[Music] good evening everyone what I'd like to do here in the next you know 20 30 minutes is I'd go over a few items first of all just talk a little bit about genetic selection and how it works and and what progress we're making and especially in light of the ability of genomic testing over the past 9 or 10 years and then get I think into what's really the meat of it which will be how does genetic potential interact with nutrition and management and then talk about our feed efficiency project with which dr. Santos and I are both part of and then try to throw out some things that we might chew on in the Q&A session any genetics presentation has to have this equation in there or at least we usually do and you know this is this is a really a report card it's kind of what I want to do here selection intensity is pretty simple in dairy cattle with the great work that our repro physiologists have done over the last you know 50 or 75 years where we would need very few males obviously as parents but now very few females as well and we can get really massive selection intensity you know top tenth of one percent type of thing for breeding animals and propagate them really widely the other one that we're doing great on is this genetic variation almost any trait that we care about seems to have plenty of genetic variation to make progress that's not really a big issue the two that are a bit of a struggle are the accuracy in the generation interval for accuracy we do a great job for traits like milk production where we have lots of data and the data are good quality that we have other traits say like female fertility where we have lots of data but the quality is not great and we have kind of rough measures that we work with like conception rate or days open but we don't really have detailed physiology did ADA on a lot of on large populations and then we have you know the really hard traits things like feed efficiency where it costs a ton of money to measure the trait and to do it well in there we really have low accuracy at this point but we're trying right and then generation interval used to be an issue but I'll argue now that with genomic selection it's really not any more an issue for for cattle just a few stats first of all I don't expect you to read this giant table though you can go to the CDC website if you'd like to over four million animals dairy cattle have been tested in the past decade since the DNA microarrays became really widely available and also since we drove the cost down to to something that was affordable and that that equates to about sixty thousand calves a month and really any every genetically relevant animal for breeding stock is tested you would hardly be able to we certainly can't buy semen from a bowl that's not tested if you go to an auction or sale you probably aren't going to find an animal that's not genetically tested but you know really large presence on the commercial farms as well with you know seven eight hundred thousand calves being tested every year so many many herds now have multiple generations where all animals have been tested and it runs about there are many different options but the typically what most people do is about forty bucks an animal okay I talked a little bit about this generation interval and this is a paper in the PNAS Proceedings in the National Academy that was published now four years ago and the trends continue to go downward at least in this red line up here but but what you'll see is that the parents of bowls now that go into the AI company are always first calf heifer and a young genomic bull that's almost never the case that it's an older animal and the parents of replacement heifers are much younger as well that the aged generation interval they're on both the male and female side is now you know in that three years something range and so we've driven that down to and that that matters because it takes a long time to make genetic progress this is why geneticists in genetics departments don't use cows for their long term projects they use fruit flies and mice and stuff like that because otherwise they would make no progress in their lifetimes or very little the trends I show here just one trait for milky old breeding value this is us Holsteins and you can see well nice long upward trend going back 50 60 years but it's accelerating here at the end the Bulls are always ahead of the cows because they're more highly selected there are fewer fewer of the Bulls make it into this graph right most of them go to beef but we see 120 656 209 250 so we're accelerating and potential is great and then what we need is folks like dr. Santos to help us actually realize that potential because geneticists are good with numbers not so good as rations right so a couple other sort of features and I'll mention that many universities did these long term selection projects initiated in the 1950s and 1960s and I'll just point out results of two of them here one is and probably the two most successful which were not here in madison the iowa state one had selection of high versus average production level sires and then did this for many many generations and one of the things they found was this yes they made more milk but then they also had this undesired will correlate a response in health rates so that the cows that made more milk also had more health problems and higher health costs and so sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you get what you want plus some other stuff too and I show down in the lower right the graph in u.s. Holsteins for daughter preggers 8 which is a female fertility measure and you can see that it was getting worse and worse and worse for about 40 or 50 years there until the last 10 to 15 when we started focusing on on leveling that off and stopping that deterioration and and so we need to toys think about that and how are we changing the cow intentionally and then how are we changing her unintentionally through that selection process the other one I mentioned it's more relevant to this discussion is kind of a really clever one at University of Minnesota was set up by Charlie young many many years ago and in the 1960s early 1960s they started saving you know using just repeatedly semen from Bull's of that era and so you really got a static control line that wasn't getting dragged along making genetic progress by accident like the control line in Iowa State and so you had a control line there that that did not change genetically by definition and then the selection line that improved quite dramatically over time like the rest of the breed but what was interesting is the control line didn't improve phenotypically either and you would say wow that's because all nutritionists and and you know other dairy management type folks were on vacation in the 1960s 70s and they all didn't come back maybe until the late 80s I doubt that's true and I think what really happens there is you just there's no genetic potential and so you can feed these cows you can improve their cow comfort and nothing really happens and and you can imagine for example if you took a Hereford cow and and started feeding her you know large quantities of nice dairy cow TMR that you're not gonna get all that much milk right she probably won't eat it at all and if she does she'll just get fat right so these things go hand in hand and I really love this lower one from Australia could to kind of demonstrate this principle so you've got three blocks there you can go to the paper if you like and and see all the details of Fulkerson but you've got breeding value on the x-axis and then on the y-axis or vertical axis you've got actual performance but then you've got it at three levels of concentrate and what's really important here is as the level of concentrate feeding these are cows that are primarily pasture with supplemental concentrate and as the level of concentrate feeding goes up the slope of the line gets steeper and steeper and steeper and that's demonstrating exactly this point that genetics and management have to go hand-in-hand and particularly genetics and nutrition you can't just breed cows better and not feed them but you also can't just feed them better without breeding and it already realized that potential you've got to gotta manage for it so setting that table I'll talk now a little bit about our feed efficiency project and then just label talk more about some of the work they're doing at Florida Lane 8 or Mike van de haar has been the leader of this big project now for eight nine years something like that at Michigan State and a bunch of universities are involved and I'll show if few of them later but but the point of this slide and you guys understand this better the guys and gals understand this better than I do but you know we can we can improve performance and we get more efficient but at some point those returns are diminishing and why are they diminishing well because rate of passage things like that and so if you look at the blue line of the NRS the old NRC 2001 you actually see that once you get up to like five multiples of maintenance you're getting less efficient I think that that's just an artifact that they had very few cows these would be data from the 1980s and early mid-90s and and there weren't that many cows at university farms in experiments that were 5x maintenance and so you fit a quadratic or a nonlinear curve to it and at the tails of that curve it kind of goes crazy right so I don't really think that's what's gonna happen the Green Line would say there's no you know digestibility law so that's probably not right either and our data shows something kind of in-between but you do see that kind of leveling off well why is that important well because that tells us that if we want to improve I say feed efficiency but energy utilization efficiency we need to actually measure individual cow intakes we can't just select for high production and hope that they get more efficient too we have to figure out which cows are biologically more efficient so if one wants to do that and one wanted to do that before say 2009 or 2010 it was almost impossible and some people like Revere camp and the Netherlands and others did a lot of good work back in the 80s and 90s on feed efficiency and kind of gave up because in a progeny testing system which is our old world you would have to measure every daughter of every bowl so 1500 ish Bulls a year in the United States alone you'd have to measure every daughter say a hundred daughters per Bowl so you have to measure feed intake say six weeks mid lactation for a hundred and fifty thousand cows a year which if you could do it which you couldn't because such facilities don't exist but if you could you spend like 75 million dollars a year or 50 thousand dollars per bowl just to get a breeding value estimate for for feed efficiency now it's you know weeks we can develop a reference population I'll talk a little bit more about what that is exactly later if you're not sure but build that reference population spend a bunch of money up front this is what we're doing right now and then add to it over time and you can decrease the cost by a couple orders of magnitude so that's why we're coming back and revisiting this now that in conjunction with the last slide about multiples maintenance for steps of genomic selection three are really sort of mechanical one is a lot of work so the first one is building this reference population getting a few thousand Bulls at least that have lots of daughters with performance data and the Bulls are DNA tested or tens of thousands of cows with DNA test and performance data for the trait you care about once you build that then you can can do the rest the mechanical parts estimate the snip effects or the breeding values which is the sum of those across the genome some calves and make decisions but this is really the big one and it's the hard one is this reference population it's great for things that are measured by DHI or typed rates measured by breed associations routinely but for traits like feed efficiency or you know we did some work last year with ultrasound diagnosis of lung respiratory disease and calves I mean it's hard to build those but it can be done this feed efficiency project first we had a USDA project same universities plus a couple more and then we kind of zeroed in on these four plus the USDA in the next project which is funded by the foundation for food and Agri research and the council and dairy cattle breeding that's matching funds and we measure a little over eight hundred cows a year at the different university farms as many as we can giving our facilities Kalyan Gates or grow say for instant tech in our case or in some cases it's it's just by way backs but the idea is to build this reference population get more reliable genomic predictions for feed efficiency or and I'll talk about what that looks like in in terms of the trade in a moment and then develop some other sensor measures measure heat loss measure various blood use cameras do anything we can to figure out how to predict dry matter intake as accurately as possible so maybe we we can then at some point do this on commercial farms that don't have to buy our gross a for an instant AG system that would be not affordable and so the trait that were looking at and a lot of the early work was done in beef cattle a lot of the work in chickens and pigs tends to be more looking at ratio traits but a beef cattle it's more residual feed intake it's been the norm so how much did the animal eat versus how much do you expect her to eat is sort of one way to do it you can calculate based on you know book values of requirements or you can do it based on contemporary comparison so how much did she eat relative to her cohort after you adjust for metabolic body weight energy content and milk secreted body weight change and that sort of thing and you can do this I forgot to mention this morning this is in kilos but but we can do it in mega cows and usually do honestly but what you want to do is find cows that are producing at a high level and also eating a little bit less than they need versus cows that are eating more than they need or more than their contemporaries do to get the same output and we really you know I often get the question about well do we really want a cow that doesn't give any milk but doesn't eat much no we don't right we want bowls so we want high performance plus we want it done efficiently okay and there are some challenges with this trait that we'll get into later so yes well we start with the grocery energy we get what's used as to get to net energy there's the RFI part and the dilution of maintenance and you guys understand all that better than I do as a geneticist but one of the interesting things we found as well in our data and others have started to see this earlier with smaller datasets is you've got the maintenance requirement going up and so the latest research you know Templeman is about point 11 so that's about a 1/3 higher maintenance cost than it used to be so why is that well we're change the cow we're changing the cow's environment and we wouldn't necessarily expect it to say the same but it's actually a pretty pretty big change and a significant change that I think we needed to talk about I'll talk a little bit about so we're probably gonna get to feed efficiency breeding values the preliminary ones released in December and then later in the winter or early spring we'll get everybody in the US I'll get breeding values for feed efficiency for their cows and bulls and this would be done as feet saved and this graph and the upper right is from Jenny price and their colleagues in Australia and they kind of pioneered this and I really like the idea so you take residual feed intake did she eat more than she should have based on her size and her her milk output and milk and energy output and then you also add in the excess maintenance costs because RFI doesn't care if you're big or small we take out the metabolic bodyweight part right but we do need to penalize you for just costing too much because you're too damn big right and so if you add those two together then you get feed saved but what she's shown is that cows are getting bigger in Australia so the maintenance costs have been going up the RFI has been going up a little bit as well and so feed saved actually is going in the wrong direction and so they want to reverse that trend and start to at least stabilize that if not improve it genetics standard deviation is shown here it'd be bigger in our case because of scaling our cows are eating more producing more so the genetic standard deviation is quite a bit higher and then they also looked in another study as what is efficiency as a heifer and then is that the same trade as efficiency in a lactating cow and there is a relationship so if you take the highest and lowest heifers 100 per group in this study of davidís and you look at what happened to them and that's that's RFI as a growing heifer so all that's in the equation is is the growth body size in growth rate what happens when you throw in the the lactation part and they did still see a difference right it's smaller okay the correlation I think between the two was around 0.3 but it's at least good news that the correlation seems to be in the right direction and it sort of diminish over time if you were looking at heifer versus third lactation cow it's closer to zero but at least it's not in the wrong direction and most of our works done in lactating cows but there are folks especially Estie genetics has done a lot of work in and growing dairy heifers what is it biologically this is in beef cattle I think we're trying to understand more about what it is in dairy cattle with all of these add-on experiments that we're doing along with our feed efficiency data collection we're overlaying nutrition trials and physiology experiments and data collection of blood and tissue samples and measuring kind of anything we can behavioral data we see digestibility as part of that body composition you know that's something we haven't really addressed when you're just looking at metabolic body weight you don't care if she's for lack of a better word tall and skinny or short in fat but that matters right physical activity matters heat loss matters and then this protein turnover seems to be a big part and so we need to look at how we how we address that and then there's an unknown part and some of that unknown honestly is error right because RFI is the leftover after you've accounted for all of the energy sinks that you know about and you believe in right and some of those might be important and you know if immunity or something is an energy sink and we ignore it then we're gonna create ourselves a problem right because we're gonna select cows that are not optimum for those traits I'm not gonna go through all these other species well there's cattle too but it's mostly pigs and chickens and my use but you can see on the slide in the selection lines the experiments what changed body composition changed although not always in the same direction protein turnover always decreased in the selection line mitochondrial function change digestibility either didn't change or improved physical activity generally you know decreased right so that's some of the the things that are happening within the animal when we're just selecting for what we see on the outside and then I just threw this in kind of for fun because a few years ago I did a talk and a couple years ago and what vultureman said well you know here look at this data that I've got from Harvard it's an association study of course not even a study right it's just an association but you know nine years difference here from when he started these calculations and he monitors every year the health costs what how many you know dollars is he spending on health costs veterinary bills that sort of thing four hundred weight of milk it's gone down from a dollar to thirty one cents at the same time his feed efficiency has gone up and you know on a farm of eleven hundred cows that's 325 grand so nothing nothing to sneeze at there so and I think to say may mention this as well later on this relationship between healthy cows and feed efficiency that's good as well we don't want it to be the other way around I put lots of examines on here that you can take now that we have this sort of we've gone from when I was growing up when you ignored the young stock and then visit revisited them two years later out somewhere on a pasture to now we can do active inventory management we could create the inventory we want and we can manage it as we choose you know as genomic testing started we started with this culling the low end of animals and then we started with sex even and then with IVF and now beef semen and and in just a ten-year period we've evolved to a point where we've got an enormous quantity hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dairy cows being bred to beef bulls because we have sex semen for the top-end or sexy for the young annals beef for the old and and we can really do some things with the production system that we wouldn't have even dreamed about a decade earlier okay and that's where we've take all these tools and put them in a box and shuffle them around and then or shake them up a little bit and then dream up some new scenarios that we can take a look at I'll talk about a couple of others another thing we can do and we've worked on others will work on this is the cow version of personalized medicine in this case we were predicting blood BHB in the first well between five and eighteen days and milk I think and we can do that with the environmental variables the herd variables if you will our demographics and we add in the genomic and we can we can predict which cows are going to be above that 1.2 threshold and which ones are not and there's a long ways to go on this but I think it's it's a really fruitful area going forward especially as we get the ability to integrate sensor data and and videos and all the sorts of things to identify cows that might have problems I like this slide just simply twelve two reasons mostly because this enormous cow that is apparently eight feet tall in the woman that's maybe four feet tall but but it demonstrates that we as geneticists always thinking about that extreme picked up top tenth of one percent and and try and make more like that but but uniformity has real value and we have not in selection programs focused on uniformity and I think we could well I know we can do that it's easy the math but we haven't chosen to do that but that is something that that we should certainly should consider going forward because we're our managing individuals are managing groups and uniformity is valuable okay lots of data on this slide but the point is if you if you take again this is the sort of well this is uw-madison herd data from a few years ago I didn't when I made this but it's the equivalent of that Australian study I showed you earlier you've got the genomic breeding value or in this case the predicted transmitting ability which is half the breeding value as a calf so the the predicted transmitting ability from the DNA test closest to twelve months of age for an animal and then her actual first lactation well it's actually Emmy first lactation Emmy of her first lactation yields if that makes sense sorry and the slope of this line this is the point it varies a lot from her to herd now you've got the sick animals at the bottom that makes sense right but and and the more sick animals you have the more that's going to pull the slope of the line down but you've got herds that are really have a steep curve and they're getting every ounce of genetic potential out of those animals and you've got other herds that just frankly aren't and I think there's a lot of room on a herd basis or a pen basis or a subset base first lactation cows or third lactation cows open cows pregnant cows whatever for using genomic potential as a management management diagnostic because we know now so accurately from the DNA test what's the potential of that animal and now we can look at a management intervention and see does she respond or not okay and then lastly I threw this in here just for fun kind of but you know you think about that normal bell-shaped curve and all the different options we have for our replacement heifers we can think about the cows too and what do we do differently you know some fifteen years ago when I was early in the extension a specialist career I put together this picture of kept keys granny cow that had four hundred and thirty thousand pounds of milk or something like that sixteen calves in seventeen years that's kind of the perfect cow that had no events and dairy comp she just did everything or very few events because she just did everything quietly and all of a sudden you realized wow you know but you know do is that the goal you know do we want to keep every cow as long as we can probably not right and and we can think about strategies now for example getting all our replacement heifers from our first lactation animals are from our yearling heifers and first lactation and then everybody who's you know over two years old gets beef semen we can do that and then we could keep some of those cows around the older cows but we never have to get genetics from them because we want to get the genetics from the younger ones that have better potential the older ones we just breed to keep lactating now we can do that sort of thing or we could even think about scheduled replacement and I put the example here of a rental car company like a bad motto for a rental car company I think if I were a marketing person would be we drive our cars until you're stranded by the road right and and if we think about how to optimize our system in terms of not just performance of the dairy cow as a dairy cow but performance of the system in terms of the dairy part of it the beef production side product of it the animal welfare part of it the consumer perception and all those things I mean maybe we should imagine a scenario or at least evaluate economically and socially a scenario where you you know you get two calves don't breed her back in second leg occasion but at the end of that lactation you move her to a feedlot there are many pitfalls with it but that's just an example of the broader type of thinking we need to do because we have so many tools now that we can do this quite quite easily if we choose to I'll stop there I got a few take-home messages you know the genomic testing that kind of the 10-year mark now has had a massive impact if we measure the right traits and do it correctly we can change them very very quickly we can't have genetic improvement without nutritionists and so like it or not just say we're stuck with each other if we want to make potential and then turn that potential into performance you know feed efficiency we're spending a ton of money getting a ton of data on the on the genetics side also on the biology side trying to learn as much as we can about relationships what happens when you change rations and more fiber and less fiber and higher protein less protein and and all those sorts of things are there negative health implications and we'll talk about you'll talk about some of those in a minute but we need to learn more and then we can pull all these put all these tools in our toolbox and then put our thinking caps on and try and come up with some new strategies I will stop there and turn the reins over to dr. Santos I'm going to stop my presentation with a question that I posed to a group of nutritionists in different parts of the country so I sent a question I asked them to identify what dietary interventions will take your best clients your best herds to the next level of production and the thermometer here was energy corrected milk and I gave them time opt-in options and I asked them to select the top three and then I summarized the top three which I'll show you later so the possible choices were improved forage NDF digestion be able to feed higher force diets increase the supply and metabolizable protein increase duodenal delivery of essential amino acids deliver essential fatty acids to the small intestine in a more precise manner increased feeding taking early lactation feed diets that prevent early lactation disease feed diets according to level of production prevent whom rumen acidosis and lastly if he dies the reduced inflammation so when I send this by email and I'd ask them to pick three different people pick different choices but the top three choices were the ones that are listed here so improve foraging the F digestion prevent early lactation disease and increased feed intake in early lactation so I'm gonna spend a little bit of time in each of those and I'm gonna try to identify whether what the nutrition is identified as being bottlenecks for the next level of production if that's truly the case and it's supported by scientific research so I'm going to start with the early lactation disease and we know that morbidity is a problem of early lactation so if you look at diseases that are very common one of them being metritis so the cow has uterine discharge that induce an inflammatory response because of the damage that stay in place you can see that Metroid is a disease that happens in the first primarily the first two weeks with the median days to diagnose somewhere here between six and seven days postpartum but then if we look at the disease that effect tissues other than the reproductive tract so what I labeled here non uterine disease we can see that most of them the initial diagnosis takes place here in the first three weeks postpartum such that if I overlay the uterine disease with the Nani Turan disease to no surprise what we see is that about one third of the dairy cows will be diagnosed with a clinical disease in the first three weeks postpartum in of the clinical disease that are diagnosed in dairy cows almost or a little over three-quarters of that the initial occur in the first three weeks of lactation okay the problem with this is that anything that happens in early lactation good or bad typically will have a legacy effect or impact in the remainder of the lactation so obviously disease is not something that's desirable and it does have negative consequences immediately but many of these disease will have negative consequences later on one of the immediate consequences that disease induces sickness behavior that is typically expressed by reduced appetite so anorexia is a common find and it to no surprise in dairy cows no different they basically eat less but the interesting aspects that disease can now also outer nutrient partitioning in animals and I'm going to use this example here from beef cattle this really cool experiment in which they induce disease and in this particular case they induce respiratory disease just because that's the disease of interest for a lot of people in the beef world so they had a treatment group in which they were remain as control animals so this year's year receive saline interact really so the idea here is was to show to have a sham treatment but not induce any inflammatory response and then they had a challenge group in which they infuse intratracheal e a particular amount of main Jaime a mullet occur which is a bacteria commonly associated with respiratory problems in cattle okay the cool thing about this experiments that these animals were multi categorized and by having character in key blood vessels in this one tissue and Splenda bed they are able to quantify not only concentrations of different analytes but by using a marker they can quantify blood flow and therefore look at flux of nutrients across the portal drain viscera the lis or the entire splenic tissue of those animals and so this captors come out here in the dorsal part of the animal and there is continuous blood sampling to them quantify blood flow and venous arterial difference in those animals okay so the animals they were using this particular experiment were these Angus steers that have inflammatory response because of pneumonia that was induced through the challenge so I want to make a parallel of this disease with a common disease that affects anywhere from fifteen to thirty percent of the postpartum dairy cows which is poor metritis often associated with systemic signs of inflammatory response such as increase in cytokine concentrations in blood increase in acute phase proteins in blood so there's a lot of similarities although to disease they affect different issues in terms of inflammatory response they have some commonalities okay so they measure lots of things one of which was the flux of amino acids across the liver so here we have in the Y scale of the amino acid flux in millimoles per hour so whenever the the bars here are below zero it means that that particular tissue in this case the liver is extracting or using more of that amino acid or group of amino acid that's then it is secreting in other words through the arterial supply from the earth at the panic artery and through the venous supply from the portal vein there will be the AB taken nutrients and the outflow nutrients would leave the deliver through the hepatic vein so the flux of nutrients going to deliver is greater than the flux of nutrients live in delivery means that the liver is using more than it's secreting the value would be negative into no surprise for the essential amino acids both treatments have a negative flux of those because the tissues are unable to synthesize them because those tissues don't express the specific enzymes for those amino acids but we can see here that the challenge group which is the red bar has a more negative value than the blue group which is the control so inflammatory response increases the uptake of amino acids by the liver and increases the utilization of those amino acids by the apparent tissue resulting in a more negative net flix now if you look at the non-essential amino acids those that can be synthesized by mammalian cells we see now that the control group or the control treatment has a positive net flux whereas the challenge animals they continue to have a negative net flix if we are when they overlay the two and they looked at the total amino acid flux we see that the differential is quite larger so I calculated this using the average molecular weight of the twenty Pertino genic amino acids and this results in approximately 2.6 moles per day base of dis flux and based on the average molecular weight is would result in about 380 grams of amino acids for this 400 kilogram steer if we translate this into a lactating cow at a sixty-seven percent efficiency of use of amino acids extracted to be incorporating to meal protein this would be the protein equivalent of eight kilograms of milk so in other words when animals develop disease to no surprise performance is impaired one aspect is because intake is depressed which is what we typically think but also because the user nutrients now it's partition away from the mammary gland and the idea here is that animals are trying to contain an infection or inflammatory response so the second aspect that was brought up by the nutritionist was that dairy cows to have greater production will require better quality forages okay so I just to illustrate this point in an easy manner I have two diets here okay that would be fed to a group of high producing dairy cows cows producing 48 kilograms of milk with 3.7 percent butterfat and 3.1 percent protein and I'm illustrating here a diet that will provide to those cows approximately 69 mega calories of metabolizable energy and 3 kilograms of metabolize of protein given that this cows would be 24 kilograms of dry matter but this initial diet has moderate quality forages basically corn silage and alfalfa silage with a high NDF content and with an NDF that has a high lignin content so each of those squares here represent about a kilogram each of these rectangles a kilogram each of the squares represent about half a kilogram so in this 24 kilograms of a diet in order to meet the needs of this cow I am restricted on how much of this moderate quality forages I can feed such that the inclusion in this particular case to get to the numbers that I desire to allow this level of production I was restrict to about 42 percent of the dietary matter okay on the other hand if forage quality is improved now I have two extra rectangles that replace corn grain in my diet that would still allow me to formulate a diet to supply the same amount of energy terms of metabolizable energy in the same amount of metabolizable protein but now allowing me to increase the inclusion of forage in the diet from 41 to about 50% and still meet the needs of this high producing cow with the same amount of dry matter so I guess let's see if this is really true through experimentation people have demonstrated that so let's look at this experiment from corn University in which they manipulate the quality of forage by feeding either conventional corn silage or brown midrib corn silage the brown Madrid corn silage would be the corn silage with less content of lignin and therefore more digestible fiber and this should allow cows to consume more feed and not only they would consume more feed but hopefully the feed would be more digestible and therefore they would extract more nutrients treatments were applied from three weeks before calving to three weeks after cabin right at the transition period okay after three weeks postpartum cows were fed exactly the same forage so this is the dry matter intake response during the first three weeks in lactation and we can see the cows overfed the higher quality forage consume about two kilograms more dry matter in the fresh period once they were moved to a common diet dry matter intake was exactly the same about twenty five kilograms after I met her which we can see here in the in the figure but look at what happened to fat corrected milk during the treatment period the first three weeks postpartum this cows were fed higher quality forage with less MDF less lignin they produce about four kilograms more fat corrected milk the same was through past the period of treatment so from weeks four to fifteen so from about twenty-two days in milk all the way to 105 days in milk despite of the fact that cows were now fed exactly the same dye those that were initially fed higher quality forage were still producing another two point six two point seven kilograms more milk for the remainder of the experiment so it's not uncommon for a lot of the things that we do either good or bad very early in lactation they tend to have a legacy effect past the period of treatment so if it is something bad that would have ramifications later on that are also bad if it is something good like in this case they will have positive ramifications later on past the period of intervention so this is demonstrating that yes forest quality is important so now if we look at the singular approach from a crossover design from masahito Oba and Mike Allen a Michigan State University they look at the change in milk as cows moved from a conventional corn silage to a brown mihrab corn silage so from a lower quality forest to a higher quality forage according to the level of production of those cows and what do you observe was this slope here indicating that as they change corn silage there was a positive change in milk because we see most of the cows are above the zero line here but the rate of change or the increase in milk yield was greater for cows that initially before treatments were imposed had greater milk yield so this is telling me that higher producing cows respond at a greater to a greater extent to better quality forests and lower producing cows and this makes sense because this cows that are producing 50 kilograms of milk they have to consume more total dry matter and to consume more total dry matter they either have to digest feed faster in the rumen or they have to pass feed faster in the rumen and by providing better quality forage probably both aspects digestion rate and passage will be enhanced allowing the car to consume more kilograms of dry matter and for each kilogram to extract more nutrients okay so it seems that the nutritionists were right again that this is an important aspect remember the third one that they thought was important is TriMet her in taking early lactation and I want to go back to what Kant already mentioned this aspect of selecting cows for improved feed efficiency or for negative residual feed intake okay usually the selection takes place in pass early lactation so a lot of the data it's been generated in the US and other countries are with cows past 50 or 60 days in milk when they are no longer losing body weight so we asked this question in this data set of about 400 cows and this is how phenotypic relationships not genetic relationship we asked the question whether cows are more efficient in mid lactation are they also more efficient in very early lactation so mid lactation here is after nine weeks postpartum early lactation here is in the first five weeks postpartum and in fact there is a positive relationship so as we can see the more pause the more efficient cows the ones that have a negative residual feeding take value they are also more efficient in early lactation whether we looked at his residual feed intake or residual nitrogen intake so in fact the cows that eat lasting lactation to produce the same amount of milk they also eat less in early lactation to produce that same amount of milk okay and the phenotypic correlation is about point 46 okay so it says it's not extremely high but it's not shy we don't know whether that's going to hold true when the geneticists work with the genetic correlation okay so if you look at the two extremes in that population of 400 cows the ones that were efficient in mid lactation and their worst the ones that were not efficient in mid lactation what happened to them in early lactation the first five weeks postpartum so as expected the ones that were more efficient they also ate less in early lactation compared to the ones that were less efficient in mid lactation okay their nitrogen efficiency was greater so about 31% of the nitrogen consumed was converting into milk nitrogen whereas here is only 27% but the point that I want to make here is whether we change body energy content so this is the change in energy content in this case they're mobilizing body tissue based on daily changes the body weight and we calculate that energy content based on the body condition score on cows because one of the the concerns would be that increased efficiency in those cows would result in animals perhaps losing a little bit more weight as we select based on what we observe in mid lactation maybe those cows will lose a little bit more weight in their lactation and what we found in fact that there is a slight increase in energy loss from body tissues but not a huge difference okay and the cows had exactly same milk production so in fact selecting for greater fuel efficiency mid lactation seems to also enhance feed efficacy in early lactation there is a small energy cost in terms of body reserves to those animals now because we are reducing feed intake in early lactation are we compromised in total lactation milk and what we observe in this data set this is our phenotypic data okay instead there is almost no relationship so you can see here that the r-square is only 2 percent or less and this is dry matter intake in the first week with 305 day milk yield observed in those cows and we have perimeters and multiple scales here in this data set so you can see that the slope of that line after adjusting for parity and other aspects it's only 80 kilograms meaning that there is only a small increase in milk yield if cows were to eat more in early lactation based on this association or eat more in in the second week of lactation ok now if there a difference in milk yield at 305 days depending upon the RFI of cows in early or mid lactation and we see no relationship between the two meaning that in fact as we select for improved feed efficiency in those cows we should not see any loss in milk yield in the entire lactation in spite of the fact that we're facing our phenotypes in a restricted period in the lactation okay so I just want to move on into two other aspects that nutritionist did not they might have identified but I asked them to select only three the first one is supply of metabolizable protein mm their lactation because there's a lot of debate of reducing protein in diets of lactating dairy cows and I want to use this experiment here from Ohio State University they initially enroll 63 cows but only 56 contribute to the analysis of the data and they had three treatments these girls were fed from two from two days after 23 days in milk so a period of 21 or 22 days postpartum a diet with 16% good protein what they call a control or a high metabolizable protein diet in which they increase the crude protein content of the diet by manipulating some of the ingredients and in this particular case they use a little bit more heated treated soybean meal and they also use corn gluten meal in their diet so they increase about two percentage points of protein but they didn't make major improvements in amino acid profile but obviously the total amount of amino acids per kilogram of diets gonna be more or they did it increased the amount of crude protein not as high as in the high-end P here but they improve amino acid profile of the diet okay so let's just look at how this animals dis cows responded they had multi-person preemie pers cows so there was no difference in dry matter intake in the first three weeks of lactation or in the first 23 days in milk but because these two diets provide more NP this cows consume more to a MP based on energy predictions okay just because each kilogram contain more MP consequently the MP balance for the first three weeks for Spartan was less negative in the diets that provide more metabolize of protein and the cows responded they increase milk production about two kilograms in both diets during the one that had greater crude protein but not a superior amino acid profile or the one that had a little bit less good protein but improved the amino acid profile so we got to be careful with early lactation cows restricting the supply of protein and I want to show you this data here from Denmark that is quite interesting experiment and what they did here as opposed to allowing the cows to eat they basically fed exactly the same diet false part into this cows okay they died that contain 16.4% crude protein but they infused up amazingly a mixture of amino acids that resemble casein amino acid profile and the product that they infused was about 88% metabolizable and they had a stair-step infusion rate so for the first week they infuse up about 700 grams metabolized protein coming from this amino acid mixture and then slowly decrease they decrease 28 grams per day until 500 grams per day and then again they went to three days of this plateau and then they decrease again until 30 days Paul's part these animals had rumen cannulas they were multi catheterized and the infusion was done in the abomasum i just want to show you what happened in terms of animal response in those cows by providing more MP cows did not eat more so they ate exactly the same amount of dry matter but as you can expect the total net energy consumed the total metabolize with protein consumed was substantially more because of the energy provided by the by the supplement and obviously by the amino acids provided by the supplement and you can see that this cows responded substantially about a six kilogram increase in milk yield in the first 30 days of lactation so this is telling me that if we are able to make out to consume or metabolize of protein they are eager to respond in terms of milk production in this very early lactation the memory sucking up the amino acids that are flowing through the bloodstream at that stage just the last two things can we out or tissue response based on the fats that we feed okay and this is an experiment from Michigan State University from atom locks group in which they fed very early lactation cows a controlled diet without any supplemental fat only the fatty acids from the basal ingredient or they supplemented dives with one and a half percent fatty acids with different ratios of pal medic-2 oleic acid 8210 all the way up to six to thirty okay and we can see that feeding fat did not increase dry matter intake not change dry matter intake in early lactation which is the comparison between the black line with the average of the three colored lines but this cows responded in milky or substantially so energy corrected milk increase about four kilograms per day some of the increases because of the increase in milk fat coming from the efficient transfer of fatty acids into into the mammary gland for milk fat synthesis but some also came from body weight losses particularly in the diet with hypo medica acid so much so that when they manager nifa and insulin concentrations the cows overfed the higher content of americas in the fed Superman they had higher non-certified fatty acids suggesting increase lipolysis perhaps because they had lower concentrations of [Music] insulin that usually would have anti lipolytic effects but one thing that we need to think about as we move cows into higher production is that fatty acids have the ability to modulate some of the hormonal responses one of which is the ability of polymeric acid which we often feel in dives because of the positive effects on milk centers to alter tissue sensitivity to insulin through the synthesis of ceramide so palmitic acid is used for de novo synthesis of ceramides and ceramides have the ability to block insulin transduction cascade so when cells are exposed to ceramides this suppresses phosphorylation of protein kinase B also called a KT and this protein here is part of the transduction mechanism of insulin and basically what this does is reduces insulin sensitivity or increases insulin resistance in the tissue therefore if this happens in the adipose tissue or in the muscle there will be less lipogenesis more like policies but this also happens in other tissues and the example that I'm going to pose here is from reproductive cells or granulosa cells from the follicle in this particular case here are from humans so we know that insulin should stimulate phosphorylation of a KT or protein kinase B and that is part of the mechanism of action of insulin so this is quantification of protein abundance of phosphorylated akt relative to unphosphorylated ADT so here we see that by adding insulin there is a massive up regulation in the abundance of protein in the granulosa cells okay this is true anytime we look in this figure in this figure but look at the attenuation of the response as the concentration of emetic acid in the culture media increase so this is showing that palmitate can suppress the ability of insulin to induce lipogenesis or suppress lipolysis so perhaps there will be ways to modulate the fatty acid that we feed as we deal with higher producing cows to allow them to be more or less likely to depend upon the stage of lactation that we desire Leslie I just want to point this figure here from a review article from Alex back in Spain in which he looked at a summary of 51 experiments that reported energy consumption and energy secretion milk and he plotted the energy consumed above maintenance of those cows accounting for changes in body weight in body energy okay relative to the amount of milk energy secreted so in theory if we are dealing with net energy for lactation and we accounted for by the needs of maintenance of the cow as well as changes in body weight gain or loss any everything else should be diverting into milk energy okay and that would be true if the animals responded in the - or the dotted line here the theoretical line of one-to-one efficiency but we can see that that's not the case of this data set and the point here is that it seems that as animals become more productive or they consume more calories in this case here this cows are consuming 35 mega calories above the maintenance needs which would be the equivalent of about 50 kilograms of milk but on average they are only screening about 30 more calories of energy in milk the equivalent of about 42 or 43 kilograms of milk with 3.5% fat so this is telling us that as production increase perhaps the efficiency of use of energy in the diet to be converting to energy in milk will be reduced either because maintenance needs of the cow changes or other aspects so just to summarize forage quality will become more critical as production increase that allows for high forest ice to be fed which is probably healthier and probably cheaper we need to implement diets and health programs to reduce the risk of disease disease suppress appetite outer cell nutrients are used the animal shifts its priority from production to survival preliminary very preliminary data itself in a typical suggests that as we select for an improved feed efficiency early lactation energy status should not be compromised okay at least that's what we can say at this point thank Erin lactation cows need to be cautious about limiting protein and in fact we should probably supplement greater amounts or greater concentration of MP than we probably would think typically think about if we want to optimize Macchio I think in the future we need to refine fatty acid feeding for different stages of lactation and perhaps we're gonna feed things that promote less light Paul is very early on and then we're gonna target fatty acids that are important for milk fat synthesis tissue response and maybe other aspects lastly the efficiency of energy for lactation used for net energy since in milk seems to decrease as production increase and perhaps we need to rework the energetics particularly the maintenance requirements of a cow as we move into curves with very high producing animals so thank you very much for your attention and I guess Brian will take over from now thank you so much was a and again thank you to you both for the excellent presentations which is set up very well the discussion session still time for people to send their questions in as we go into this discussion session I think Jose and Kent can see the question so I might ask some but if you want to also just jump in and address some of the questions directly a please do so so I just our first question that I really liked a very practical one so better feeds are called the forage in the farm should be fed to fresh cows so can you say it again Brenda right so and you showed in one of your slides that the BMR slides how much improved and so if you had to make the choice would you feed the BMR I call the silage to your fresh cows unquestionable yes so your you should feed your best quality force your early lactation high groups it's unquestionable that you know I think with the idea that we need to limit energy intake free part and a lot of times people have moved the opposite direction we became accustomed to add very low quality horrible force like straw to Cal diets but in early lactation I think we need to use the thermometer of how much I can feed of a better quality forage without causing any digestive problems and the way of doing that is if the inventory allows you just need to feed more forage in the diet yeah I think it's unquestionable if I have to choose between two piles of corn silage one with 3% lignin and 38% MDF and the next one with 45% in DF and 3.8 percent of lignin the first one will go to the fresh cows and the high high pants and the other one will go to the low pants I won for mostly for Kent but by using genomics and heavy selection of specific traits are we heading to two wards genetic lines like it happens with poultry or swine you know we could certainly go that route I mean there have been a couple of the studs that have looked at that a little bit just mostly in terms of how do you help the farmers control inbreeding and sort of have you know maybe three lines that don't overlap so much that you can just interbreed you know the red line and the Green Line and whatever right you know very simple mating strategies but I mean in a reality our breeds our selection lines right I mean jerseys Holsteins our selection lines they just evolve you know they've been selected over centuries not you know not a short period of time but we could go that route I don't know I mean there's so much variation within the breeder still that you can kind of find what you want anyway you don't necessarily have to have a fertility line and a you know you know milk volume longing and the components line or whatever right I mean a it's a little harder to do that in cattle too because the longer generation interval though not as long as it used to be right but those those selection lines work better when you're doing you know three breed cross is that sort of thing right the maternal line made it to the meat quality line and growth that sort of thing we may see it but it's not imminent I guess you showed that slide that you have different species that as we select for residual feeding day animals become leaner yeah I mean the cattle is from beef cattle data sure is there any initial data from dairy cattle that we know what the genetic correlations are between RFI or feed saved in daughter's Realty yeah there are and I'm not recalling the exact numbers as AI should I think Paul van Raden has done that I if I remember correctly and it's bad to guess I think it was pretty low you know the confidence range including zero you know so I think that that's all you're something to keep an eye on right I mean the last thing we want to do is is select for skinny cows and more health problems and I think we have to be really more careful in selecting for feed efficiency in dairy cattle than we do in meat animals right because more things can go wrong you know and we're asking these animals to do to do more different things so I think that you know that's something that we have to monitor you know pretty darn closely but it wasn't alarming to me when I saw it not I can't remember know the exact number it was pretty small so the other question is with genomics can we make sense and disentangle yeah what do you call it the recessives right yeah the genetic defects well Jennifer yeah and I'm assuming a lot of negative effects of the inbreeding is coming from accumulation or homeless I cause an accumulation of bad genes yeah yep or maybe some of the appli types that show up so can we sort that out such that we have daughters of cows and bulls that are relatives but we don't have the negative effects because everybody's going for the same rules yeah yeah pretty closely related right very and yes we can do that so sort of two thoughts here and yeah we had a student now some years ago she's at University of Pennsylvania you know not working in in livestock but she looked at in the Jersey breed she traced the inbreeding depression back to founder sires and you know found that it was different in certain families which is what you'd expect what's the genetic load that this old famous bull carries as compared with another one in terms of recessives and then if you in breed one animals daughter's one you know famous you know foundation bulls you know future offspring your and great offspring you have more genetic cost or more cost of inbreeding than others and so we know that right so we can identify that but the other part that's interesting is the folks at USDA particularly probably under 18 who I mentioned earlier you know figured out that that just by simple math you can look at regions of the genome where there are missing homozygotes right and so those are lethal right I mean not every homozygosity at every undesirable allele results in lethality right sometimes it's just reduced performance but but that was really clever and so the cost of inbreeding has gone down right because we can identify these genetic defects so fast now and and breed around them or breed them out of the population alright so we have more tools I mean the inbreeding is a tough tough thing right because we can get rid of it instantly by just you know stopping selection right and let everybody be a parent and have random mating and go back to you know the good old days of 100 years ago or whatever right we're not going to do that because we want to make progress so we have to have this balance and so there's a lot of hand-wringing that happens about inbreeding but not actual action that happens right so we worry about it but we don't really do anything because we we want improved performance more than we're worried about inbreeding if that makes sense it's hard to go away from those top polls yeah you know there but it certainly makes it easier to manage it now with genomics because we just know so much about the genome you know there was a question you know Brandi said we could kind of look at some of these and I can't remember now exactly what it was about the NRC and I'd be curious to hear today's thoughts on this and you know I don't want to pick on it because it's the nutrition Bible right and I'm a geneticist so that would be kind of bad for me to say you know nasty things about the NRC but I think you know from the out from an outsider's view point and we look at this topic I think we're beyond the point now where a once every 20 year Bible on nutrition requirements is a good thing right I think we're making such rapid genetic change we're making such rapid changes in management in nutrition you know there's another question about ruminant microbiome that wasn't a thing in 2001 right not too much maybe a few people we're working in that area now there's a ton of work and so I think we need and I think you guys recognize this in the nutrition community a system that can be updated more rapidly it's not just that it's published every 20 years let's say but in in 2001 and that was the end product of several years of discussions about published literature that was published the the most recent of which would have been in the late 1990s which would have been experiments done in the mid 1990s and earlier so really it's not even 20 years it's probably 30 year old data right now right the actual trials that went into that so we need sort of a more robust and interactive system where you can can adjust it on the fly I think but that's just my view from the outside Jose I don't know what your thoughts are there you're right yeah so you have to have the data to substantiate the recommendations so there's two aspects is that obviously there is a delay the first one but the second one that is more eye-opening is that the fundamental research that is lacking from a previous cycle is never addressed in the next cycle right so a lot of times the the data that provides the backbone to generate equations for nutrient needs they are from fundamental research that was performed in the 60s or 50s or 70s best example is mineral nutrition all the isotope work was done in the 50s and 60s nobody does that now therefore we do try a narrow type of experiments yeah we add more we add less and then we look at responses is it's not mechanistic to a great extent a lot of the experiments are not mechanistic why is that because of funding it's because of money I mean those are expensive experiments right it'd be really intensive and now you mentioned yesterday I think or the other day in our discussion about you know these multi lactation trials or even a full lactation trial it's really not a thing anymore right we just not are doing six weeks eight weeks 12 weeks at a time and that's it that's right so to use stable radio isotopes I give an example we're looking into calcium stable isotopes per animal just to have the enough amount of the isotopes just because the size of the cow it costs about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars per cow just to do an experiment with one animal now if we were to infuse radioactive isotopes and we have to thank the cow so there's a lot of fundamental questions that are never answered because it's expensive to do in cows that's one aspect the second one so to that point josée sorry to interrupt but you know it's part of the you know you see some of that early work done by USDA scientists and others were you had a sort of a stable research budget maybe not the sort of pressure to publish fifteen papers a year you could publish one really good one and spend a ton of money bringing it and people were happy whereas now that will get you fired or not tenured at least is that it is you know it's a big issue I think it's a big issue yeah and in the other aspect obviously in the 60s and 70s or maybe the 70s and 80s university research were the lead places in terms of progress or where things are gonna move in terms of infrastructure today university research farms are they like behind yeah so we go to commercial farms to see what they are doing and then we can emulate that when we build the next facility and very few people revamp their facilities so the gap between what University of Florida heard does and what the best words do is huge yet and used to be in error or used to be closed so how many university cards have 28 30,000 pounds of milk what Michigan State and Universal Wisconsin and maybe somewhere else in Europe everybody else is in the 24 to 26 thousand pounds whereas we're talking about the cows of the next ten years there will be probably many herds with 32,000 pounds or you know 15 16 thousand kilograms per cow with a thousand cows two thousand cows yeah it is it is hard to answer those questions because a lot of those fundamental questions are done not with the ideal cow is not an early lactation cattle a lot of the fundamental physiology is done with a cannula cow with a multi catheterize cow that often times slowly producing 35 kilos a meal so and funding is an issue hey guys it might jump in here because your discussion is provoking quite a few additional questions so I thought we'd go to some of them okay so everyone here is an what genetic number or number are available to help the chairman quickly what the potential over here it is is this hair capable is this hair capable of 150 pounds average that should be a simple question it's really not because you know we can estimate the genetic potential but the management potential that herd varies greatly so what what I was trying to illustrate with that scatterplot was really the differences between animals you know we have big herds now we have big pens and you can look at a pan or you can look at all the first lactation cows that Alliance dairy or somewhere right and you could say wow are you getting the potential which means are the best of those animals exceeding the genetically poorer animals by as much or more than we'd expect that's kind of what you can do as a diagnostic it's hard to say you should be getting 97 pounds or 112 pounds because that then really gets into mostly non-genetic questions of where is kind of the average what we can differentiate is what's that slope look like by by genetics and and are they are you capturing the extra if that makes sense maybe Jose can answer that more eloquently was it from a nutritionist point of view do you think more 10 pounds or 100 pounds behind a nutritionally the genetic potential of a cow huh good question I don't know because that are you behind it all maybe we were not behind it all that's why I didn't become a geneticist because I wanted to do the difficult job of being a nutritionist the issue is how to disentangle this yeah you can compare different farms yeah I can today I can probably go in genotype animals or get the genotypes they have and look at their breeding values genetically and look at how they perform in farm a a B or C or D and I could have treated that to everything that farmed this how do we know that that is all nutrition yeah it's there's lots of things that influence production so it's hard to pinpoint a single one so if I were to think about the potential of the breed or the cow the one that I know phenotypically the highest producing cow has produced thirty six thousand kilograms of milk and our average cow in the US produces eleven thousand kilos so we are only thirty percent of the potential for the maximum production per cow genetically I'm not sure what's the the top cow and in the country I really don't know so yeah I don't I don't have an answer for that so yes I was a great question because if you don't have answers there must be a good question right yeah that's a tough one to answer and it's to know how far are we from allowing that cow to reach the potential there are so many factors that influence that so here's another one from our friend Luke eeny daniel Wakeeney so if selection aims to have more resilient cows and not only produce more but also being healthier will it be more profitable to capture the milk potential on a full third or even a fourth lactation of the cows considering that it takes two locations to break-even yeah then you're still trying to get me on that less light because he really hates that no I'm joking but sure right if you if you look at an individual cow levelly said when do you pay off your bills it makes no sense right if you look at the law and it maybe it makes no sense any at all right but if you have to look at the whole system right and if you said okay now I capture more value in the beef enterprise or now I spend less money on my breeding program you know so therefore I also spend much less money on labor you know that's kind of the the kind of thinking I was trying to generate and and the cow would have to be different right we would have to have a cow that doesn't ramp up to her peak yield over several occasions we would want to cow that matures more quickly maybe calves at a year and a half and milks at 90 percent of mature value right away which we could do by selection it would take a little while right but we couldn't just take today's cow and today's management and just make a change like that right and we'd have to change the whole system if we even thought it was a good idea which it may not be right but at least Daniel thinking right right so it's another Daniel type question but it's me that's asking it in terms of from a sustainability point of view if we think of the whole farm system and probably in the future or even in certain countries like the Netherlands already where you know the nitrogen efficiency part is really important because basically you know they have severe limitations now on what they can do and apply to the limited land launch space they have maybe there's you know there another element to this efficiency or sustainability we need to take into account when we're thinking about the type of car we want to breed for the future you know we stayed away from nitrogen efficiency and and again it just stays the expert here not me but when this first project started Nino 10 you know 9 10 years ago on a feed efficiency we stayed away from it with the logic that people were over feeding protein and so how do you evaluate the efficiency of something that's being fed at higher levels than it's needed right but the question maybe I would before I turn it over to dr. Santos is can we now with the genetic tools we have I I identify those animals that drop that are likely to lose production if we reduce the protein and those that aren't right because if you over feed protein just in case then in case some cow drops well then we if we could figure out which cows are then maybe some cows are happy at a lower level right and we could identify that with a DNA test I don't know well just by selection for residual feeding take automatically you're going to be more nitrogen efficient yeah yeah by doing that because the cow is unless we are producing milk with less protein but that's not the case because the protein is part of the equation calculating energy corrected milk that's being produced by the cow but just by eating less trying matter states less total nitrogen and therefore nitrogen efficiency will go up so we will make some progress on nitrogen efficient so we'll go back to what Brian mentioned for countries that have restrictions on how much nutrient they can dispose of in their land this will be a plus in terms of value-added to to the selection program it is one way another idea out in my field as perhaps we could select for cows can recycle nitrogen better just just wonder you know broadly in this area of nutrition interaction was managed but you know it makes me think about you know like the animal breeding community versus plant breeding and I'm not an expert on plant breeding by any stretch the whole you know tetraploid 's and stuff kind of makes my head hurt and i don't really understand it but i do know that you have hundreds and hundreds of plant breeders out there because you have to test every variety and every soil type and moisture level and so on and genotype environment interaction is a huge thing that they focus on understanding we in animal breeding especially in dairy cattle breeding have treated it as noise and we've said we want to know the genetic potential and everything that nutritionist does veterinarian does that's noise and we want to get rid of it and so we can focus only on what's the average genetic potential of this Bulls daughters and that made sense in a progeny testing system because you were averaging the performance of that Bulls daughter out over hundreds of Hertz right now with genomics we got flipping all around right so now we we can know about the individual females genetic potential at great detail now we can no more because herds are bigger we can know more about their management their feed quality we have the technologies than the data streams to do that you couldn't do that with a thousand little herds but with with a smaller number of big herds you can you can look at G by E interaction really effectively and I think we still are trying to get our heads around whether the the work that veterinarians and nutritionists and others do is a feature or a bug right and we treated it as a bug in the past and now I think it's a feature right and we got to get our heads around how to link those two together well guys I think I know that Josie I don't know basically stay fill a glass up again or he still has one last question about again some cows more efficient because of let's say the size of the viscera ie the size of the remaining are etc what your feelings on let's say organ size or all these digestive organ sizes as being part of selecting or cows being more efficient that sounds like a physiology question I'm out my intuition would say if we're looking at residual feed intake or our feed efficiency like residual feed intake I would say that they probably have smaller but at least in beef cattle larger viscera accounts for greater maintenance requirement so I would say that if I had to really document that my hypothesis would be that more efficient animals probably have smaller visceral smaller intestine smaller room and less omental fat maybe completely wrong but I would be the case perhaps more productive cows irrespective of their efficiency they probably have larger viscera because not genetically but phenotypically larger animals produce more milk and at least first lactation animals they produce more milk and therefore they're larger they probably have a larger gastrointestinal tract genetically is the opposite larger animals there is a negative genetic correlation correct can't between body size and milk yield but you know typically I think it's a positive genetic correlation it's pretty small yeah but I would say they probably have smaller viscera so there is less energy used for protein turnover for accumulation of tissue and things like that well again on behalf of our CEO and the audience we just like to thank you both for again an excellent evening on a very stimulating discussion and I hope next year that we will be back together physically so that we can obviously not only enjoy whatever topic Daniel bikini comes up with for next year but also be able to enjoy really wine and cheese so thank you Oh before I want other thing before I go just to say that this has been recorded and will be available within a week on our feed channel and everybody who's participated will receive an email indicating when it has been posted so there anything you want to go back and revisit or recommend to a friend or colleague this this will be on our our feed channel so thank you again and have a great evening good night [Music]