Breeding heat-resistant livestock for a post-warming world: A worthy endeavor?

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The future of chickens in a warming world? (CREDIT: University of Delaware, via Los Angeles Times)

A chicken with a featherless neck looks rather freaky (see photo to the right), but it might be the future of poultry in a post-warming world.

Evan Halper at the Los Angeles Times chronicles the quest by researchers at the University of Delaware, funded by the federal government, to breed heat-resistant chickens. Halper writers:

These experiments reflect a continued shift in the federal government’s response to climate change. With efforts to reduce carbon emissions lagging behind what most scientists believe will be needed to forestall further warming, the government increasingly is looking for ways to protect key industries from the impact.

Climate change could have dramatic effects on livestock farming:

Turkeys are vulnerable to a condition that makes their breast meat mushy and unappetizing. Disease rips through chicken coops. Brutal weather can claim entire cattle herds.

And it’s not the seemingly minor rise in overall temperatures that’s the major issue. “It’s the increased number and duration of heat waves. The issue is helping these chickens or any animals survive in a state of increased heat stress,” Univeristy of Delaware’s Carl Schmidt said in a presentation.

So Schmidt’s team went to Africa to find the freaky-looking naked-necked chickens mentioned above and map their genomes. Their featherless necks are actually great at reducing the heat stress on the birds by giving them an expanse of un-insulated skin that can shed unwanted degrees. Hopefully they can find out which genes help control this trait of featherless necks and introduce it into large and fast-growing modern American chickens.

Another team, led by Gale Strasburg, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Michigan State University, is focused on turkeys. His team is exposing hundreds of turkey chicks and eggs to increased temperatures (via heat lamp) and studying the muscles and genetics of the ones that do best in a hotter environment in the hopes of figuring out how to breed heat-resistant turkeys.

But is it even worth it to try to improve our birds to thrive in a post-warming world? Many critics say the federal government is trying to keep pace with meat consumption while it should instead be trying to find meat substitutes and encourage people to consume less meat. Meat is an incredibly energy and resource intensive source of food.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture approach to climate change “is like trying to promote driver safety while helping the car industry make faster cars,” said Alan Miller, who recently retired as a principal climate-change specialist at the World Bank.

The meat industry should be more radical in confronting climate change, Miller said, pointing to an approach backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates that takes animals out the process altogether. The billionaire is bullish on technology that would use pea proteins to create replicas of beef and chicken that are indistinguishable from the real thing.

“There’s no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people,” Gates wrote recently on his blog. “Yet we can’t ask everyone to become vegetarians. We need more options for producing meat without depleting our resources.”

For their part, the scientists trying to develop better livestock seem to see themselves as pragmatists (there will always be meat demand, so we should make sure we can provide it) and — despite the arguments of critics — allies in the effort to reduce resource consumption.

They want their improved breeds of animals to have a smaller footprint, not only allowing meat production to persist apace under high-temperature conditions but to do so while being less of a burden on the environment.

The subjective matter of taste, notes Halper, complicates matters considerably. (Consider the introduction of the common carp to the U.S., which was brought across the Atlantic to improve our available food supply but has since fallen out of favor as a food source and become a nuisance species.)

Halper’s example is the heat-tolerant Brahman cattle of India which could thrive in warm conditions but fails to pass American taste-tests. Oklahoma State University’s Megan Rolf is trying to circumvent the problem by creating, in Halper’s words, “an uber-steer as resilient as a Brahman and tasty as an Angus.”

And what of the developing world where many of these resilient breeds of livestock are being studied?

Schmidt says he hopes his work can be most beneficial in increasing survival for backyard flocks in impoverished areas of Africa and South America. As the University of Delaware team seeks birds that are more durable, that information can be used to create a more resilient food supply there, too.

“If the developing world runs into problems with food security,” he said, “that affects everybody.”

Read Evan Halper’s original article at the Los Angeles Times: “Scientists race to develop farm animals to survive climate change

Kenrick Vezina is Gene-ius Editor for the Genetic Literacy Project and a freelance science writer, educator, and naturalist based in the Greater Boston area.

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