A REVOLUTIONARY suite of artificial breeding technologies is hitting the beef industry this year, promising to condense seven years of selective breeding into just seven days.

Recently-formed Australian genetic technology company Nbryo says it is aiming to re-imagine livestock systems for future food resilience.

Nbryo will outline some details about its project during a session on Wednesday this week at Beef 2024 in Rockhampton (full details at base of page).

To nullify any misinterpretations that may exist about ‘genetic manipulation’, the process is simply standard embryo transfer, but done much more efficiently, and at greater at speed and scale.

By any standards, the broader scope of the Nbryo project is visionary, and potentially far reaching. The technology is designed to have equal application for a progressive beef producer in Australia looking to produce more efficient and environmentally friendly beef, as it is for a smallholder farmer in Bangladesh with two head of cattle, who could improve his or her productivity by as much as 50pc in a single generation.

For this reason the project has attracted some serious early financial backers, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nbryo says the broader project is about re-imagining livestock systems, for future food resilience.

“It’s about enabling animal-sourced protein to be more readily available, while ensuring animal wellbeing – not only for welfare, but being fit-for-purpose, without wastage, and natural systems resilience, particularly around methane,” Nbryo managing director Dr Gerard Davis said.

“It’s a technology platform benefitting farmers, animals, and the planet itself. Crucially, each component is designed to integrate with each other to deliver the Nbryo platform,” he said.

The entire process being developed by Nbryo involves a number of different components protected by Intellectual Property, rather than one single element.

The four key components, being developed under separate R&D work streams are:

• Identification: genetic selection using accurate sexing of embryos and genetic reliability
• Scale: Low cost high scale production of quality embryos
• Delivery: A greatly simplified embryo transfer process, with improved preservation and logistics
• Data analysis: Automated traceability and advanced analytics for critical insights.

Much of the detail about how the technology works is still under wraps for commercial reasons, but more will be learned as the project unfolds over the next 12 months.

The broader project has already produced calves on the ground, and the methods to enable and facilitate embryo transfer are described as “well ahead of schedule.” Other components will be rolled-out over time. A trial ‘ambassador’ program is underway this year with a limited number of co-operator herds to field-test the technology.

In terms of cost, the ultimate project objective is to get embryo transfer significantly below the cost currently associated with producing a calf through artificial insemination.

Rather than wait until all research phases of the larger project are completed, Nbryo is planning to commercialise the different components incrementally, gaining feedback and proving each in the field.

Background work

Much of the background work and prior learnings behind the project have been carried out at the Murdoch family’s highly innovative Nindooinbah artificial breeding centre south of Brisbane.

Principal Euan Murdoch and general manager Nick Cameron have developed and refined embryo transfer processes at Nindooinbah over 20 years, in addition to carrying out broader genetics and genomics research. All of those learnings have contributed to the new platform which forms the Nbryo company.

Why embryo transfer?

So why is embryo transfer so important, and widely-employed by progressive pastoral companies and elite seedstock breeders?

“It’s because they recognise that they can make significant genetic advances in quick time,” Dr Davis said. “At the same time, in its current form ET is expensive, difficult to do effectively, and hard to scale,” he said.

“The key objective of Nbryo is to harness the power of genetic change through ET, and put it in the hands of any cattle producer on the planet – by making it easy, accessible and affordable.”

The first phase project was formed a couple of years ago, with funding grants from MLA and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That first stage was about developing some specific embryo technology, providing the first step along the path to making it easier, c0heaper and scalable.

The key to delivering scale on the project was removing most of the manual laboratory process involved in conventional ET work, and replacing it with automation, Dr Davis said.

“We aren’t talking about doing anything particularly novel with the embryos themselves – and certainly not genetic manipulation – but it’s about selection at the start and selection amongst embryos, while enabling that to happen at scale. We have already made some large advances in that, which are different to the way things are currently done. Those advances already made allow us to produce embryos at lower cost, and with higher pregnancy rates,” he said.

“As we add more step-change technologies, then it will change things dramatically – not just for the elite bull producer, but the commercial beef producer, allowing them to make dramatic genetic improvement.”

Third world benefit attracting funding

One of the key reasons the Gates Foundation is spending money on the research, is its potential application in livestock industries in developing and third world countries.

Based on early outcomes, the Gates Foundation and MLA returned a year later to fund a second project phase, and a third, even large component is now underway. At each stage, the level of funding has been stepped up.

Early success has led to patents being secured under the first project, and the second will also soon be patent-protected.

Some of the first calves to hit the ground using the new technologies arrived in September 2022, followed by autumn and spring calf crops last year.

Many of Nbryo’s new technologies are currently being trialled in a New Zealand livestock operation running 30,000 beef cows and 40,000 dairy cows. The company involved has a clear mandate to test technologies that will improve environmental sustainability, animal welfare and reduce emissions.

None of Nbryo’s research work is carried out in-house. Instead, it is contracted out in component parts to universities and other research and design organisations, both Australian and overseas.

Further equity has also been added to the project for the commercialisation phase, via Nindooinbah’s Euan Murdoch and family, his manager Nick Cameron, geneticist and company chief executive Gerard Davis, who has had extensive experience in genetics technologies companies over the past 30 years, and other Australian-based interests. Further rounds of capital raising will happen, as the project moves forward.

Market driven need

Dr Davis said the livestock industry in Australia and globally was under existential threat, because of the impacts of climate change and its methane contributions through enteric emissions.

“It’s led to the rise in alternatives to animal-sourced protein (plant-based, lab grown and fermentation), putting pressure on livestock producers to reduce their carbon footprint,” he said.

“Those influences might not be having a big impact on the livestock sectors to date, but the point is, the pressure is there, and most beef and dairy industries around the world are recognising that they need to take steps.”

“The key driver is that while the consumer wants to buy animal-sourced product, they want lower environmental impact. They are telling that to their suppliers, and those suppliers are in turn going back to producers asking them if they can deliver product with lower environmental impact,” Dr Davis said.

“Nbryo sees this as less of a challenge, and more of an opportunity,” he said.

“It comes down to three main areas. Commercial cows have to get pregnant every year (non-pregnants being a cost to the system).

“If we can make getting each cow pregnant easier and cheaper, that’s a significant opportunity. The average cost of achieving a pregnancy in many markets is in the order of US$70 – either through natural mating (cost of bulls) or AI (cost of semen and activity).

“Obviously, conventional embryo transfer today is much more expensive, but if we can make it easier to get cows pregnant, at a lower cost, then it represents a significant industry opportunity.”

“Secondly, productivity varies dramatically, both within countries and between countries across the world – as a function of many things – nutrition and health among them, but genetics also has an important role to play.”

“We think there’s an opportunity there to make significant improvements in productivity – and in the case of those lower to medium income countries, that’s where the Gates Foundation is particularly interested in our work.”

The third component was around methane emissions, and the ability to have significant impact on methane emissions through productivity improvement – and done in such a way that did not add recurrent cost.

“Genetic change is persistent through the herd over time, producing a more sustainable change in methane production through accelerating productivity,” Dr Davis said.

He said a well-run conventional beef breeding system only makes 1.5pc to 2pc genetic progress per year.

“While that’s cumulative – and genetic improvement has been a very effective pursuit in livestock production – it’s not matching the speed of change that the industry needs to address climate change. And it’s also difficult in certain circumstances – particularly in low to medium income countries.”

On this basis, it could take seven years for a beef herd to make a 10pc change in performance.

“But imagine producing embryos from elite parents – which we are able to genotype, and know in advance what their performance will be in terms of productivity, methane output, disease resistance, heat tolerance, resilience and meat quality – and do it at scale. On top of that, making further selections within a bunch of embryos for even more genetic merit, in a single round of ET production.

“If you consider it takes seven days to complete an ET transfer (day one being IVF and day seven being transfer), we believe the industry will be able to make the same level of genetic gain that it currently takes seven years to achieve with conventional breeding, in seven days.”

“Genomics is well understood these days, people can genomically profile and identify animals with elite genetics, both in terms of productivity and low methane. But you want to be able to produce them at scale, today that’s difficult to do. Certainly breeders can use AI, but that only provides half of the genetic impact. Producing elite embryos captures 100pc of the bang for your buck, but you have to be able to produce them, culture them and deliver them at scale.”

The solution was in taking the human part out of the equation, and having robots do the laboratory work.

Part of the technology being developed by Nbryo will allow embryos to be delivered at scale, and be done in a fashion that means an average commercial producer or AI technician would be able to transfer embryos into cows themselves.

In order to complete the full vision of the project, Nbryo’s current research plan includes 11 work streams, each of which will deliver a ‘commercialisable outcome.’ These will be delivered as versions 0, 1, 2 and so on.

“That’s enabling us to get to the market with our first version this year,” Dr Davis said.

He said the whole process would generate an enormous amount of data, which because of its scale would allow delivery of a level of information to producers that they may not have had access to before.

“That information will be important not only for their own herd productivity and herd improvement, but also to the supply chain programs they are selling into – where the customer wants to know where the cattle have come from, what their genetics is, and whether they are low methane or high productivity animals, for example.”

“We see this program as enabling such information to be available through the supply chain.”

Emissions considerations

Talking specifically about emissions, Dr Davis said there were three ways the Nbryo program would have an impact.

The first is a point that most people already clearly understood: improving productivity reduces emissions intensity. The amount of methane per kilogram of beef is reduced, because of higher productivity.

The second area with significant opportunity to reduce emissions was the ability that the technology presents for any cow to produce any calf the breeder wishes, independent of the cow’s own genetics. The ability to do that is vastly more flexible than current systems.

That capacity to make massive structural change – for example breeding replacement heifers one year and elite-performing steers the following year – would lead to massive efficiencies, including potentially reducing the number of breeding cows to produce the same, or more output, Dr Davis said.

The third opportunity was in directly selecting animals for methane output performance.

“Because of that ability to make substantial genetic change quickly, we’re not talking about gradually reducing the amount of methane, but replacing the current breeding herd with animals that are perhaps 30pc better performers for methane output,” he said.

“Like most other traits, we know there is a wide distribution of methane production in cattle of similar age and type – so there is the capacity to identify animals that are substantially different.

“Being able to identify the good performers genomically, at embryo stage, before a lot of money has been spent on them, is a big opportunity.”

 

• Nbryo will deliver a presentation on the new IVP technology during Beef 2024 in Rockhampton this week. Venue is the Australian Wagyu Association pavilion on Wednesday 8 May from 1pm to 2.30pm.