Re-Livestock: Facilitating innovations for resilient livestock farming systems

The overall objective of Re-Livestock is to understand and mobilize adoption of innovative practices, applied cross-scale at animal, herd/farm, sector and region level, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of livestock farming. Re-Livestock follows a holistic approach by combining practices from animal nutrition, breeding and management and housing in novel Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models. Wageningen University & Research, Animal Breeding and Genomics (WUR-ABG) is partner in Re-Livestock and leading the animal breeding work package (WP3) in the project.

Animal breeding as a tool for climate change mitigation and adaptation

Re-Livestock aims to demonstrate the potential of animal breeding as tool for climate change mitigation and adaption to climate change by 1) defining the best traits for this in cattle and pigs, 2) estimate their genetic parameters, and 3) defining their genomic determination. Methods for breeding value estimation will be developed for cattle and pigs by combining relevant -omics data, signatures of selection, and biomarkers for mitigation and adaptation traits. Breeding strategies to reduce greenhouse gas animal emissions and/or adapt to climate change will be developed. Re-Livestock defines innovative phenotypes for heat tolerance using weather data and, for example, mid-infrared spectral data in cattle. For mitigation the focus is on methane (CH4) emission traits in cattle.

International collaboration to build large reference populations for CH4

One of the key objectives of the Re-Livestock animal breeding work is to improve the accuracy of breeding values for lower methane emission. Individual methane emission is difficult, time- consuming and expensive to record on a large scale. WUR-ABG is taking the lead in collating phenotype data for methane emission in dairy and beef cattle from Spain, Poland, Australia and the Netherlands for joint genetic analyses. Phenotypes of 12,500 cows comprise the start of an international reference population to estimate genomic breeding values for lower CH4 output. When working across countries, harmonised trait definition is key. Here, WP3 of Re-Livestock delivers an important contribution for harmonisation and standardisation of methane phenotypes.