Sheep Industry News August 2021

President’s Notes SUSAN SHULTZ ASI President

Now is the Time to Embrace Genetics in the Sheep Industry

M uch discussion and dialog have taken place in recent years regarding how the American sheep industry can become more efficient in order to meet the demands of our consumer. Those demands include making American lamb and wool premium products on a consistent basis and improv ing productivity and profitability for a sustainable industry. the need to improve collaboration and explore new technologies to modernize within our industry. Committee members agreed that prioritizing ways to improve productivity and increase the speed of adopting new technologies was especially important in the area of genetic improvement. Through the ASI Let’s Grow initiative that followed, there were numerous examples of pockets of producer groups that were at tempting to do just that – collaborate in order to utilize the latest in genetic technology. But even with all the generous industry support for genetic improvement, there has always been a void in bringing together under one umbrella all of the key stakehold ers to collectively move projects forward that could benefit our industry. It had become increasingly clear that with limited resources and the rapid pace of change in both quantitative and molecu lar genetics that the time for structured collaboration and the prioritizing of projects that had the potential to make significant changes to our production efficiencies had arrived. I can only imagine the changes that our industry could make if we were able to embrace and adopt the genetic tools that are currently avail able, such as estimated breeding values, genomic marker panels and now genomically enhanced breeding values, plus the future tools that are currently being studied. Several events are merging together and that leads me to be lieve that this could be the decade of genetic change for our sheep industry. First, the coming of age of a very talented young group of genetic scientists who are working together to implement change. Second, is the cooperation and coordination between our Agricultural Research Service stations to create new and focused scientific, genetic advancement. Third is the rapid reduction in Tracing conversations back to the Indus try Roadmap in 2014, the productivity im provement committee I chaired recognized

the cost of DNA analysis, which makes it more affordable for many sheep producers. This brings us to the fourth event in these new developments.

Soon after a formal meeting of stakehold ers with much discussion and dialog about American sheep genetics at the 2019 ASI Annual Convention in Scottsdale, Ariz., a group of five progressive producers were tasked to move the discussion forward to an action plan. The concept was to create a separate organization supported by the

ASI VISION Premier Protein Premier Fiber Environmentally Regenerative Economically Sustainable

American Lamb Board, ASI and the National Sheep Industry Im provement Center, along with industry stakeholders, with a vision of being a proactive, collaborative initiative focused on improving genetic tools to enhance profitability. By including all of the sheep industry stakeholders, this effort would create the critical mass needed to drive genetic research, development and adoption to new levels. During the pandemic, this group of producer volunteers worked on the vision and mission, wrote bylaws and reached out to numerous stakeholder groups for their input, thus turning a concept into a reality. Rusty Burgett (Iowa), Ben Lehfeldt (Mont.), Bill Shultz (Ohio), Brad Boner (Wyo.) and Tom Boyer (Utah) are leading the way for the recently formed non-profit organization Sheep Genetics USA. Tom will share more of the story in this issue. Through their designated action committees, Sheep Genetics USA will bring together stakeholders representing consumers, producers, educators, researchers, feeders, packers and breed organizations to focus on supporting constructive projects to improve genetics. As one of their first initiatives, ASI is pleased to team with Sheep Genetics USA to launch this August issue of the Sheep Industry News dedicated to genetics. Hopefully this will be an annual occurrence and will showcase how producers can increase profitability and efficiencies by using modern genetic technolo gies. I hope you enjoy this special issue, and thank you to all the volunteer leaders and organizations that have worked together to bring these ideas to fruition. My best.

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