Feeding the future: Nbryo’s vision for nourishing 10 billion people

The Problem

The world is confronting a critical challenge: how to feed a rapidly growing population in the face of climate change impacts. By 2050, a growing population of nearly ten billion people will require safe, affordable protein, putting immense pressure on global food security. The increasing global demand for beef and dairy places significant strain on livestock industries to simultaneously enhance production efficiency, reduce emissions, and improve ecological sustainability and animal welfare.

Ruminant livestock are essential for global food security, transforming products that are not fit for human consumption into high-quality protein, such as meat and milk. These products provide crucial amino acids, energy, minerals, and vitamins necessary for a healthy, well-balanced human diet. Additionally, in many low and middle-income countries, livestock not only provide food and income, but also serve as a source of draught power, fertiliser, household energy, and a means of disposing of unwanted crop residues.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) predicts a 20 percent increase in demand globally for animal products by 2050 compared to 2020 levels, driven by an expanding and more affluent global population, particularly in low-income and lower-middle-income countries.

Transformative strategies and global cooperation will be crucial to confront these challenges and achieve long-term food security.

The Solution

Selective breeding and rapid genetic improvement offer pathways to unlock productivity increases and reduce environmental impact.

The FAO identified productivity increases and breeding as two key solutions that could have the greatest impact in mitigating emissions from the livestock sector with estimates between 28% – 44% Mt of CO2 reduced between now and 2050.

The Nbryo Transformation

Due to the expense and difficulty, IVF and embryo transfer technologies are prohibitive to the commercial producer and so have commonly only been utilised by elite breeding operations.  The annual rate of genetic gain achieved has traditionally been slow at around 1.5-2 percent per year.

Nbryo is developing a platform of new, affordable breeding technologies and data analytics that has the potential to accelerate generational change in beef and dairy herds dramatically. It enables the production of elite high-quality embryos at scale. It will now take only seven days using embryos, to achieve what used to take seven years using natural selection or artificial insemination.

With four key technologies, the Nbryo platform will give producers access to:

• Genetic selection: Reliably identify embryos of desired sex and breeding values, including lower methane traits
• Embryo production: Novel embryo development technology enables low-cost, high-scale production of high-quality embryos
• Transfer process: Simplified embryo transfer and improved preservation and logistics will substantially reduce costs and remove skill barriers
• Data analysis: Advanced data tracking to enable unique analysis and insights not currently available.

The outcome

More accurate identification of desirable traits and greater selection intensity, providing benefits across the entire value chain through:

• Increased productivity: Better genetic selection and propagation of embryos with desired traits can increase farm productivity. Utilising embryos with desired traits such as fertility can increase productivity with better pregnancy rates, shorter gestation and more calves on the ground. Improving reproductive efficiency can reduce the number of cows needed to produce a target quantity of beef, which can limit the number of unproductive animals within the herd and improve emissions per unit of beef or dairy product.

• Better resource utilisation: Improved reproductive efficiency means less feed, water, and space are required per animal, making livestock farming more sustainable and resource-efficient. Farmers with access to advanced reproductive technologies may also be able to breed animals that produce higher-quality meat and dairy products, making them more competitive in the market.

• Faster genetic progress: Improving herd genetics can speed up generational turnover and lead to significant structural changes in the herd. Being able to predict the type of calf a cow will produce allows for a quicker restructuring of the entire breeding operation. Breeding for resource-efficient and well-adapted phenotypes can enhance production efficiency by ensuring the right mix of animals. This approach can maximise production sustainability and profitability while reducing the number of low-value animals such as bobby calves.

• Decreasing costs: Via high volume production, simplified embryo transfer and improved pregnancy rates reduce costs over time. Although initial investments in reproductive technologies can be high, the long-term benefits of having a more productive and resilient herd can outweigh the cost and generate greater economic stability for farmers and ultimately better food security outcomes.

• Direct selection for lower methane. The genetics of methane production by cattle are becoming more understood and in the near future, producers will have the tools to select animals with lower methane and higher productivity at the embryo stage. Other traits that may become selected for traits that enhance adaptability to changing climates, such as heat tolerance or drought resistance, and disease resistance.

• Future proof genetic diversity: The Nbryo technology enables rare breeds and desirable genetics to be produced at scale and stored efficiently in a bio-bank. This helps to preserve and propagate not only endangered breeds but current and relevant industry genetics ensuring vital genetic diversity is maintained. New breeding programs can easily be initiated at scale through the platform in response to new breeding goals or the need for rapid recovery of breeding herd populations following losses through disease outbreaks or major environmental challenges such as floods.

Ensuring communities around the world have fair and equal access to nourishing food as the climate crisis intensifies will require new technologies, significant changes, and the development of resilient livestock systems.

The advanced breeding technologies offered by the Nbryo platform will give producers and communities the tools to breed animals with superior genetics that can increase farm productivity, improve sustainability, and boost profitability. The result is that livestock producers and their communities thrive into the future.