Head Shepherd
Mark Ferguson from neXtgen Agri brings you the latest in livestock, genetics, innovation and technology. We focus on sheep and beef farming in Australia and New Zealand and the people doing great things in those industries.
Head Shepherd
Genetic Control of Methane with Dr Nicola Lambe
Tune in to hear Dr Nicola Lambe and Dr Mark Ferguson discuss sheep genetics, methane emissions and their intersection with climate change.
With an impressive 25-year career at Scotland's Rural College (SRUC), Nicola brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to our listeners. From her beginnings as a poultry research assistant, Nicola is now a teacher and project manager at SRUC.
Throughout her career, she has played a crucial role in CT scanning work in Scotland, helping farmers breed for better meat and carcass quality in their sheep.
20 years ago they started with a second-hand CT scanner from a hospital that wasn't mobile. Now, they have one on the back of a truck trailer that travels around the country. Through the years this has produced a wealth of data to analyse.
"It takes cross-sectional images through the body," she explains. "We have software that can calculate fat, muscle and bone in different areas of the body. You can look at the 3D reconstruction of the images and examine it in different planes to measure muscle dimensions and body part volumes."
From this, a lot can be recorded. Muscle mass, fat percentages and even rumen capacity and pelvis size and Nicola goes through the results of this research, plus the more recent methane and feed efficiency work Nicola and SRUC have been involved with. They are currently recording methane via portable accumulation chambers, the CT traits listed above, feed efficiency, rumen microbiome, disease resistance and commercial performance.
Mark and Nicola dive a little deeper and discuss the impact of methanogens, organisms that generate methane in sheep. The relationship between methanogens and sheep genetics is an intriguing subject that still lacks complete understanding. However, advances in technology over the past ten years have greatly influenced the industry and, with research happening globally, answers aren't far away.
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Welcome to the Head Shepherd podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo at Next Gen Agri International, where we help livestock managers to get the best out of their stock. I want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflex for sponsoring Head Shepherd again this season, and I'm also excited to introduce our mates at Heinegger as brand new sponsors of the show. Msd in Orflex, or perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia, offer one of New Zealand, australia's, largest livestock product portfolios, with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products connected through identification, traceability and monitoring solutions. Like us, they see how the wealth and breadth of information born out of this podcast can help their men and their farming clients achieve their mission of the science of healthier animals.
Mark Ferguson:Heinegger will need little introduction to our audience. A market leader and one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fibre removal, together with an expanding range of agricultural products and inputs, the Heinegger name is synonymous with quality, reliability and precision. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. It's fantastic to have both of these sponsors supporting us and bringing Head Shepherd to you each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode.
Mark Ferguson:Welcome back to Head Shepherd. This week we're excited to have Dr Nicola Lamb. Welcome, nicola hey there. Nicola, it might be nice to just start with a bit of your background. I guess You're over there in Scotland. Back in my PhD I read quite a few of your papers and yeah, I mean I'm looking forward to chatting through what August your previous history, how you ended up where you are today.
Nicola Lambe:So I've been working for SRUC as we are now SAC the Earth's and for over 25 years now. So I started off as a research technician working with poultry for a couple of years and then with sheep, and I'm based at the Hill and Mountain Research Centre, which is north of Loch Lomond, so it's near quite a small village we're kind of between two small villages, in about an hour from any kind of major towns and it's mainly a hill farm typical of the west coast of Scotland. So a lot of the research that we do there is looking at the same ways of hill sheep farming. So, yeah, been there for over 25 years and moved more into the kind of research project management side of things. So the projects that we're working on are looking at hill sheep maternal traits, lamb production traits, also terminal fire breeds across the different landscape types in Scotland, in the UK, and more of the work recently has been focusing on things like methane emissions, heat efficiency and more environmental traits.
Mark Ferguson:Cool, yeah, quite the career from technician through to management. So I guess, before we get into the details, any tips on how that, or any, I guess, highlights of that career, the change from. Obviously one of the battles with anyone in science is that you start off as a passionate scientist and end up as a manager. How have you enjoyed the change from science to management?
Nicola Lambe:I think it's nice having started off the technician, because you can understand more of Pacing's work at farm level and always pitch in and help weigh some sheep for blood samples or whatever. So, yeah, quite enjoyed that side of things and, like you say, then you move a bit away from the hands on stuff and more to the kind of project design, project management and worrying about things like budgets and management and people hours. But yeah, I think, especially because we're quite a small team up at the field station I work on, everybody does kind of get involved and you're still quite close to the animals and the farming system as well. So that's been quite good.
Mark Ferguson:Excellent. How's the research landscape in Scotland is there? I guess it's always been a battle. To always secure funding is sort of my life anyway in research.
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, I don't think it's any different anywhere. It always seems to be getting more difficult and it's exciting. Most of the funded work at the moment is around net zero. That's why a lot of people are kind of moving into that area and that's been government priority, so that a lot of the funding has come up for especially in remnant space and land, reducing the emissions as a big priority.
Nicola Lambe:So yeah, there's money in that area. I've worked more in kind of meat quality and carcass quality Previously. There's less of the funding for that sort of work now in the UK.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, pretty similar world around, then we're all. I guess research teams are ending up more focused on methane, so we will move on to that. What is the landscape in Scotland? What are we? What's the targets in terms of how remnants are going to be taxed or how much is meant to look? Is there any any pathway?
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, I think policy-wise it's really still quite uncertain what's going to happen. There's a lot of guesswork. We obviously still have subsidies for sheep farmers, so it's kind of a bit of guesswork at the moment whether subsidies will go more in that direction of rewarding measures taken to reduce methane emissions and particularly other environmental targets yeah, but in the moment that that's not particularly clear. Or whether it would be a kind of tax or credit system, because I'm a colleague, work a lot more closely with the policy teams that Scottish government and UK government yeah, but although that's where the funding's come from in the research, we don't really know how that's going to link up with policy going forward.
Mark Ferguson:If I had a nice single moth with the average Scottish farmer, what would they? What's their mood like? What's the how positive agriculture has got them in the moment?
Nicola Lambe:All sheep farming. I suppose I think some are fairly positive. So, as always, there's kind of progressive farmers are looking for ways to kind of move forward and be the leaders of the pack and the first adopters, and then there's others who are very much in denial of the fact that sheep produce meat in at all, or that there's any issue with that and that any research in that area is just trying to demonise meat eaters. Yeah, so there's different views out there, but I think that there are those that are really keen to embrace any research that we're bringing out and really try and move forward.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, cool. Yeah, we've got quite a few listening along. I think we have something like 15% of our listeners are in Europe, so most of them in the UK, so there'll be a few of them hopefully not in a way, If we get into your current research areas. So lots of work around how we design a system and an animal to reduce meat.
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, so a few of the recent research projects have focused on feed efficiency and reducing meat emissions in particular. One of the things that we've been looking at over the last couple of decades is the use of our CT scanner, originally for looking at body composition. So we've got our own mobile CT scanner, the SIUC, and we use that to go around the country and scan shape within the national breeding programme, so mainly Terminal Srier Ram Lam for the breeding programme, and we've been doing that for about 20 years with reasonably good uptake and it tends to be the more influential size that CT scans, so it has a bigger impact throughout the breeding programme as well. One of the things that actually came from Australia and New Zealand, where they started with their meat and selection lines. So I think in both countries they had high and low selection lines for meat and emissions and they found that there's differences in room and volume with the two different lines and they've measured that using CT scanning amongst other measurements. So that was something that we picked up on and Australia could be looking at in our research projects as well using our CT scanner. So as well as looking at body composition changes and other characteristics of the CT scanner. We've been looking at room and volumes and how that relates to characteristics and also things like feed efficiency and going forward hopefully meat and emissions as well.
Nicola Lambe:So as well as the CT scanner, we've got some feed and take recording equipment. Just in the last six years it would be. So we've got a couple of sheds set up with pens that work, with the electronic ID tags to record every meal that every lamb has in the shed. So the last few years of the measuring groups of anything lamb through the system so we can get really good information on feed and take, because a lot of our selection work had been focused on production, maternal traits and production traits and held sheep a lot and when you an awful lot of it.
Nicola Lambe:Now it puts from the different genetic lines but really nothing about the input. So it may be that these animals are producing a lot more lambs and growing a lot more quickly, but they might be eating twice as much and we just don't know. We're trying to get more of a handle on that, look at the deficiency and get some information about and take an individual animal level. So we've got some of the technology, the CT scanner, the feed and take recording equipment and just in the last few months we've got some portable accumulation chambers from that we bought from Agro Search in New Zealand, so chambers that we can put the lambs in for 50 minutes and get meaty measurements from them. So that's quite exciting because now we can close that, look pretty and look at actual individual meaty emissions as well.
Mark Ferguson:So an animal would go through the mobile CT scan, then go through the chamber. Is that some of them anyway? Is that the plan?
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, yeah. So the health sheet. For example, this year at the research firm they've just gone into the feed intake recording equipment. They'll be in there for six weeks and get weighed and feed intake recorded. When they come out of them at the end of that six weeks They'll get the methane measurements taken and then the CT scan the following week. So hopefully we can link all these issues of inflammation.
Mark Ferguson:That would stick to saying you by the time they've been through that experience.
Nicola Lambe:I know they're real handy.
Mark Ferguson:Just for those, I guess, less way of scientific processes, I suppose.
Nicola Lambe:Just to explain what a CT scan is and does, yeah, so it's just like the computed tomography, so it used to be called a CAT scanner, and it was built for human medicine.
Nicola Lambe:So it's the same scanner as it would be put through in a hospital if you got a CT scan there to look at anything internal. And the first scanner that we had at SIUC we actually bought a second hand from a hospital. It wasn't mobile, but the ones that we've had recently have been mounted in an Arctic trailer that we can tour around the country. So it takes cross sectional images through the body, working with X-rays, and you can look at cross sectional scans along the length of the body, and we have software that can then calculate fat, muscle and bone in the different areas of the body. You can look at volumes and you can look at the 3D reconstruction of the images and look at it in different planes so you can measure dimensions of muscles, volumes of different body parts. Yeah, a good idea of what's inside the sheep. So we can scan either live animals or carcasses as well, or meat joints.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, I think the papers of yours that feature in my PhD. Not that many people have read that, but it's the body composition of Hill sheep. I think that would have been the area that I'm guessing from now. So a while ago I wrote that thing but yeah, I'm pretty sure all the papers that were featured. So of those old CT scans, can we go back and then measure room and volume on those old files and look at anything from history?
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, and that's the big good thing about the CT scans, especially since we've had the first scan that we had didn't have the 3D capability so we could just take cross sections at that point and it was a lot slower and a lot more we were intensive. But with the modern ones, the one we've got at the moment is 16 slice, we call it, so it takes a lot of imagery very quickly and so we take the whole body scan. This imagery is taken every 8mm, usually along the body. You can adjust the distance. We usually go with 8mm and so we scan the whole animal in 2-3 minutes and we can save those images and go back and analyse them later. So we've got tens of thousands of images saved and we can go back and measure things like these new traits like room and volume, or we've also looked at things like pelvic dimensions as predictors of lamies and various different things we can measure. But it's really valuable looking to go back and measure these old scans as well.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, because presumably you can get a lot of those animals will have a known genotype or a known pedigree at least, and you say, have you already done the genetic analysis of those old information?
Nicola Lambe:Yes, for most of the traits we have. So for the room and volume, for example, we went back and measured pixels over the last 10 or 15 years that we got and a data that we could look at genetic control of those traits. So we found the editability for room and volume based on those commercial textiles that have been scanned over the years. Yeah, so that's really useful because of the majority of the animals that we scan for the breeding programme. So they're all well recorded for a number of traits and all have pedigree information and the text of the society in the UK of the genotype, every ram in the system and doing the ones that have been CT scanned for a number of years.
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Mark Ferguson:Excellent. So, if we get to some results, what do we know now? What's? Where are we at in terms of understanding more about the genetic control of methane?
Nicola Lambe:Well, I suppose we'll still get to the complete answer, but that's the most of the genetic parameters for methane emissions have come from other countries. So far in the New Zealand space grooming and fake livestock farming there Cool, thanks so much. Ireland have been doing a lot of work in this as well. We've been in some joint projects with them so we have genetic parameters in the UK for the room and volume part of things. We know that in the text. We've measured it quite heritable. So quite heritability of 45 per cent for that trait For recent emissions measured in restoration chambers or in the portable accumulation chambers.
Nicola Lambe:I think it's reasonable, actually with heritabilities as well. So about 30-40 per cent heritability for that. There is something that we can change. It's a similar heritability for growth traits or Kirk's composition. So it's something that we could change with reading. I think particularly in New Zealand and Ireland that's been looking at whether we could incorporate that into existing selection indexes without having too much of a negative effect on maternal traits and lamb tradux and traits. It looks like you might slow the genetic gains in those other traits lightly but you would still be making good progress in those traits and be able to reduce your recent emissions, so it is definitely something that could be achieved without too much of an negative impact on other traits and interests.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, we know that some room and parameters change the bugs, which changes the methane. Do you have enough detail of room and wall or room and shape or other than volume? Is there anything else that you're picking up that might be controlling the population of bugs in the room?
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, some of that early work in Australia and New Zealand looked at other things like different shape parameters and then the amount of raft in the room. We've not had the same amount of data from very controlled experiments that we can measure these things. I mean, most of the animals that are CT scanned have been off food for four hours but we're just measuring this as a kind of afterthought in those scans. It's not very controlled, standardized feeding conditions that we're measuring them on. But actually the studies in New Zealand and Australia found that it was the volume that was the most predictive of methane emissions. Interestingly, something that I was hearing at conference a couple of weeks ago. Zan Ro was talking from AgroCerts and she said that in their high and low methane emission lines was found this difference in room and size that they'd found that the lower meters that had the smaller room and sizes actually had higher surface area of the pilly within the room. So it may be that the actual physiology of the room changed in some way. And what she also said was that it wasn't so much that the low emitters had much smaller room than normal. It seemed to be that the high emitters had higher rooming volume than control line use that hadn't been selected.
Nicola Lambe:So now I'm just quoting other people. It's all kind of makes quite a complex story that I think to some of the projects that we've started on. We have one with industry partners in the UK, led by Innovis, which is a big breeding company for sheep in the UK and that's going to be looking at the room and microbiome as well. So we've taken some room and samples from the same sheep that were safety scanning and put into the pack chambers and doing feed and takes recording on as well. So yeah, hopefully we'll get some of our own data on the microbiome side of things as well, and it'll be quite interesting to see if what we find in our UK sheep matches up with what we've been finding in New Zealand, whether it's the same species of microorganisms that are associated with me.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, certainly much more complex than we give them credit for the humble sheep. When I was doing my PhD, the SIROM group there were doing the vaccine work for trying to vaccinate against methane, but what they found was you'd knock out one species and another one would dominate, and you'd have to knock it out and another one would dominate. So the methanogens are plenty of different varieties of methanogens. So it became pretty apparent that vaccinating them away wasn't going to work. And maybe that was timing of the work in terms of where they're at with technology, but certainly a whole heap of work going on back then, which was when I look back now, was very much before. It was time.
Mark Ferguson:We also had a back in 2009,. We built a feed efficiency shed. Again, we were probably just about five years too early to get onto the big gravy train or something, so we missed that. The definitely an interesting field, and if we jumped in our time machine and went forward 10 years, what do you think the industry is going to look like in terms of? I guess we can think about how the UK looks in terms of the production system, but also, with these technologies all mature, how rambredders will be sort of the tools that they'll have at their hand in another decade.
Nicola Lambe:Interesting to know. Again, I think well, looking back at the last 10 years, in some ways we haven't changed that quickly. I mean, like you've been talking with some of these things for quite a while but there has been quite an investment in technology in terms of capital assets within UK research in the last five to 10 years. I think it is speeding up a bit within the UK. Some of these things the CT scanner, the pack chambers they are becoming available to commercial readers. The project I mentioned with Inevis they've bought their own set of pack chambers to measure methane emissions from their partner farm.
Nicola Lambe:I think some people are really embracing it and we've had interest from these independent readers who don't get any kind of subsidy or grant payments but want to spend a few thousand pounds measuring some of their animals through the methane chambers just to get data started, which is great, is really encouraging. Even though some of the other side of the scale are some skeptics that think it's all a waste of time and money. I think definitely things will change and again, it depends how policy goes and how subsidies change in the future. I think there is indications that there will be link to reductions in methane emissions and carbon footprint. I think that readers can see that as well. They are trying to make a move in that direction and be early adopters.
Mark Ferguson:We're seeing the same here with the portable methane chambers getting around the place. We've had a few of our clients have put some ramps through and getting beef and lamb are funding a lot of work at the moment to start that process. At the moment we're just starting to see the side difference, which is interesting. So far we haven't, as all the work is showing there's no it doesn't tend to be correlated with, or too strongly correlated with, anything bad or good. So it'll mean we can make some good gains, while I'm definitely of the belief that rumours aren't the problem, but that doesn't mean the policy doesn't think they aren't. So we have the opportunity to make some improvements and drop some methane out of the atmosphere while we watch for other technologies to have a real impact on the menacea to cruising around.
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, I think it's true that, even if we're not the main offenders, you have to be able to measure it to be involved in the debate, really, don't you? So yeah, as researchers, we're not saying it's right or wrong, but we're measuring it to see. Can we feed some information onto these arguments?
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, I think the reality is, as we're finding as this discussion continues, I guess, is that most of the yeah if you look at farmers who are or not sorry, corporates who are looking at their wider emissions often ends up that the only spot that can actually have a real impact is at the farm level. That's weird, and so that seems to be where that's going to be a fair bit of focus, because a lot of the other processes are already highly efficient or necessary evils of producing food and producing clothing, etc. So, yeah, it does seem that the farming is going to be a big part of the agricultural landscape, is going to be a big part of the solution. So, yeah, as you say, we need to know everything in fairly, at fairly detailed level to actually have a real part of that discussion.
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, and there's been a bit of a move in parts of the UK that people buying land to plant trees to offset carbon and a few farming, a few areas of farming land have been kind of taken over for planting trees to offset carbon rather than for producing food.
Mark Ferguson:Yeah, that certainly gets me one of my pet grubs, but we won't get into that one. But the yeah, certainly. The North Island, new Zealand. We've seen a lot of sheep farms converting back to, unfortunately, just a radiator, not even back to native woodland. So that's yeah, we won't get too far into that.
Nicola Lambe:That's not my idea.
Mark Ferguson:An election coming up in New Zealand. Yeah, we'll hear plenty more about that. But yeah, the I guess if we look back at your career, you would have started. I don't know I'm making assumptions, but maybe as a woman in science, I might have started as a minority and now much more, much more of a balance. And I guess if we look back and just ask a tough question like what's been the highlight of that career so far?
Nicola Lambe:Yeah, it's funny you say about the gender balance thing, because actually one of the projects that we've just come into an end, that we've been involved in the last four years, is EU projects. We've got seven different countries in it. In fact, new Zealand and New Regal is also included in it but nearly all of the people within that project are female. I think we had two male partners that came to find them. We think and it does surprise me because we all have female partners that are male who lets you know that you're a female contributor to everything? Because I'm a person who's doing this with those differentized elements and your Looks like this is the most agencies and locked-up contracts science we have ever bent around.
Nicola Lambe:I'm not sure why, within this area, there seems to be an increasing number of women. I don't know. Maybe there's other reasons for that. I'm probably just putting off answering the question about my highlight. I think that would be my highlight. One of the highlights of this career is really being able to work with people from different countries. I've had a couple of sabbaticals in different countries and a lot of different trips to other countries, just finding out how keep farming works in different places, how different countries cope with things and how different farmers are in different countries. There's definitely similarities, but like it always surprised me in France, for example, how strong a voice farmers have compared to the UK. Meeting researchers and industry people in different countries is definitely a highlight.
Mark Ferguson:I guess at the end of the day it's all about the people. When we do the sums and you work out, you spend two thirds of your life with your colleagues. You need to enjoy that aspect of your job. Maybe not in the last three years Virtually as your colleague.
Mark Ferguson:Excellent, nicola. Well, thanks very much for your time. I think that we've covered that well. It's certainly an interesting space and something that we're watching closely. As you say, there's great collaborations across all of the countries that tend to listen to this podcast we're all waiting to.
Mark Ferguson:I guess we're on the edge of knowing a lot more and, particularly as we get, I guess my interest is in the technology that can measure what's happening in the fields rather than in the feedlot. I think that's obviously your previous research is the same. We really need to know what's going on and those hill use what they're eating, how they're eating. I guess we're not there yet with technology, but obviously we will get there. We're as close as we've ever been. I guess that's the exciting thing for me in the next 10 years is having some of those ways to measure intake out on the pasture and look at the whole systems.
Mark Ferguson:Efficiency as my real interest area, I guess, because I think obviously we can get a partial guess of what's going on when we put him on feeding in pallets or controlled diets under feedlot, really looking forward to where we go in terms of once we get all this technology out and about. That's been a feature, I guess, of your work with having those mobile CT scan and then mobile methane chambers. You can get a lot more, I guess, more information. But that was quite the big. That's quite a long, long call out of this podcast. But thanks very much for coming along.
Nicola Lambe:Thank you, it was really interesting.
Mark Ferguson:Thanks, nick, I'll let you get off to bed.
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