The most efficient animals in any herd are also the lowest-emission animals and the breeding programs selecting for profit are already doing the sustainability work.
Dr. Cleveland came to the symposium with the most important practical question in the field of methane genetics: how do you get from a promising university result to improvement in tens of millions of animals? The answer, he argued, runs through commercial breeding companies — organizations with the artificial-insemination infrastructure, the producer relationships, and the global reach to propagate genetic gain at the scale that actually moves emissions. ABS Global operates that infrastructure across dozens of countries, influencing the genetic makeup of millions of cattle every year.
“Genetic innovation is the most important tool for permanent reduction of environmental impact and more sustainable livestock production”
He framed the structural challenge plainly: genetic improvement decisions are made at the farm level, but the value of those decisions is captured across entire supply chains. Individual farms are under-incentivized to invest in genetic strategies whose payoff lands somewhere downstream. ABS’s response is to serve as the scaling mechanism — embedding sustainability traits directly into commercial sire evaluations, so a producer who uses an ABS bull selected partly for low methane is contributing to emissions reduction without any additional investment on their part.
Cleveland then walked the room through ABS’s work on microbiome-driven breeding — integrating rumen microbial data into genomic selection models in partnership with research institutions, on the recognition that microbial communities are partly heritable through the host animal’s genetics. He closed on the first beef-on-dairy lifecycle assessment his team developed for that production system, a framework for quantifying the environmental benefit of genetic improvement in commercial supply chains — and a signal that the market transition from research to scale is genuinely underway.
In a one-on-one conversation with Sarah Mikesell after his presentation, Dr. Cleveland explains why the most profitable cattle are also the most sustainable — and how ABS Global is using commercial breeding to deliver both at the same time. He breaks down what twelve years of selection data shows, why methane traits carry no economic value today, and where the breeding industry is headed next.