Inbreeding a challenge for Wagyu producers going forward

Australian Wagyu Association chief executive Matt McDonagh says there is twice as much inbreeding in Wagyu as what they thought.

Genetic inbreeding will be a challenge for the Wagyu breed in Australia going forward.

And it is something the industry is throwing time and tools at improving.

With DNA testing, it has been found there are animals that basically have close to zero genetic diversity in the Wagyu breed.

Australian Wagyu Association chief executive Matt McDonagh said it doesn’t mean that it is a bad thing, it just means they’re the most typical animal in the whole population.

“So if you have done the same thing as every other Wagyu breeder in Australia and you bred for one type of animal using the same crosses, it is still a perfectly viable animal … it just has a low genetic diversity relative to the rest of the population,” Dr McDonagh said.

Speaking at the WagyuEdge conference in Perth, Dr McDonagh said they were looking at inbreeding heavily now because there “is about twice as much inbreeding in Wagyu as what we thought”, thanks to the ability to DNA test, rather than just go off pedigree information.

He said this was because the genetics that came out of Japan into Australia were already inbred.

“At the founder level those animals have roughly 6 to 8 per cent inbreeding on average … then we have a current population that is more like 12 per cent inbred, which is starting to get to be a big number.”

“We started with the genetics from around 222 individuals and they were already inbred, but what we’ve done from there is we’ve amplified those 222, into a population of about 300,000.”

Dr McDonagh said since 2000, when inbreeding was at about 10 per cent, they have let it slide.

“That is not a good thing as a breed. When you get too much inbreeding, you reduce heterosis, reduce survival, fertility and performance.”

AWA technical services manager Carel Teseling said the problem was there wasn’t a lot of other variation we can just bring in.

“Other breeds have that opportunity to bring in other genetics from other countries but that is not the case for Wagyu, so it is certainly is something that the breed needs to consider very seriously, how they manage that diversity,” Mr Teseling said.

In 1997 Japan imposed an export ban on Wagyu cattle, meaning no other countries have access to new genetics in an attempt to keep Wagyu exclusive to Japan.

Dr McDonagh said using the genetic diversity and genetic inbreeding tools (within Estimated Breeding Values) the industry has the opportunity to make active decisions to manage their cattle and breeding differently.

“That’s a key future challenge for us.”

“It is just something to be aware of, we know there is a higher level of inbreeding in Wagyu than other breeds, and that is the nature of having a smaller population of animals to originally breed from, but now with DNA accuracy it is something we can monitor and limit the negative effects of negative mutations that chip away at profit over time.”