Biotechnology seen as hope for lamb, goat

Press, 12 June 1986, Page 31

Biotechnology seen as hope for lamb, goat

NZPA staff correspondent Washington With the help of biotechnology, Americans may be eating more lamb and goat in the future, a science meeting in Philadelphia has been told. A retired United States Agriculture Department scientist, Clair Terrill, told a meeting of the American Association For The Advancement Of Science that using biotechnology to increase meat production from "small ruminants” — sheep and goats — offered the best hope

for increasing farm income and reducing the net loss of farmers in the future.” Rising costs could easily double or triple the price of beef, pork, poultry, or farm-raised fish, but raising more sheep and goats offered a more efficient option, she said, according to a report in the "Washington Post.” She said raising sheep and goats meant low costs, low capital investment, low energy requirements and a means of stopping erosion and using abandoned and non-crop land in every rural county in the country.

Genetic engineering could make goat and sheep production even more efficient in terms of reproduction, growth, feed consumption and meat quality and taste. Ms Terrill said research at the United States sheep experiment station in Dubois, Idaho, had already proved its effectiveness. The scientist predicted that while consumption of meat from other sources would decline, production from sheep and goats would increase and become the “only low-cost meat available, as it generally is in developing countries now.”