“Cattle with the best genetics appear to be the most susceptible to acute interstitial pneumonia (AIP),” says Scott MacGregor, a consulting feedyard veterinarian, in a recent Beef magazine article. MacGregor goes on to say that, while the cause of the often fatal disease is still unknown, it tends to appear in the “high-quality, high-performing, big-eating cattle.” Does this mean that all the careful genetic work done in years past has led to naught? No, it just means there is more work yet to be done.
While the disease tends to prefer the best livestock, it is not limited to the genetically superior individuals. The disease has been the bane of farmers for decades, long before the genetic breakthroughs and techniques in use today came to be. Indeed, according to the report in Beef, as far back as 1979, veterinarians at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph in Ontario noted the disease had been observed in cattle for many years.
What this seems to indicate is that genetic manipulation of livestock, both naturally and artificially, has not worsened the problem but rather has yet to address it.
A look at private sector investment trends in recent years sheds a bit of light on why genetic research to address animal disease resistance is progressing so slowly.
The good news is that private sector investments in ag research and development is on the rise; it increased by over 40% in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1994, moving from $5.6 billion to $11 billion in 2010. The bad news is that “R&D spending in the animal-related inputs remain essentially flat” according to a recent USDA Economic Research Service study.
The overriding problem of the seemingly lack of interest in animal genetics is that “firms supplying inputs to the agricultural sector invest in R&D to develop or improve their products with the aim of increasing or maintaining sales and earning a profit.” Translated that means there are products to be sold and profited from in the other agricultural sectors, but nothing much to sell in the animal-related inputs sector.
In other words, a company can sell a sack of seed or feed easier, and often more profitably, than it can develop and sell genetic discoveries. We’ve seen this perfectly understandable problem before in areas such as sequencing the human genome. While the results coming from the genome sequencing industry are hugely profitable for end-users, such as pharmaceutical companies, there’s little payoff for the industry itself.
The public sector, then, becomes the home of the ironically classified “unprofitable” research. Globally, 55% of all ag R&D comes from publicly funded institutions. In 2000, about 60% of total U.S. public agricultural R&D was allocated to research related to plant and animal systems and a similar percentage is found in other high-income countries.
Once the public sector lays the groundwork that the private sector needs in order to develop products that will cure or prevent diseases like AIP, farmers will be presented with a wide range of tools to use. This is why it is so important to support public research and private research. The two are complementary and equal parts of any given solution.
So, no, livestock genetics is not the cause of AIP but advances in the field will likely render the cure.