question we had from our sales team. What we found is that we could do this consistently through all these bits and pieces of trials over the last 30 years. Then, when we took those bits and pieces and said, “This is what we've been able to do with reproduction as far as increasing calving rates, increasing pregnancy maintenance and, ultimately, affecting calf production from the cows that were fed those organic trace minerals with higher weaning rates and higher feed liveweight gains,” that was quite exciting to our sales team and to our customers.

                        When we took it out into the field to the customers, the customers were reporting back exactly the same things we saw in university research trials. They're reporting back higher pregnancy rates, higher conception rates to AI (artificial insemination). They're reporting back that their heifers are reaching puberty earlier, so they're ultimately calving earlier in their life span. So, we're shortening the non-productive time of these animals on the farm, and that's very exciting for us, and it's very exciting for the consumers, because anytime the animal is not productive — if they're slow to cycle back during the breeding season and slow to get pregnant again, or if your heifers aren't reaching maturity until later in their life — you're feeding an animal that's not ultimately bringing you back any money on the farm. So, if we can shorten that time period that we're feeding unproductive animals, we're saving farmers money. We're ultimately getting closer to that beef production gold standard of one calf per cow per year.

Kara:              So, saving money, healthier cattle — these are all things farmers are looking for when they're looking at feed, when they're looking at production. What are some other things that you believe, as you continue your research, (you) are going to find in using trace minerals? And not just using — we've always used trace minerals, but using the organic trace minerals, and as you learn more about them — are there other things on the horizon that you're excited about or you think you're going to see?

Anne:             There are some things I'm particularly excited (about) and am hoping to start looking at a bit more deeply. One of the things that keeps coming back to us is that, within the beef industry, as I said before, we don’t have an issue with conception rates. Our cattle are incredibly fertile. We get 95% or greater conception rates. What we do see as an issue is early pregnancy loss. There's some data out of Fort Keogh with Dr. Gary in Montana that says 25% of those cattle that conceive lose pregnancy before 28 days. So, it's that very first bit, where we didn’t maybe quite realize they were pregnant, so we thought maybe they didn’t conceive — but what he's saying is, it's not the conception; it's that early pregnancy loss in the first 28 days.

                        So, what some of the research we have at Alltech has shown is that we're getting better pregnancy rates from AI in beef cattle, and we're getting fewer services per conception in dairy cattle, which is the same way of looking at something, but looking at it from a different angle. So, what I firmly believe is that those two numbers are showing us that we're getting better maintenance of pregnancy during that first 28 days, so I'd really like to get a chance to dive deeper into that and really specifically look at that in some of our research.

                        The other thing that's particularly interesting to me going forward is taking this to some of our purebred and AI systems and looking at embryo, flushing an embryo quality on that side of the beef industry. We've got some very preliminary data there from the field, where people have used this, that shows we're getting better embryo quality, more transferable embryos and things like that out of these embryo-flushing situations, so I'd like to dive a bit deeper into that and see what we can do on that side as well.

Kara:              That's exciting. I know that your area of specialty is with beef cattle. Do you work with dairy cattle as well?

Anne:             I do. I actually work with pretty much any species.

Kara:              Okay. Well, that's what I was going to ask. What you're learning from beef cattle, and utilizing organic trace minerals in beef cattle — are you also doing research or are there researchers at Alltech looking at this in other livestock?

Anne:             There absolutely are. A lot of the research that I was able to find when I started looking into this, and seeing what we already had in our databases, came from the dairy industry, and so, we've seen this consistently in the dairy industry. We can see this consistently in the beef industry. There are some indications that we see something very similar in the swine industry. Poultry is a little bit funny because eggs are a bit different than a pregnancy, but on the pig industry, what we're really seeing is that we're getting heavier birth weights, we're getting more pigs per litter, and those pigs are thriving more after birth when the sows are fed Bioplex minerals.

Kara:              Trace minerals (are) maybe not a secret weapon, per se, since we've always used them, but maybe it's the organic and natural direction that is something that's going to make a difference to producers down the road.

Anne:             I think that's accurate.

Kara:              Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Anne.

Anne:             Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Kara:              This was Dr. Anne Koontz, Alltech research scientist.

Have a question or comment?

Better lighting, nutrition and air quality can greatly contribute to alleviating many of the health issues we commonly witness in poultry production. How can we implement these modern poultry housing system enhancements across the industry to improve the quality of the birds in a sustainable way that also conserves energy? Dr. Brian Fairchild, poultry scientist at the University of Georgia, discusses housing designs and current marketing trends in broiler house management.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Dr. Brian Fairchild. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm here today with Dr. Brian Fairchild, a professor and extension poultry scientist with the University of Georgia. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Fairchild.

Brian:             Thank you.

Kara:              I'd love to know what inspired you to pursue a research career in poultry management and science.

Brian:             Well, that's kind of a long story, but I grew up on a poultry farm. We only had one two-story house in North Carolina. My dad was working for Holly Farms at the time in the processing plant as an assistant plant manager. My grandmother worked there on the debone line, and so when I went to school, I had the intentions of being a veterinarian, but along the way, I started working in a turkey physiology lab and discovered the world of research and education and working with students and growers and just changed my career path down that avenue.

Kara:              So, you really enjoy that interaction with the farmer and with your students and sharing with them about the poultry industry.

Brian:             I do. As a matter of fact, a good week is if I'm on farms two or three days a week.

Kara:              That's wonderful. That really ties into your interest in broiler management. Explain how your research has led to looking at the operations of housing impacts on the success of a poultry farm.

Brian:             The goal of our research at UGA — there's a team; it's myself, Michael Czarick, who is an ag engineer, and we’ve got our students that work in our lab, a series of grad students. Our goal is to improve poultry house environments and conserve energy. All of the techniques that we've been trying to do, over the last 20 years that I've been involved with (it), have been to try to come up with techniques that are relatively low-cost to implement and give a quick return on investment while making that house energy-efficient. So, what we're trying to do is improve the environment for the bird but, at the same time, conserving as much energy as we can, since the growers, in most cases, are paying for those utilities.

Kara:              Bottom-line is always a big issue for the farmer, as we all know. When you're looking at operations of a poultry house, one of the things that I've always read about and actually experienced is, of course, we all need healthy fresh air, but there are other components that are critical in the operations of a poultry house: fresh air, heat, air movement. Why are these so important, and how can farmers take existing housing and maybe make improvements and incorporate these in to make a house more efficient and conserve energy and make a better environment for the birds as well?

Brian:             Well, those are correct. The temperature is obviously — I think people have really focused on that, and we do a very good job of meeting very specific temperature profiles during the life of that flock, but we do not do a very good job of controlling the relative humidity. We need to really have specific goals for relative humidity and try to hit those just as accurately as we do with our temperatures to improve that environment for the flock, because the relative humidity and the litter quality or the bedding material quality is going to be directly related; the higher the relative humidity, the more damp your floor conditions will tend to be. That can lead to footpad lesions. It can lead to higher microbial activity, more challenges, higher ammonia output — again, a challenge to the birds.

                        What we're trying to do is just minimize those challenges that that bird has to face so that it doesn't have to use its resources to alleviate the environment or alleviate a stress. What we're trying to do is to have all those resources, the energy it's taking in from feed, (go) to growth and development, whether it's broilers for meat production, breeders for hatching egg production or layers for table egg production.

Kara:              Well, of course, weather and different seasons can impact that. I know that there are amazing apps out there now for farmers so that you don't have to be in the house every moment to read the changes. Can you tell me a little bit about your research and, possibly, research that you've done and others have done there at the University of Georgia to address these concerns and develop technological approaches to helping farmers?

Brian:             What we do is we scan the different technology areas to identify tools that can be implemented at the farm level, economically and efficiently, and provide a payback for that return on investment for that grower.

                        We're just out constantly looking for new ways to implement this. Now, what's happening right now is we're seeing technology prices come down to a level now that agriculture is really starting to use it. We're getting into precision farming and other types of agriculture when it comes to road crops, so now, we're starting to see more opportunities for implementation of these technologies there. The environmental controller companies have got a whole host of environmental monitoring opportunities there for people to use, whether it's putting (in) a laptop or a PC and connecting that wirelessly to the houses so that they can look at that when they're in their office or sitting at home. Most of them now have got some kind of a phone app that will communicate wirelessly as well, and they can see temperatures. They can even make changes to their house settings based on what they're seeing on their phone.

                        What we've done along those lines — back to our whole ventilation, relative humidity and ventilation rates to control moisture — is we developed our app called the Chkminvent. Unfortunately, it's only available on iPhone, but basically, it's a moisture-balance calculator where you can plug in the amount of water that that bird is consuming that day, and it will calculate, based on the inside temperature and relative humidity targets, the outside temperature and relative humidity, and the amount of fan power that you're using to ventilate that day on how much you need to run that fan, so they can get a better hone-in on a more precise and accurate way of controlling that moisture.

                        I use that a lot of times. I keep it on my phone. I've got it on my iPad. When I'm doing farm visits and I see that somebody is not ventilating enough, I use it a lot of times to plug in those current conditions that we're standing in right then and there to show them that maybe we need to increase those ventilation rates 10%, 15% or whatever it needs that day.

Kara:              How have farmers been responsive to this new technology? I know (that), sometimes, farmers have a tendency to not adapt as quickly. Some jump on the bandwagon right away. Where are the challenges you see facing the adaption of this technology in the poultry industry?

Brian:             Actually, it's amazing how quickly they'll adapt. If it's something that will make their lives a little easier and give them more feedback — because, ideally, they would be visiting those houses every hour throughout the day, but we all know that's physically and logistically not possible for many people, so having that phone there and having those apps and those ways of looking to see what's going on inside of those houses on a more consistent basis throughout the day, throughout the week, is really going to give them the incentive to implement this. A lot of them surprise me when I go out and visit, how many people pull out their phone, or we go sit down in their office, which is very close to the houses, and they'll bring up a PC and we'll just start looking at data.

Kara:              So, this not only helps them save time; it also is an energy-conservation approach to handling your poultry house operations, correct?

Brian:             Yes. It could help with that, because if they're seeing something going on, they can fix it much quicker than waiting several hours to find out that an inlet got stuck opening and you have a heater that's running constantly, so you could see these little blips pop up on your phone — and they're going to get more sophisticated in the future. As these companies develop algorithms and they collect more data, they're going to be able to do better predictions of when there's something going on and be able to notify that grower of an alarm that something's not right and you need to go down there and figure out what's going on.

Kara:              And this all comes back to the bottom line because, when you can address issues quickly, you save money in the long run, and it also impacts the health of the bird.

Brian:             Which means a better, bigger return —

Kara:              — for the farmer, and that is always a positive. With your work in extension and getting out on the farm, how do you see ways that we can implement these poultry housing improvements and operational improvements across the industry to better improve the quality of the birds and the success of our farmers?

Brian:             That's a tough question because there are a lot of factors that are involved, from economics. All of these things are going to have a different investment, and people are going to be looking to see, "Okay, if I invest this much, how long is it going to take me to see a return or recoup that investment?" That's one factor that's going to be going into this. Others (are) going to be education, in a way — being able to demonstrate and help those people understand how this can help them improve their operation, improve their bird performance and, ultimately, their bottom line.

I know we've been saying how much it's going to help the grower. It will help the grower, but it's also going to help the companies as well, because the more efficient those birds are, the more efficient they are at converting feed into muscle, into bird. So, with that being our most expensive input into the live production side nowadays, companies are going to be just as interested in this. The integrators are going to be just as interested in this as those farmers are.

Kara:              Well, we are lucky to have research specialists and extension specialists like yourself that are willing to work with our farmers and work with our companies to address these issues. Where do you see your research going a few more years down the road?

Brian:             We are moving into trying to tie what the bird — that effective temperature. The effective temperature is what that bird actually is feeling. It's a combination of all the environmental factors that include air temperature, relative humidity, air movement, bird density. All of these things come together and affect that bird body temperature and what the bird is actually feeling.

                        So, what we've been doing and will continue to do over the next couple of years is trying to measure the actual bird body temperature in relation to those different environmental things — controlling the humidity better, doing a better job at keeping the birds evenly distributed, just do those types of management things. The other thing that we're working at is we're still looking at new technologies. We're going to start our third test farm with variable-speed fans to look and see how those can be implemented into broiler production or poultry production in general to conserve energy.

Kara:              Well, that is wonderful, and best of luck to your future research. Thank you so much for joining me today. This was Dr. Brian Fairchild, professor and extension poultry scientist from the University of Georgia. Thank you.

Brian: All right.

Want to learn how you can improve your poultry housing?

What does it take to build a healthy, synthetic salmon gut? When it comes to fish nutrition, a lifetime of health and performance can be greatly influenced by the early stages of the gut microbes. Dr. Martin Llewellyn and Raminta Kazlauskaite of the University of Glasgow are creating new ways to improve sustainable fish feed and drug stability for salmon aquaculture farming with SalmoSim .

The following is an edited transcript of Tom Martin’s interview with Dr. Martin Llewellyn and Raminta Kazlauskaite. Click below to hear the full audio.

Tom:              We're entering a new frontier in fish nutrition and among those conducting cutting-edge research in the field are Dr. Martin Llewellyn, a research scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and PhD candidate Raminta Kazlauskaite. Llewellyn, author of over 50 peer-reviewed research articles, has expertise in salmonid parasitology and nutrition. Kazlauskaite's focuses are in the fields of bioengineering and molecular biology, and together, they have been working on creating an in vitro system replicating the Atlantic salmon gut. They call it SalmoSim and they're here to talk to us about it. Thank you for joining us.

Martin:            It's nice to be here.

Raminta:        Thank you.

Martin:            Thanks for having us on.

Tom:              What is the problem that you set out to address resulting in the development of SalmoSim?

Martin:            Atlantic salmon are a funny old fish. They're a carnivore and we don't farm many carnivores, so there's a big problem around sustainability of salmon feed, as well as its price because what you have to do to feed a salmon is you have to go out -- when we first started farming salmon, we'd have to go out and catch an awful lot of wild fish, grind it up, and feed that to the salmon.

                        These days, things are changing quite a lot. We're feeding new feeds to salmon all the time with a focus on insect-based, plant-based feeds including things like soy, gluten, protein. What this means is we're basically challenging the salmon gut every time with things it's not entirely used to. There are so many different feed additives in different protein sources out there on the market that there's an awful lot of in vivo testing. That means testing of salmon to see what they're happiest on, what they're healthiest on, what they grow best on.

                        Essentially, we've built this system to act as a pre-screening tool because these trials are really expensive and there aren't many places that do them, so it's a massive bottleneck. You're looking at estimates for a single trial of around £150,000, maybe $200,000 just to try a couple of different ingredients in the sea cage to see whether your fish are going to perform well on your feed. What we've developed the system for, as well as to do pure science because we're from the University of Glasgow, we're not strictly a commercial entity, but as well as doing pure science, we'd like this system to be a useful way for people to triage or pre-screen, so you come with ten different alternatives or ten different ingredients and be able to narrow that down to two that then take on to a trial in real salmon and reduce the cost of the whole process of getting from these new feed ingredients, new additives that people dream up in the lab all the way through to having the right feeds to bring up healthy, happy, productive fish.

Tom:              What are you seeing in terms of cost savings?

Martin:            At this stage, we're right at the beginning. We know that we could do it substantially under the cost of a current feed trial but where ours doesn't completely replace a feed trial in vivo. It's one of these things that's kind of like for like cost saving. It's hard to estimate that. I don't quite know what that is at this stage, but it's likely to be very substantial just because the cost of what we need to do in the lab is just really a tiny fraction of the cost of what people have to pay for these in vivo trials.

Tom:              This technology is created in vitro. Do you want to tell us more? Raminta, do you want to talk about that?

Raminta:        Yeah. What we do, we literally just transfer all the salmon gut inside the lab. We have three bioreactors, but they represent three different salmon gut pieces, stomach, pyloric cecum, and midgut, so it's similar to us humans like stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. What we do, we literally just take bacteria from these three different gut compartments and transfer them into three bioreactors or jars and then we set the right conditions and we get it running.

Tom:              I was going to ask you what it looks like in the lab, but I guess you've just described that.

Raminta:        Yeah. Literally we have a feed bottle. We have three bioreactors and then we have waste and it's continuously going. In other words, we just use SalmoSim to produce really expensive salmon poo.

Tom:              Okay. If you could expand on that and give us an idea in a practical sense how this tool is used.

Martin:            First, I'll tell you what a bioreactor is. A bioreactor is like a very fancy fermentation vessel and a lot of the people that we work with at the University of Glasgow work on anaerobic digestion of food waste. All the stomach is essentially is an anaerobic digestion tool, so we've taken that same technology of these closed units where you can change the pH and monitor the pH, change the temperature, monitor the temperature.

                        We're putting in enzymes directly extracted from salmon. Also, we're putting in the microbial communities the bacteria, as Raminta says. What we would do when we get a new feed, what we tend to do is stabilize the system on a feed, our control feed, and then change the feed and then essentially begin to introduce that into the system, which is essentially grinding it up, feeding it through the pipes, and beginning to take it into this three-compartment model, so it'll go into the stomach. It'll be exposed to these different pHs, enzymes, and then it'll get transferred into the pyloric cecum. Again, there'll be different pH, different enzymes it's going to get exposed to, the microbes as well, and then moving on to the midgut. It'll get exposed there.

                        If we're looking at drug stability, let's say we were taking one of these sea lice drugs, and quite often, some of them are in-feed, some of them aren't in-feed, but with an in-feed one, you absolutely want to make sure that it's not getting released in the stomach, so there's very little absorption that happens in the stomach in Atlantic salmon. Most of the absorption happens in the pyloric cecum. If your capsules, if you like, if your microcapsules you've absorbed your drug onto are releasing all that drug and the drug is potentially getting degraded inside your stomach compartment then really you're losing a lot of efficacy with the delivery of your drug dose. So what you want to do is make sure that the highest pharmacologically relevant concentrations of the drug are in the pyloric cecum. Again, we could take various different combinations of the drug, maybe try them alongside different kinds of feeds, for example, and see which feed combination or encapsulation combination delivers the best dose of drug to where we want it to get it to. That's I guess an example of how --

Tom:              So that's the ultimate holy grail that you're going for?

Raminta:        No. We look at [0:07:03] [Indiscernible] stability hopefully, as well as probiotic survival in different gut compartments and how do we affect bacterial communities, VFA analysis.

Martin:            Certainly, anything that you want to do to a real fish, we can give you a sort of an early warning system to rank the different possibilities in order of their likely efficacy in an in vivo model.

Tom:              How could a greater understanding of these processes reveal pathways to improve growth efficiency of fish fed on plant-based diets?

Martin:            Lots of different ways. The first and most obvious way is I think probably digestibility, so just how readily large complex organic molecules like protein is broken down into smaller organic molecules like amino acids and then presumably absorbed by the fish.

                        The slightly further on the line things are the impacts on the microbiome. So at the moment, we could detect whether there was a significant perturbation in the microbial communities by bringing in sort of a plant-based feed. The science is less developed there, but if you're shifting your microbial communities away from a stable, potentially complex microbial community to one microbial community dominated by a small number of microorganisms, that's normally a bit of a red flag. Those types of communities are normally more easily invaded like pathogens, for example. There are also other things beyond digestibility related to the microbial composition of the gut that I think we can predict with our system in relation to what happens if you feed them on a soy meal-based feed certainly for plant protein. That's the main thing.

Raminta:        For feed, yeah.

Tom:              Alltech as a leading agricultural biotechnology company has been making important inroads into the aquafeed sector. What is the company's connection with this research that you're conducting?

Martin:            We were dreaming this idea up about three years ago. There's a guy called John Sweetman and someone else called Philip Lyons and these guys have both been working in aquaculture for a long time. I was interested in this initially as a tool to understand what are the ecological processes that underpin microbial community assembly, so why are microbiomes like what they are from a pure academic perspective, but talking to these guys at actually this kind of conference where industry and academia are brought together and you get these lovely link-ups and explosive, potentially explosive, disruptive combinations then we got to talking about this. They were enthused. They saw potentially some of the early promise for some of the applications I've just described to you, so Alltech very kindly funded a PhD student, and that's Ruminta.

                        Yeah, Alltech have been really a major catalyst for actually getting this idea off the door and brought it into reality. Ruminta actually made that reality happen. I never believed we'd get as far as we have today. It's all Ruminta's hard work.

Tom:              I'm really interested in something you just said too about this conference and how it brings together industry and academia. Have you seen sparks fly this time?

Martin:            Yes. Certainly, I've had some interesting conversations around the place and you can see interesting conversations are being had I think across all different sectors. I'm really pleased to see there's increasing people talking about sustainability in livestock production that's all the way from agriculture to chickens and beef, et cetera. I'm particularly impressed by how far and how much industry is recognizing that as important with an aquaculture session, so I sit within my aquaculture sessions, having sat with a few other sessions and I really think we in aqua -- I don't want to blow our trumpet too much, but we're really thinking about is what we're doing sustainable.

                        We've got these brilliant feed conversion ratios compared to huge amounts of other -- we're down at FCRs of 0.8 whereas poultry, I don't know, but they're around 3. We're talking about ingredients, where are they coming from. We can't rely on marine protein, so there's a real environmental responsibility, I think, that is there in the aqua sessions and I really hope it's building in the other sessions too. I think there's been lots of really good open discussion around that here, which is being really encouraging, I think.

Tom:              Yeah. I think it's safe to say that sustainability has quickly become something of a watchword or a guide star for [0:12:04] [Indiscernible] our clients.

Martin:            Yeah, that's right.

Tom:              What's beyond this research? Are there uses for this technology in other species, do you think?

Martin:            Yeah.

Raminta:        Definitely. It's just time to validate and to see what is happening inside of a SalmoSim or other species that are representative of what happens in real fish, so just time and money, yeah, but it's definitely, definitely possible.

Martin:            Yeah. We've taken about two years to get this far with Atlantic salmon, but we've learned an awful lot along the way, so I do think it is transferable, but like Ruminta says --

Raminta:        It just takes time.

Martin:            It takes time, yeah.

Raminta:        And some resources, yeah.

Martin:            Yeah. You could apply it to tilapia. You could apply it to trout, just a bit of time, a bit of resource, and demand really.

Tom:              Dr. Martin Llewellyn, a research scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and PhD candidate Raminta Kazlauskaite.

I want to learn more about aquaculture nutrition and management.

With new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning expanding into all industries, agriculture has an opportunity to become more efficient. TERRA NutriTech, an Ireland-based startup, is using these technologies to eliminate waste and ensure accurate mineral delivery through water systems to boost farmer’s profits by reducing labor.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Padraig Hennessy. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              I'm here today with Padraig Hennessy, co-founder and CEO of TERRA NutriTECH, one of the Pearse Lyons Accelerators presenting at ONE19 (The Alltech Ideas Conference). In 2012, he founded TERRA NutriTECH with his brother, Tom. Tell me a little bit about TERRA NutriTECH and how it got its start.

Padraig:         We have a sister business and we started out about 12 years ago. In that business, we designed and installed water systems on farms. Through that, a lot of customers kept coming to us, asking, "You guys are in water. Have you got a better way to put minerals and supplements into the water system?" Eventually, a handful of people asked us that we start looking around the world and looking for what systems are out there. We have three components that we have to have: it was precision, it needed to be automated and it needed to be easy.

                        We couldn't find any system out in the world that had all of those elements for us, so we coupled together some existing technology and we launched about five and a half years ago now up to this stage, and that's how we initially began — a very, very slow start, testing the market out to see, is there really a market here, and we literally, every year, kept doubling the size of the business. More and more customers are coming, on and on and on, and it was a fantastic start. That really got us going in the market. From that, then, we realized that the technology needed a big upgrade and we needed to bring it in to the 21st century, utilizing artificial intelligence, IoT — again, making the data easily readable for farmers. That was always key for us.

Kara:              With the AI, how have you really brought that into the system and innovated it to help meet the farmers' needs?

Padraig:         One of the key drawbacks with putting minerals into the water systems was variations in water consumption, so we've developed machine learning effectively in our system where we're constantly monitoring animal water intake, and an advanced algorithm that we've developed changes the concentration levels to ensure exact dosage each and every day per animal. That's the main component. We've got further iterations to come down along the track, where we can start becoming predictive of what the farmer will need via supplements, looking at water consumption, looking at weather, looking at animal life cycle. I'm helping them to become predictive rather than reactive.

Kara:              How have the farmers adapted to this technology? Is it something that is easy for them to use, or have you seen the challenges with that?

Padraig:         No. I grew up in a farm, and so I know exactly what farmers want, to be honest. My dad would've been a very traditional farmer. He actually would've started — when my dad first started farming, it would've been with a horse and plow, so I knew exactly what farmers needed. What farmers need is something that's robust and easily used; we always had that mindset when we were designing everything. Really, systems have to be hands-off, from the farmers' perspective. Systems just need to work. If they need to do something with it, it needs to be really, really easy, so we always develop it with that in mind. Many of our customers are completely hands-off with our system. They call us up if they need something or need to change something. With our new app, now, it's literally (you just have to) open it up. If five animals have left the herd, they can just decrease the herd number by five and ensure precision dosing continues.

Kara:              So, it's all based on the app then.

Padraig:         Yes, a controller on-farm with our technology. So, the way our technology works is water first goes through a water meter. It's connected to our computer controller, so we're constantly monitoring the water intake. Exact herd numbers and exact data requirements of minerals are inputted either on the controller or on our app, and both communicate to each other. Then, on any given day, we can dose in. Let's just say there are 434 animals and there are 10 grams of supplements needed for each. That's 4.34 kg, and that's exactly what we will put in on that day, so it's highly, highly accurate. If ten animals go off and there are only 433 tomorrow, then, tomorrow, we put in 4.33 kg, so it's always precision of what we do.

Kara:              So, along with ease, how does this impact the farmers' bottom line? Because that is always a concern.

Padraig:         That is the concern. You can make great technology, and there's loads of good high-tech coming out, but it's hard to see how it will impact the bottom line. With our system, (a) there's no waste, so you completely eliminate waste, and (b) with the accuracy, you're ensuring Cow Number 99 out of 100 will get the same concentration, the same level of supplements, as Cow Number One. Therefore, the uptake and the health of each and every animal is maximized, so there's better calving. There's better fertility. There's less lameness, overall, healthier animals. That is what will impact the bottom line. All would reduce labor.

Kara:              How many farms, would you say, have introduced this technology into their operations to date?

Padraig:         Currently, we are only operational in Ireland, and we're just about to launch internationally, so we have about 350 farms using this technology to date, and we're still growing very, very quickly. We have a customer retention rate of about 98% every year, so when somebody switches on our system, they stay on our system, because they just find it so easy and they're getting the results to back it up.

Kara:              Now, you presented at the Pearse Lyons Accelerator. What was this experience like, and how did you come across this opportunity?

Padraig:         I originally saw the opportunity about two years ago, when the accelerator was first launched, and it interested me then. We were still in the midst of developing our technology, so it was a bit early for us. So, when we applied this year, I obviously knew who Alltech was. I'm in the nutrition space, and I realized it could be a huge opportunity for us to introduce our technology to a much, much wider audience.

                        Really, participating in the accelerator has far exceeded my expectations. Actually, I was blown away by the resources and the time that all of the Alltech senior management put into it. Literally, I don't think they could've been more helpful to us. It's really been just an absolutely fantastic experience for us, and not only that, but interacting with the other participants on the accelerator as well opens up your mind to other technologies and potential collaborations down the road. None of us are in competition. We can all help each other in our paths, and that's a fantastic opportunity to have.

Kara:              Speaking of your path, where do you see TERRA NutriTECH in the next five to ten years? How do you hope to grow the company?

Padraig:         We're going to grow internationally. Currently, we're talking to nutrition companies in New Zealand, France, the U.K. and the USA about utilizing our technology in ruminants, in poultry, in swine. The system we've developed is the most accurate system on the market now. It's the only mineral-dispensing system that will allow supplement companies a viewpoint inside the farm gate. So, because of that and because of the data we're generating and the insights we're generating on-farm, we see huge opportunities, and we really do expect rapid expansion.

Kara:              Are you using this data for other research with other companies or with scientists at this time?

Padraig:         At this time, no, but we will shortly be going down (that path), because it's a way to prove the efficacy of a product. If a product is going in and you know there are a hundred farmers using it, then you can start to actually look at the data behind it. Are they improving milk? Are they improving yield? Are they improving health? So, we can actually start to get down deep into that data to ensure that the products that are released are what they're supposed to be.

Kara:              Thank you so much for your time today. This is Padraig Hennessy, co-founder and CEO of TERRA NutriTECH.

Padraig:         Thank you very much.

Padraig Hennessy spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference (ONE). Click here to learn about ONE and how you can access innovation on demand.

As consumer demand for antibiotic-free beef increases, we must consider the possibility of a future without antibiotics. What role does nutrition play in responsible antibiotic use and efficacy? Should we be more concerned about antimicrobial resistance in animals? Dr. Brian Lubbers, director of clinical microbiology at the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Library, shares his perspective on the future of antibiotic use and the challenges producers are facing.

The following is an edited transcript of Tom Martin’s interview with Dr. Brian Lubbers. Click below to hear the full audio.

Tom:              The use of antibiotics raises all sorts of issues, including a future without them, as antibiotic resistance continues to outpace the search for a solution. In the meantime, there are consumer concerns and pressures and questions about the role of nutrition in responsible antibiotic use. What about vaccine efficacy? What about the role of the Alltech Nutrigenomics product, Actigen, in improving antibiotic efficacy?

                        Here to talk about these issues is Dr. Brian Lubbers, director of the clinical microbiology section of the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. His teaching and research interests include antimicrobial stewardship and therapy, antimicrobial resistance and the application of antimicrobial susceptibility testing in food animals. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Lubbers.

Brian:             Thank you.

Tom:              Let's first talk about this race to get ahead of antibiotic resistance. Who's ahead in that, us or them?

Brian:             History has told us repeatedly that, whenever we develop a new antimicrobial, that bacteria will adapt and change, and they will find ways to become resistant to those treatment therapies we have.

Tom:              So, it's a never-ending chase.

Brian:             It's a never-ending chase.

Tom:              How does the problem of antibiotic resistance present in livestock, and what's the impact on production?

Brian:             It's actually something that probably doesn't get as much attention as it should. I think, from the agricultural perspective, when we talk about antimicrobial resistance, we hear a lot about the implications of using antibiotics in agriculture and how that causes issues for resistance in human pathogens. My laboratory actually does testing on bacterial pathogens and livestock, and we have seen a trend over the last few years that shows that the bacteria that are of interest to us — particularly Mannheimia haemolytica, which is one of the bacteria that causes bovine respiratory disease or pneumonia — we are seeing increasing rates of resistance in that particular bacteria.

Tom:              Are producers sensitive to consumer concerns about the use of antibiotics in dairy and beef cattle?

Brian:             I think the whole industry understands those concerns. That's a very challenging position for both producer and veterinarian, when you're asked to consider a use in an animal that may potentially lead to resistance down the road. I certainly understand those consumer concerns, because that equation changes dramatically if I'm the person that has that infection. So, I do think the industry is aware of it. We're trying to find ways to address those concerns, and that really is antimicrobial stewardship.

Tom:              What kinds of challenges do producers face when they're trying to respond to this consumer awareness and concern?

Brian:             I think one of the challenges is simply understanding how we use antimicrobials in food animal production. There are a lot of misconceptions around that concept. I think there are also challenges to things that we're being asked to, and what I see as trends in the future — things we'll be asked to do in the future certainly come with some challenges as far as adopting technologies, how we'll implement those technologies effectively in a way that we will not probably ever completely get away from antimicrobials but, certainly, reduce our reliance on them.

Tom:              What are some of the more troubling misconceptions that you've identified?

Brian:             I think the biggest one that I hear is that all meat contains antibiotics. That is not true. The meat that we have is safe. The antibiotics that we have have been tested by the FDA producers that adhere to guidelines so that, when those animals enter the food chain, they are safe to consume.

Tom:              So, what is the state of antibiotic use in the beef industry and the dairy industry as well?

Brian:             The state currently is that we still use a lot of antibiotics, quite simply. If you look at the sales data that is collected by the US Food and Drug Administration, beef is the number one as far as percentage of human medically important antimicrobials that they use. Those numbers have dropped since the implementation of the recent FDA guidance and the Veterinary Feed Directive. I think they will continue, and yes, there has been some legislative pressure to make those changes, but really, that has been the industry voluntarily accepting those guidelines and looking at our production practices and trying to figure out ways to use antibiotics and in a better way.

Tom:              Is it acceptable to administer antibiotics and vaccine simultaneously, or are there some effects on efficiency of vaccines when antibiotics are introduced?

Brian:             It does depend a little on the vaccine. If you have a live bacterial vaccine, you can have some effects.

                        Certainly, we'd never want those things in the same syringe, but most of the vaccines that we have are actually viral in nature. And as we all know from talking to our human doctors, antibiotics do not have any effects on viruses.

Tom:              I think you answered this at the very beginning, but I'm wondering if you envision ever winning control over antibiotic resistance.

Brian:             I don't know that anyone really knows that answer. I think that concept of completely reversing antimicrobial resistance, that's probably a stretch. I think the goal for us is to really slow down the progression of antimicrobial resistance. I have a lot of faith in the innovative nature of humans, and I hope that, over time, we're able to develop some new tools that probably don't select for resistance and, eventually, over time, those tools, hopefully, will replace traditional antimicrobials. In large part, I don't know that we'll ever completely lose antibiotics in animal agriculture as long as they're still effective.

Tom:              I'm just curious. I'm wondering what sorts of trends in your field you're watching right now are most exciting.

Brian:             Honestly, I'll go back to what I just said. I think the innovative development of technologies is pretty interesting. There's a lot of research going on, and I'll use the term "alternatives to antibiotics" very loosely, because I think a lot of people think that that's just another chemical compound that we're going to administer to an animal, but I think there are lots of exciting things that are happening.

                        People are looking at microbiome research, which may or may not involve antibiotics at all, but certainly, we're seeing on the human side the potential for that to affect both infectious diseases and non-infectious diseases. I think new diagnostic tools that will help us, certainly from the beef side, make decisions faster about which antimicrobial — if to use an antimicrobial at all — and then, if so, which one particularly would be best suited for that particular situation. I'm really excited about a lot of the new innovation, which also poses some challenges for us. As beef producers, we're probably going to be flooded with new technology and trying to figure out, really, how to efficiently implement the things that will work in our system and politely pass on the things that may not.

Tom:              Dr. Brian Lubbers is director of the clinical microbiology section of the Kansas State Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. Thank you so much.

Brian:             Thank you.

Dr. Brian Lubbers spoke at ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference (ONE). Click here to learn about ONE and how you can access innovation on demand.

David Cleary, director of global agriculture at The Nature Conservancy, discusses the institution's three main sustainability goals: to reduce deforestation, increase soil health and promote water conservation. Learn what these three goals mean for climate change, habitat conservation, regenerative agriculture and the recent fires in the Amazon.

The following is an edited transcript of David Butler’s interview with David Cleary. Click below to hear the full audio.

Interviewer:  I'm here with David Cleary, director of global agriculture for the Nature Conservancy. Welcome, David.

David:             It's a pleasure to be here.

Interviewer:  Thank you very much. Tell us a little bit about what your role entails.

David:             Sure. Basically, three things. We have agriculture programs in about 40 countries around the world, so my first and most important job is to support those programs to help them grow their capacity, help fund-raise for them, and also to have them sort of, more or less, flying information around a shared definition of what sustainability and agriculture means. I represent the organization and voice our opinions on topics relevant to agriculture. That's the main reason why I'm here at this particular event. I also help to manage some of the global-level relationships relevant to our agriculture work in both the private and the public sector — so large agribusiness companies that operate on a global scale, but also organizations like the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Gates Foundation, institutions that have an important role to play within the global ag space that we'd like to try and have conversations with and, occasionally, try to influence.

Interviewer:  You said that the Nature Conservancy has agriculture programs in how many countries?

David:             Around about 30.

Interviewer:  Okay, so what goes on at the country level? What do your programs do?

David:             Well, we have three areas of focus. One is trying to reduce and eliminate deforestation and habitat conversion from supply chains. We also have a soil program, trying to avoid soil erosion but also manage soils and increase soil health. The third area of focus is around water, water conservation and water quality, so dealing with agriculture so that it has the least possible impact and the most efficient possible use of water around the world.

Interviewer:  Great! That sounds like very important work, really.

David:             Very important and very challenging, sometimes.

Interviewer:  Yeah. You've spent a lot of your career — you've been at the Nature Conservancy a pretty long time, right?

David:             It wasn't deliberate, but that's how it's turned out, yeah.

Interviewer:  You've spent a lot of your career there focused on Brazil. Is that right?

David:             Mm-hmm, Brazil and Latin America, more broadly.

Interviewer:  Okay, so what are some of the biggest challenges there? I can guess one of them.

David:             Well, Brazil is a big country, so wherever you are, the challenges are slightly different. I think the biggest challenge that I dealt with the time I was living there was around deforestation and commodity supply chains, especially in the soy and the beef industry. We've actually been very successful over the last 10 to 15 years in reducing deforestation in the Amazon, way below where it used to be. I'd say you have an increasing problem now in various parts of Brazil with water use. We've already been able to see some changes in rainfall patterns probably linked to climate change. We've also, I think, in different parts of Brazil, got issues around soil loss and soil health. Brazil is an extremely efficient agricultural producer. It's a massive supply of agricultural commodities to the global market, but in some ways, that grain complex, an oil seed complex that drives that, have got some vulnerabilities on the soil and the water front.

Interviewer:  And is most of the erosion there related to large quantities of rainfall? Are a lot of the farmers there using no-till?

David:             No-till is really common in Brazil. It's been taken up by wildfire, actually, over the last 10 or 15 years. Brazil is a tropical climate, so you do have quite violent rain. That's just part of the natural cycle there, but I think what's happened is that quite a lot of habitat has been cleared in recent years to be able to expand the agricultural, the planted area there, and quite often, that's loosened root structures, and it's made soil erosion a problem in some places.

Interviewer:  Yeah. I'm sure there's a massive amount of erosion right after the forests are cleared, right?

David:             Yeah, that's absolutely right. You can see it very obviously on the landscape. It's important just to flag, though, that, actually, most of the cropland area in Brazil, it's expanded over grasslands rather than forests. The Amazon is by far the most famous part of Brazil outside Brazil, but the real engine of agricultural growth in Brazil has been, actually, more the Cerrado, which is a mix of savannah and woodland-type biome.

                        It's rather similar to the U.S., actually. The history of U.S. agriculture is it expanded much more over grasslands than it did in forested areas, and that's actually true of Brazil, too.

Interviewer:  Okay. Is that actually a bigger environmental problem than the rainforest deforestation?

David:             Well, it depends (on) what lens you want to view it through. If you're worried about biodiversity, then forests are more of a problem because they have much higher levels of biodiversity. If you're worried about climate change, probably, you're going to be more worried about forests as well because, when you burn a forest, it releases more carbon, if you're burning savannahs — but at the same time, we worry about all ecosystems, not just about forests. The Cerrado and grasslands, generally — the U.S. also — they're a really important ecosystem. They have historically been incredibly important to human life both in agricultural terms and for ranging and livestock, so it's really important, around the world, that rangelands and grasslands are kept in a good state. That's always going to be a focus of our work.

Interviewer:  This episode was recorded in May 2019 at our ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference in Lexington, Kentucky, and it was a great conversation with David Cleary. But shortly after that, things went awry in the Amazon rainforest, and there were thousands and thousands of fires this summer. David was nice enough to get on the phone with us today and give us a little update about where we are, how much damage was done, and what does the future look like for the Amazon.

David:             Thank you, David. Well, yes, you're right. Things have gone awry. The background to that is that the Brazilian government essentially signaled to the farming and ranching sectors in the Amazon that they weren't going to spend a huge amount of time or effort chasing down people who didn't have the requisite deforestation permits to clear land.

                        What we've been able to verify so far is an uptick, quite a strong uptick, in fire activity. It's important you understand what we know and what we don't know. What we do know is there's a lot more fire activity in the Amazon. What we don't know is the size of the land areas that those fires are clearing. We don't know that because the smoke and the clouds at this time of year make it very difficult for us to get reliable satellite data. But what happened is we're at the end of the year, and at the end of the year, we'll know what the deforestation figures are.

                        Now, I know the figures that you've seen in the media are quite dramatic. There definitely has been a significant increase in fire activity, but there's a lot of other factors in the mix as well. I mean, if the rains come early, that dampens it down. It's not necessarily true that a large increase in fire activity in the Amazon is going to result in that level of increase in deforestation. It could be more; it could be less. We won't know until the end of the year. What I think we can say is that, even with the quite strong uptick of deforestation in the Amazon, it will be bad in comparison with last year, but it's still going to be at a level that, historically, is not as bad as it was about ten years ago. It's bad news, but it's not devastating yet.

Interviewer:  What do you see for the remainder of President Bolsonaro's term? Do you expect that this is going to be an ongoing thing year after year? Will it accelerate? I know that conversations or messages from the G7 to him didn't work very well this summer. How can we engage with Brazil to slow this down?

David:             Well, I think it's pretty interesting, what happened, because I think the strong international reaction to the fires in the Amazon really put the Brazilian government on the back foot. It was very clear that they weren't expecting such a strong reaction. It wasn't just the environmental NGOs and the Greenpeaces of this world that were very critical. A lot of the companies that invest in Brazil and are active in the agricultural sector were also critical.

                        Brazil depends upon those companies, and the agribusiness sector in general is an incredibly important and thriving part of its economy. So, to the extent that Brazil makes life more difficult for its big agribusiness sector, and because it's an exporting economy, an agricultural commodity-exporting economy, it could do without the sort of damage to its image that the Amazon fires do. I think the government understands that better now. There are actually parts of the Brazilian government that always understood that very well. The Agriculture Ministry, for example, is run by an extremely competent woman who was very active in saying that, “No, no, this is not the way for us to be going.”

                        I think you did point to the sort of diversity of opinion even within the Brazilian government. In fact, there are different power centers within it. I'd be quite optimistic that, next year, perhaps, learning a little bit from this experience, we'll find the government and the private sector and the farmers making more of an effort to combat the damage that was done. There was clearly damage.

Interviewer:  Well, that sounds good. I hope that we can find a good way to go forward and not lose all the progress that we made over the last decade or more. At this point, we'll rejoin our previous interview in which you talk about how all that progress was made. Thanks for joining us again today, David. I really appreciate it.

David:             It was a pleasure.

Interviewer:  You mentioned that there's been a lot of progress in reducing deforestation in the Amazon. What were some of the things that were successful there?

David:             Both private and public initiatives played a role. On the public side, you have, actually, very good regulatory framework for agriculture. Farmers in the Amazon have to keep 80% of the land holding in native vegetation, so that's already a good thing, a high bar to be able to work from. The government also recognized deforestation is a problem, and it had targeted strategies to crack down on it where in the bits of the Amazon they could see that deforestation was increasing.

                        Technology really improved over the last 20 years to the point that you could really pinpoint where the problem was, and that made it much easier to target policing actions, but it wasn't just a sort of top-down regulatory approach. There was also, I think, a recognition on many market actors that there's plenty of land that's already cleared that you could expand soy over. There was also an understanding, I think, that there was consumer resistance to deforestation because the soy and beef that was being produced, significant amounts of that were exported to Europe. There was also, I think, a feeling among the big global traders that had their presence there that they had a reputation or risk here as well, so it was a kind of perfect storm of coming together of both the public and private initiatives that drove the deforestation levels down. It's worth saying by how much: Fifteen years ago, it was about 30,000 square kilometers a year. Right now, it bumps along between 5,000 and 8,000 kilometers, so very, very significant reduction.

Interviewer:  That is a big difference, yeah. How is that effort working on the savannah areas?

David:             Well, it's sort of like a catch-22 because, the way the geography of Brazil is, is you have the forest in the north. In the center of Brazil, you have the grasslands, the Cerrado. From our standpoint as a conservation organization, it's not a win if we're successful in reducing deforestation in the Amazon but all that does is displace that pressure for habitat conversion into the grasslands of the Cerrado. That has actually not happened. The dynamics are slightly different in the different regions.

                        Right now, we're in a situation where, for the last three years, habitat conversion levels in the Cerrado have been very low. Six or seven years before that, they were really booming. A lot of the Cerrado was converted and, right now, we're in a situation where we have about half of the Cerrado in native vegetation; the other half is under agricultural or pasture. There's a very large amount of pasture that's not particularly productive — probably about 20 million hectares in total that you could expand cropland over. So, at least in theory, you can see a future sweet spot where you have cropland expanding over pasture and pasture intensifying. That would make a lot of economic sense. Of course, there's many a slip between cup and lip, and you can see that in theory, but actually, having that land-use pattern develop is a complicated thing, but that's what we're working towards there.

Interviewer:  Some of the areas that have been in agriculture the longest, do they suffer from soil degradation, loss of fertility, possibly partly because of the heavy rainfall?

David:             Well, that's a hard question to answer because if you pull out globally and just do a quick look around the world, there are places that have had agriculture in place literally for millennia with reasonable soil quality being maintained throughout that period. There are parts of Southeast Asia, for example, that you've got these smallholder, peasant farming systems that use a very intensive — they use manure a lot, and they have maintained really excellent soil quality. That's because, on the whole, there are fairly stable systems, and they're in fairly stable market context.

                        What's destabilizing for soil is when you have a sudden expansion of demand and intensification of production that the natural ecosystem of the soil in that particular area can't support. There are many places around the world where you can point to that kind of dynamic having happened as well. There's no hard and fast rule, I think. You can certainly generate what the basic principles of good soil management are and apply them pretty much anywhere and it's going to improve your situation if you're in one of those stress systems.

Interviewer:  Yeah. Is there a movement to try to use regenerative agriculture techniques like no-till?

David:             Yeah. No-till, cover cropping, there's a whole range of systems. I think whatever agricultural system you're in — whether it's a system that's typical of, like, the U.S. or the Brazilian corn and soy belt, very high productivity, industrial agriculture, or a smallholder system like you could find in Africa or Southeast Asia — good soil management is a basic principle of success in all of those different agricultural systems. That's why it's really strategic for us to focus on it, because it doesn’t really matter what scale of agriculture you're in; basic soil management is going to be important, too, so it's an across-the-board strategy for us.

Interviewer:  Okay. Let's step back up to the global level that you're focused on. When you look at agriculture as a whole internationally, what do you see with regard to greenhouse gas emissions? That's a trickier thing to measure at the local level, right?

David:             Yeah. Well, we know a lot about what the patterns of greenhouse gas emissions around agriculture are, and I think we can make some pretty secure assumptions moving forward based around what we know about population growth rates and also consumption, patterns of consumption in developing countries as they transition from developing status to developed. I think China is a really good example of what you can expect; the country, a generation ago, was poor. I have colleagues in China who talk to me about their siblings who — they remember famine conditions when they were children. China today is a totally transformed country: much higher levels of income, much higher levels of protein consumption, protein demand, rather, so we can expect a world where hundreds of millions of people are transitioning into a middle-class lifestyle with all of these demand patterns that are involved.

                        For agriculture, I think the really big question on the climate change standpoint is you're going to have a big increase in demand for protein. As we know, enteric fermentation is the second-biggest source of greenhouse gasses after land conversion, so if you have the huge increase in protein demand that we expect, that's got implications. The agriculture could increase overall, in absolute terms, its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. That's a really important problem for the industry to be thinking about, the solutions to it. There's different range, a very large range of potential solutions to it, but it's really important that people understand, I think, within the industry, that the development pattern that we're on, which we have to manage, too — I don’t think it's possible to do more than bend the curve of development of the margins. It's very difficult to go to countries like China and Brazil and say, “No, you can't be achieving the same levels of consumption and development of the U.S. and Western Europe.” That's not going to happen, but I think, with the combination of wider understanding within the agriculture industry of how critical this is, and also science and ingenuity, which has always been really important in agricultural history as well, I'm reasonably optimistic that we can make progress.

Interviewer:  Can you drill down on a couple of the tools that we might put into place there?

David:             There are a lot of things around soil management that you can do that reduce carbon emissions. There's a lot of work that you can do around reducing the emissions intensity of livestock production. We're going to be diving into, I think, some of that work during this conference (ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference). There's also a lot that you can do around managing fertilizer, which is an important contributor here as well.

                        But most critically of all, I think we can think about ways that we can intensify agriculture without expanding its geographical footprint into a natural habitat because, if you look at the numbers, that's the single biggest contributor of agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions. It's the expansion of the geographical footprint of agriculture. If food demand increases by 70% or 100% or whatever it is — we know it's going to be a big number — there is no way that we can do that by expanding 70% or 100% the area that we farm or the area that we graze. We absolutely have to intensify our production systems but do that in a way that doesn’t increase the environmental impact of those systems. It's hard, but I think there are some places around the world that you can point to where this is happening to a significant extent already.

Interviewer:  What do you sense as the mood in the room, sort of, when you talk to large agribusiness companies and you talk to governments? Do you think they're excited about digging into this challenge, or are they helpful or optimistic or pessimistic?

David:             That's a hard question to answer because I think it depends on who you're talking to. If I could make some very dangerous generalizations, I'd say that I think the CEO level of ag companies in the agribusiness sector, they get how climate change is important. They're faced with two problems. One is their obligation is to their shareholders, and a lot of the short-term impact of what you need to do to address climate change is not necessarily going to be positive for your bottom line, so there's that tension between the short-term time horizon that many companies have to manage to and the medium- to long-term nature of the impacts of climate change.

                        The other problem, I think, that the private sector often faces is that you have — the world food system and the agribusiness companies within it are very large and complicated organizations, and it's like trying to change, the proverbial changing the direction of a supertanker. It's a difficult thing to do and it takes time and one has to be patient about it, but at the same time, there's a limit to the patience that we can have here given the urgency of some of the problems that we face.

                        In governments, I think there's much greater variety compared to market actors and how they look at climate change and the urgency that they feel. I think the European governments, to take one example, feel the urgency of climate change a great deal, and that's because they're reflecting, I think, the greater level of concern about that among European electorates. You don’t see that same level of concern in developing countries, for obvious reasons; they have very pressing social and economic issues that they have to address, and they regard those as more politically important in the short term than the longer-term issues that swirl around climate change. I completely get where they're coming from on that, but that's basically the picture of where we are.

Interviewer:  Well, let's talk about a couple of specific governments, maybe. The president in Brazil has just rolled back a lot of environmental regulations there. Are you afraid that that might undermine a lot of the progress that you've made?

David:             Well, I broadened it out because I think that Brazil and the United States are a really interesting compare-and-contrast right now. There's also, in the U.S., been a rollback of a lot of environmental regulations. There are some similarities, I think, with the view of the world that both President Trump and President Bolsonaro have. I think what you'll find in Brazil, and I think what we've seen in the U.S., is that the president can try and do things and set a certain tone, but Brazil and the U.S. both have quite strong institutions.

                        You will, I think, see a lot of the things that President Bolsonaro was attempting to do end up in court in the same way as things in the U.S. are ending up in court. Brazil has a very strong judicial system. It will take a while for things to work themselves out. I know there's a lot of coverage, all the media coverage about all of the things that could happen and might happen. I suspect that what actually will happen is actually a lot less than some people are thinking, because those institutions are going to come into play and, I think, to a significant extent, moderate what President Bolsonaro is thinking about doing. I think you're probably going to see the same or have seen the same dynamic in the U.S. as well.

Interviewer:  Tell me a little bit about this online tool that you've created for mapping out soybean production in Brazil.

David:             Sure. As I've referred to, a critical question for the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the Cerrado is encouraging soy and other grains and oil seeds to expand over land that's already been cleared instead of directly into native habitat. So, companies and other market actors, they might want to do that, but they'd face the challenge of, "Well, where would it be most economic for me to do that?" That's partly a question of what your environmental conditions are, what your topography is, what your precipitation ratio is, what your soil conditions are like, but it's also a question of economics — like, what are your transport costs going to be like, what's the yield history of this particular area, what yields can I expect, how much fertilizer am I going to need, all those kinds of questions.

                        What Agroideal does — and I should emphasize that Nature Conservancy put the system together, but the parameters of the system and what it's meant to do was completely designed by the soy traders and the financial institutions in Brazil that have a direct interest in this and can actually really drive what happens. All we did was execute what they said they needed. Agroideal is a geospatial planning tool. It's web-based. It's free for anyone who wants to use it. It allows you to zoom in on particular regions within the Cerrado. It covers the whole of the Cerrado. It's also, by the way, being expanded to Chaco in Argentina and Paraguay. It layers different categories of information — environmental, social, economic — and it allows the user to model different potential scenarios. So, I put a silo here or if I build a road spur over there or a railway in here, how can I do that in a way that minimizes soy expansion into native habitat and maximizes expansion over land that's already been cleared? It's a tool that allows market actors to be able to play with different scenarios and have that influence where they site their infrastructure in a way that channels cropland expansion over cleared land, over pasture, usually, rather than into native vegetation.

Interviewer:  That's fantastic. Well, let's talk a little bit about resiliency. You mentioned that as one of your global focuses.

David:             Well, the first thing to say about resilience is, it's kind of difficult to define. Scientists tie themselves up in knots trying to define it and map it, but you can recognize it when you see it. It's like good art: difficult to define but easy to see when you're walking around the landscape.

                        I'd say there are two really important points to make. One is that you can make all agricultural systems, whatever scale they are, more resilient. You often hear debates about, "Well, this particular system is more resilient than that particular system." Well, that might be true, but that doesn’t mean that you can't increase the resilience of all systems. The other thing, I think, that's really important to understand is that, in order to increase the resilience of your system, it's going to make sense for you to be sharing your agricultural landscape at least a little bit with natural habitat, because natural habitat plays a huge role in buffering the environmental impacts of agriculture. That's true even in a largely converted landscape like the U.S. Corn Belt, for example.

                        Provided you've got patches of native vegetation buffering your field edges, provided you're doing things like cover cropping and trying to do what you can to increase the variety of the agricultural system that you're using — intercropping, whatever it is — you're going to be more resilient than you would be if you weren't doing it.

                        Now, if you're in a smallholder system in Africa, say, or Southeast Asia or China, you're going to be probably more resilient in the sense that you've got lots of different crops instead of just one or two, often, in a really small area — but at the same time, you've got bigger population and growth. You've got urgent demands for production, and that can also undermine the resilience of your system, because you're over-intensifying, basically. The strategies that you would use in different settings vary depending on the nature of the system, but in general, don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Diversify as much as you can. Make sure you've got some native habitat around to be buffering the impacts of what you're doing.

                        I think it's easy to talk about it in the abstract. It's often good to be citing some concrete examples. My favorite example is actually what, on the surface, looks like one of the most vulnerable, politically unstable parts of the world for farmers, and that's Sahel. That's the area just south of the Sahara Desert as it transitions into West Africa. In the last 10 to 15 years, specifically in Mali and Niger, countries which had all sorts of political problems, you've had this extremely impressive agroforestry movement, where thousands and thousands of small farmers have implemented a system that's known in the trade as farmer-managed natural regeneration. It involves using a lot of different tree species to intersperse with their cropping. Some of the tree species have direct economic use, some of them don’t, but they all have an important role in helping to shield cropping from the effects of drought and increasing yield. You look at satellite photos of that part of the world, compare them, what they are, compare them today with what that part of the world looked like 20 years ago. It's much greener today, so there are examples of success stories. It's not just a story of “what a terrible problem, and it's really difficult to do anything about it.”

Interviewer:  Yeah. Well, that's really exciting that they're seeing increased yield from that practice. Do you know if there are upfront costs that they have before they can switch to a practice like that, and how can we overcome those upfront costs?

David:             There are upfront costs. The upfront costs are quite modest. It's a fairly low-tech solution compared to what you might be using in other parts of the world. Those costs have been funded by a combination of governments getting behind it, agriculture research institutes and extension agents getting behind it, so a lot of experimentation on what particular species would be good that was done within CGIAR network, which is a UN-funded network of agricultural research institutes. A lot of non-governmental organizations also played a really important role in bankrolling some of the costs, so lots of different people got involved.

                        The critical thing, I think, is that this was a low-tech solution. There were costs, but they weren't crippling. And even within the context of the fairly poor, hardscrabble farming that most of these villages were in, it was realistic. With appropriate external help, they were able to scale it up to the level that it's reached today.

Interviewer:  I imagine that Nature Conservancy works to try to spread practices like that.

David:             Yeah. Funnily enough, we can't claim any credit here because we actually don’t have a program in West Africa. Our programs are in East Africa in Africa. It's very much the type of thing that we try to encourage, building resiliency, but also when we're looking at it, not just trying to import expensive external solutions that just aren't a realistic proposition for the realities on the ground and the places that we're trying to influence.

Interviewer:  A similar kind of practice, I think, is silvopasture, where you mix forests and livestock pasture. Where do you see that taking off in parts of the world?

David:             Actually, that is one of the areas we work very directly with in Colombia and also in Argentina. You do see it taking off, yeah. It's really impressive to see some of the transformations it's been able to cause on the ground. I would introduce one note of caution, which I think is not just with agro-silvopastoral systems, but across the board, is that, sometimes, the impacts are really spectacular, especially in places that have been badly degraded. It's extraordinary how quickly areas can come back when they're well-managed, and these systems are really good at doing that.

                        Agriculture is always about context. It's the most contextual thing that there is, and what works in one valley might not work in the next valley along, so it's important not to get too evangelical and oversell any individual strategy. I think sometimes that happens with agro-silvopastoral systems. People try and say it's a silver bullet when, in fact, we're in a world where it's silver buckshot. I think it's really useful. We work with it directly. We find, especially in Colombia and Argentina, it's really made a huge contribution, but it's one of lots of solutions that we need to be thinking about and implementing.

Interviewer:  Well, it's exciting that there are some very low-tech solutions like this that are helping farmers put carbon back into the soil and into the forests.

David:             Yeah, although I would say also, I'm not knocking for the high-tech solutions either, because I think one of the really interesting things about American agriculture right now is that you look at the digital technologies that are coming out and the extraordinary way that they can transform how we manage water, for example, how we're able to target inputs in a really efficient way so that we can, for example, know exactly when we ought to be applying fertilizer, exactly where, and that kind of input efficiency is also really important in being able to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture while increasing yields.

                        I think one of the really fascinating questions that we'll be working out over the next 10 or 20 years is the U.S., in particular, it's always been this engine of technological innovation that's always led the way in thinking about the appliance of science. It's really had an extraordinary impact on the productivity of American agriculture. Now, if we could get those, even a fraction of those productivity gains in places like Africa or in Southeast Asia, we'd be well on the way to solving the problems that the world food system faces.

                        One of the great challenges, I think, is how can we translate those technologies and bring the promise that digital agriculture offers to very different settings, where you have farmers who are, on the whole, poor; on the whole, can't afford the level of investment that American farmers can to access these technologies; and, on the whole, don’t have much of a digital education. These technologies are complicated, and a farmer who doesn’t have much education is going to have trouble applying them. You don’t have, in Kenya or Tanzania, this ecosystem of service providers that you have in the U.S., but when you think about the need to increase the productivity of agriculture while minimizing its environmental impacts, these technologies can be incredibly transformative. How you can get them working at a scale in a smallholder farming context, where you have poor farmers and not so much capital to invest — that, I think, is one of the great unanswered questions of the next generation. If we answer it, I think we'll be a long way towards cracking the kind of questions that we've been discussing today.

Interviewer:  That's very exciting, and I like your concept of silver buckshot.

David:             It's not my phrase, by the way. I have to acknowledge Jon Foley, who's the president of the California Association of Science, who came up with that.

Interviewer:  Well, thank you very much, David. It was great talking to you.

David:             Yeah, it was a great pleasure. Thanks a lot.

Interviewer:  Thanks.

To improve profitability and meet consumer demands, farmers need to manage dairy cow comfort as well as intakes, body temperature, stress levels and additional aspects for each cow. Without precision dairy monitoring and real-time data, this is nearly impossible. Dr. Jeffrey Bewley, Alltech's dairy housing and analytics specialist, shares where technologies like robotic milking and sensors come into play.

The following is an edited transcript of Kara Keeton’s interview with Jeffrey Bewley. Click below to hear the full audio.

Kara:              Dr. Jeffrey Bewley, Alltech's dairy housing and analytics specialist, is with me today to talk about the impact of technology on the dairy industry. Glad to have you today, Jeffrey.

Jeff:                Glad to be here. Thank you.

Kara:              I know your interest in the dairy industry grew from your involvement with your family's dairy operation in Kentucky. How did experiencing a traditional operation inspire your research today?

Jeff:                In the end, what drives me is helping dairy farmers and helping improve the lives of dairy cows, and that was something that was instilled in me from a very young age on the dairy farm in Kentucky from my grandfather. He was actually quite a good dairy farmer and didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned a lot from him. I learned the importance of understanding records and data. From a way too young age, I was working with spreadsheets for the dairy farm, and that got me interested in data. I really guess I was probably born at the right time in that regard because, now, we have a data explosion. You hear about terms like big data and precision dairy and the internet of things, and here I am in the right place at the right time, because those are now very important parts of dairy operations and are going to continue to be more and more important because there's a massive opportunity with the amount of data that we have available to us now on dairy farms.

Kara:              You mentioned precision dairy monitoring. What opportunities can that provide to dairy operators?

Jeff:                Basically, when I refer to precision dairy monitoring, I'm talking about monitoring individual variables on the same animals across time. We might be looking at something behavioral — for example, a Fitbit for cows kind of an idea — or we might be looking at something within the milk or something physiological with the animal, or looking even with image analysis to look at the contour of the animal for something like how thin or how fat the animals are.

                        So, we're looking at these variables, trying to perform a management by exception approach. We're looking for animals that maybe are deviating from their normal behavior; that might indicate that it's time to take some kind of an action with that animal. For example, there might be an early indication that that animal is becoming sick. These technologies provide us an opportunity to monitor cows 24 hours a day. They're watching that animal, and they give us an early indication that something is going on. If we're able to detect something early, then the chances that we're going to have a successful intervention are higher, so, basically, it's all about making the lives of the animals better.

Kara:              I love the idea of a Fitbit for dairy cows. How are farmers embracing this technology? We all know some are tentative to move to something new. In your work, your research and your work on the farms and with farmers, are they accepting this new technology? Are they seeing the benefits of this into their operation?

Jeff:                They're generally fairly accepting of the technology. I think they see the value in it. They see the real-world stories, and they see the differences that the technology can make. The biggest issue, ultimately, probably comes down to cost. There's a cost involved, and the last few years have not been the strongest for milk prices, so it's been a little bit difficult in terms of adoptions, because people haven't had the extra capital to invest in those kinds of improvements. But for those that have had that or those that see that they need it to take them to the next level, they've been able to adopt that type of technology very readily and very successfully.

Kara:              Those that are embracing technology, of course, still have to focus on the day-to-day operations. Is technology replacing the human factors in operation, or is it just enhancing their ability to run a successful dairy operation?

Jeff:                It is definitely not replacing it. It may replace, in some cases, some of the monotonous tasks that are involved. For example, if we think about something like robotic milking, milking is pretty much a monotonous task, and robotic milking is able to do that, but in general, I would actually say that the use of technologies on dairy farms increases the need for people that really can understand cow behavior and can interpret what that information means. It increases the level of skill required.

                        So those that really understand animals and really can read beyond what the data might say are the ones that are going to benefit the most from the technologies. The people that use it as an easy way out are not going to be very successful. The analogy that I use a lot of times is, for example, if people want to lose weight, then it would be really nice if we could go down and take a pill and automatically lose weight. In reality, you still need to exercise and eat better, and I think that's the case with dairy farms too.

                        It's not an easy way out. We can't put a technology and, suddenly, things get better. You still need to be a good manager and know how to use and interpret that data.

Kara:              You spoke of the automatic milkers on farms, and that technology is a time-saver and labor-saver for farmers. How are technologies impacting dairies across the world? Are we seeing, on a global scale, this technology embraced, or is it more in the U.S. and maybe Europe?

Jeff:                There are definitely differences in the technology adoption around the world. I think, in general, Europe and Israel are the biggest adopters of technology. The United States is definitely behind in that regard. I think a lot of that has to do with labor costs. European labor costs are higher. That means that the technologies start looking economical sooner. Then, another factor is that a lot of our operations in the U.S. are larger, and some of the technologies, the economy as a scale, aren't quite there, so it still makes sense to do things with people instead of with technology, in that case. Also, I think the economic conditions in the last few years would have an impact, too.

Kara:              With your work at Alltech and the research that you're doing here and around the world, what new technologies are on the horizon that will really change the way that dairy producers manage their animals in the future?

Jeff:                I think it's really neat, what's coming on, in terms of being able to analyze variables within the milk, so there are a lot of biological parameters that we can pick up in the milk. The nice thing is we don’t have a variable cost associated with attaching something to every animal in the herd. We can use the same technology to monitor sometimes 10 or 15 different variables with the same technology.

                        The other place is in image analysis — so, being able to use the same technologies that are used in the human industry for looking at facial recognition or even the same kind of cameras that are used in the Xbox, for example, to look at something like how fat or how thin the animals are and measure that automatically, basically, just using geometry to do that, or being able to track the movement of the limbs as the cow walks, to be able to pick animals up that have feet and leg problems sooner, or being able to use that kind of technology to monitor feeding behavior and which cows are eating, how much time they're eating, and perhaps even eventually getting into how much that they're eating. These two areas, I think, are huge opportunities that we're going to see more and more technologies come out in the next decade.

Kara:              While technology is being embraced by the dairy industry, it is still, in large part, a family-friendly industry. There are a lot of family dairies out there. As you work with different farms, what do you see as the changes in the operations? Are the families still seeing a future for the industry? Do you see it changing in another direction in the future?

Jeff:                Well, one of the things that's particularly nice about robotic milking, for example, is that it takes away a task for a small dairy that really takes a lot of their time. With robotic milking, you can have one robot handle 50 or 60 cows, so it works very well for a small dairy and allows them to be able to not have to be tied down to three times a day when they're in the milking parlor with that monotonous task. Most people would argue that one of the biggest advantages of investing in a robotic milking system — particularly for a smaller dairy — is quality of life improvement. I think that technology has an opportunity to really improve the lives of small farms. Also, it's something that a lot of younger people really gravitate toward. In many cases, you hear stories where it's something that the next generation maybe wasn't that interested in being the dairy farmer and carrying on the family legacy until the robot came about, and then, that increased their level of interest to be able to continue that operation.

Kara:              So, from the health of the animal, the production on the farm, operations and even the life of the family members, in the bottom line, the technologies in the dairy industry are all-around improving what they're seeing in their operations.

Jeff:                They have a lot of potential for improving things at a lot of different levels. I think there's always a reality check that comes in that, sometimes, the data doesn’t do necessarily what it was supposed to do. You have to do something with the information that turns into a meaningful decision, and the economics of those technologies become very important also, so it's not necessarily magic, but I often say that the technologies don’t change the cows and they don’t change the people. They will change the way the two work together.

Kara:              Well, thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Bewley, and we appreciate you coming.

Jeff:                Thank you.

Kara:              That was Dr. Jeffrey Bewley, Alltech's dairy housing and analytics specialist.

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