Bill Gates backs Kiwi livestock genetics company LIC to improve food supply in sub-Saharan Africa

New Zealand agri-technology company LIC has a globally unrivalled dairy cattle genetic database.

Gene editing is a technology tool New Zealand will need to use to achieve its productivity and climate change targets, says dairy genetics specialist Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC) as it takes on a major international project to improve food supply in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Waikato-based agri-tech co-operative describes the project to breed heat-tolerant and disease-resistant dairy cows for the region south of the Sahara desert in collaboration with precision breeding specialist Acceligen and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as “ground-breaking”.

LIC chief executive David Chin said the initiative will combine the co-operative’s genetic expertise in breeding efficient dairy cows for pasture-based farming systems with Acceligen’s gene editing capabilities to produce cows that can produce more milk than native cattle species.

Embryos bred from LIC pasture-based genetics will be sent to the US, where Acceligen will perform gene editing on the stem cells. The embryos will then be transferred into cows that will give birth to gene-edited sires. The bull calves will go to Brazil for rearing and their semen will be collected and sold to sub-Saharan African markets.

Chin said with the New Zealand Government committed to legislative change to enable greater use of gene technologies, ending an effective ban on gene editing by the end of next year, the project is “a great way to explore a very new era of science that’s going to be opened to us in quite a safe way”.

“It’s great that we’re now having a sensible conversation around the ability to use technologies to improve our primary sector. I think that’s a really important discussion to have as a country.

“We’ve matured a lot from when we first had conversations around the possibilities of gene editing, and I think using technology investment in science and innovation is really going to help our primary sector maintain its competitiveness.”

Asked if the claimed greater acceptance of such technology was political rather than Kiwi community-based, Chin said New Zealand had “a lot better understanding about the spectrum of advanced breeding technologies”.

“On one hand you have traditional breeding programmes, and we’ve made great advances in that. On the other hand you’ve got full genetic modification. We’re not introducing a new species or new DNA into it.

“We’re just tweaking existing DNA. Gene editing sits in that sweet spot where you can accelerate the traditional breeding programme. I think that as people have understood that, they are more and more comfortable around deploying these technologies. We can have a probably more nuanced conversation about the potential to use these technologies for environmental reasons.”

David Chin, chief executive of Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC).

LIC is the first organisation globally to identify the parts of DNA that control thermal regulation in dairy animals. The work has been patented. The company has worked previously with its new project collaborators on sustainability and food production research for Ethiopia. The project is fully funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a budget of US$5 million ($8.3m).

“We think to achieve our productivity challenge and meet our climate change targets, we will have to use all the technologies available to us. I think gene editing is one of those tools. I don’t think it’s the silver bullet, but it’s a tool we need to understand how it operates,“ Chin said.

The project was “a big one for LIC” and would provide an insight into what is happening in the sphere, what it is capable of, and the market uptake “in a controlled way”.

“We’ll get a lot of experience and [lessons] ... from this partnership, and then when the time is right, when gene editing can be used in other markets and there’s consumer acceptance of it, we can apply that technology and those learnings to markets.”

Asked how gene editing could support the $26 billion New Zealand dairy export industry, Chin said lifting heat tolerance and producing polled, or hornless, animals for improved animal welfare and cost reduction were starters.

“We know heat tolerance can be gene edited ... we are doing that around heat tolerance genetics. We’ve been running that standard breeding programme for a number of years, and we think that by 2029, we’ll have cows of high enough genetic merit with heat tolerance attributes in them.

“It takes a long time to generate the gene ... [with gene editing] we can accelerate what a natural breeding programme could otherwise do.”

Chin said gene technology tools could be “incredibly useful” in New Zealand. “Think of possum control.”

LIC was in its fourth year of research on bovine methane emissions, “trying to understand the genetics that control methane”.

“It’s looking very, very promising. I put heat tolerance into this adaptation category.”

Chin said LIC had had global partnerships for many years and strategically, remote New Zealand, particularly its primary sector, needed to partner internationally more.

Andrea Fox joined the Herald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the $26b dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.