Development of Climate Master Cattle: A New Climate Resilient High-Value Wagyu Composite Beef Breed for Use in Temperate Environments

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Heat stress is an emerging cause of mortality and production loss in Bos taurus beef cattle production in North America. Despite extreme heat waves that occur in Canadian rangelands, there is very little heat stress research conducted in these settings. As heat waves and summer temperatures are projected to increase dramatically in Western Canada, there is a growing need to develop and select new heat-tolerant breeds of cattle for beef production in temperate environments. Additionally, due to anticipated increases in polar vortex activity, cattle must still be capable of performing/coping with severe cold stress simultaneously; or the industry will face increased production costs resulting from rising winter-feeding requirements, the single largest financial input cost to the cow/calf sector in Canada. To meet this challenge, we will develop a new composite beef breed believed capable of dealing with climatic extremes, while delivering unprecedented animal performance, superior carcass yield/quality and optimized beef nutritional attributes. We will combine totally unique Bos taurus breeds with novel and naturally occurring genomic mutations arising independently in very distinct global geographical locations. The composite beef breed we will develop, tentatively called the Climate Master, will provide the marketplace with a luxury beef eating experience for the modern gourmet beef consumer both in Canada and globally, while improving cattle industry resilience and sustainability of the national beef herd, in the face of unprecedented and unrelenting climate change.