frozen in time - a fertility bank for rare livestock - nytimes

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en in Time - A Fertility Bank for Rare Livestock - NYTimes.com

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anuary 6, 2010

Rare B reeds, Frozen in Time

By BARRY ESTABROOK

NEWPORT, R.I.

T didnt take long for Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat sporting a luxuriant Vandyke beard and an

mpressive pair of curlicue horns, to live up to his breeds name. When Peter Borden, accompanied by a

tranger, entered the immaculate stable that Chip calls home, the goat pressed his velvety nose through

bars of his stall, begging for a scratch. But at the visitors approach, Chip apparently had second thought

His left foreleg stiffened, his brown eyes went glassy and he began to list to one side.

There he goes, said Mr. Borden, the executive director of the SVF Foundation, a heritage livestock

preservation facility here. The guest turned away, and Chip quickly recovered, his dignity intact.

Located on a 45-acre estate in Newport, SVF is the only organization in the country dedicated to conserv

are heritage livestock breeds by freezing their semen and embryos, a technique called cryopreservation.

Chip, now SVFs unofficial mascot, was the proof that the foundation had mastered the process. In early

2004, as a six-day-old embryo, he was flushed from his mothers womb and spent the next several mont

rozen. Thawed and transplanted into a surrogate Nubian doe, a common breed, he was born on May 7,

2004, a perfectly normal fainting goat.

The building adjacent to the one that houses Chip contains three stainless-steel tanks about the size of

ommercial washing machines. About 45,000 semen and embryo samples from 20 breeds of rare cattle,

heep and goats are preserved there in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 312 degrees essentially a froze

ark. Each time the foundation freezes a batch of embryos from a new breed, it thaws a few and transpla

hem into surrogate animals, repeating the test that Chip once passed.

Keeling over when frightened by a potential predator is not the most desirable trait in a small ruminant,

t is easy to see why fainting goats became an endangered breed. In the eyes of modern agribusiness, Ch

and his companions at SVF are a collection of misfits.

Huge dreadlocked Cotswold sheep are too big and slow-growing for commercial acceptance. Sleek Milkin

Devon cattle have the flaw of being dual-purpose livestock in a farm economy that demands specializatio

a bovine must produce either rivers of milk or massive cuts of well-marbled beef.

But in other ways, the foundations four-legged barnyard nerds are ideally suited to meet the demands o

volving culinary and farming trends. People are demanding choice at a time when commercial livestoc
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are being bred for consistency, Mr. Borden said.

Consider goat meat, once relegated to Caribbean, Hispanic and Middle Eastern immigrant enclaves. A

decade ago, who would have guessed that it would become a culinary phenomenon, readily available at

armers markets nationwide and cutting-edge restaurants like David Schuttenbergs Cabrito in the West

Village, Rick Baylesss Frontera Grill in Chicago and Tom Douglass Lola in Seattle? There is no way of

elling which of the forgotten breeds preserved by SVF might someday find itself in similar demand, but

oundation will be prepared.

Chip will never end up on a kebab skewer, but a glance at his stocky wrestlers build shows that he carri

plenty of meat. His squat stature means that, unlike other goat breeds, he cant leap tall fences, making

uited to small, diversified family farms near urban areas where goat meat is popular.

These animals lend themselves well to the locavore movement, Mr. Borden said. They dont need a lo

attention. They do well on small pastures, and require no grain.

Set on rolling hills among Newports mansions, the SVF complex, with its restored stone buildings thatesemble a Swiss village (the SV in the name), is an odd combination of an early 20th-century

gentlemans folly hobby farm and a scientific facility. Visitors are confronted by locked electronic gates

and signs warning: Biosecure area. Absolutely no trespassing. Please leave immediately.

Think of this as a safety valve program, said Dr. George Saperstein, the foundations chief scientific

adviser, who is chairman of the Department of Environmental and Population Health at the Cummings

School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. If there was a disaster, if something like the potato

amine of livestock ever hit, these frozen embryos would be made available, and in one generation we wo

be back in business. It is up to a small group of trustees and advisers to determine whether a severemergency or some other circumstance requires release of the frozen germ plasm.

That possibility is not altogether remote. For all their efficiency and high output, modern livestock breed

have become a weak, inbred bunch, Dr. Saperstein said. Fifty years ago there were a half-dozen popular

dairy breeds in this country. But today, according to Lindsey Worden of Holstein Association USA, an

organization representing farmers and breeders, the countrys 8.6 million Holstein cows make up 93

percent of Americas dairy herd. Fewer than 20 champion bulls are responsible for half the genes in toda

Holsteins.

As an example of how vulnerable our milk supply is, Dr. Saperstein points to a heat wave in California in

2006 in which some 16,500 Holsteins died, despite farmers efforts to save them with cooling mists of

water and fans. In contrast, the Pineywoods cattle in SVFs collection were introduced into the forests of

South by Spaniards in the 1500s specifically because they tolerated heat. In all likelihood, the hardy anim

would have survived the heat wave.

Heritage breeds have not been continuously improved by humans, Mr. Borden said. They have been

haped by natural survival-of-the-fittest forces and can get along without human intervention. Typically
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are varieties exhibit good birthing and mothering abilities. They can thrive on native grasses and other

natural forage, and many know how to avoid predators.

The foundation, a nonprofit group, was founded by Dorrance Hill Hamilton, known as Dodo. Mrs.

Hamilton, 82, is a summer resident of Newport who inherited a major stake in the Campbell Soup

Company, making her one of the countrys wealthiest women, according to Forbes magazine. An avid

preservationist, she realized that the pastures and fieldstone buildings could not only serve as a greenbel

but would also be ideal for the conservation of livestock.

After consulting with Tufts scientists, she decided to create a frozen library of genetic material from farm

animals in danger of being lost to extinction. The facility operates on an annual budget of approximately

million supplied by Mrs. Hamilton.

No one else was doing this work, Mrs. Hamilton said through a spokesman. She was visiting Britain in

2001 when millions of farm animals were destroyed to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, an

he thought that something had to be done in case a similar outbreak happened here. I didnt have eno

and to maintain herds of animals, so I realized that cryopreservation was where we should go, she said

Before SVF, the preservation of heritage livestock was through natural reproduction and largely the purv

of dedicated amateur and professional breeders and organizations like the American Livestock Breeds

Conservancy and Slow Food USA, as well as organizations promoting specific varieties. On-the-hoof

onservation is important, Mr. Borden said. But used in conjunction with it, cryopreservation is a grea

ong-term solution.

n an operating room at SVF late last month, an 87-pound black-muzzled ewe lay anesthetized on an

operating table. She was one of about 300 Hog Island sheep, remnants of a tough, healthy and highlymaternal colonial population that had survived essentially as wild animals for hundreds of years on a

barrier island off Virginia. Technicians had given her fertility treatments to increase her egg production

and six days earlier she had mated.

After examining the ewes womb through a strawlike laparoscope inserted into a tiny hole in her belly, D

David Mastas, a Tufts veterinarian who spends nearly all his time working at SVF, enlarged the incision

ifted her uterus from her abdominal cavity and flushed out four embryos.

Barely visible to the naked eye, they resembled salmon roe when magnified under a microscope. Once it

was determined that they were viable, the embryos were frozen. Dr. Mastas performed the procedure on

wo more Hog Island sheep that day, resulting in 21 frozen embryos. A typical Hog Island ewe produces

amb each year.

About an hour after the procedure had begun, the ewe stood woozily in a stall next to the operating room

Like two-thirds of the 100 or so animals at the facility at any given time, she was there on loan and woul

be returned to her owner in Virginia. In other cases, the foundation leases animals or, occasionally, buys

hem outright. Once these have had their germ plasm preserved, they are sold to other farms to create
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//www nytimes com/2010/01/06/dining/06frozen html?hpw=&pagewanted=print[1/7/2010 10:02:26 AM]

atellite populations.

Having mastered the techniques of cryogenics, SVF has expanded its efforts to educating the public abou

he value of conserving heritage breeds. To that end, the foundation is donating about $30,000 for a pil

program with the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Working with

onsultants, SVF and the farmstand started the brand Fair Food Farmstand Heritage Breed for meat, da

and eggs. The effort includes point-of-sale information explaining the merits of rare farm animals.

We have to eat these animals to save them, Mr. Borden said. Ultimately, food is the reason heritage

breeds are important.

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frozen in time - a fertility bank for rare livestock - nytimes

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