KINSELLA, Alta (Staff) – In an editorial in the Rocky View News and Market Examiner in 1960, Roy Farran mocked the goals of the University of Alberta ranch.
Animal scientists Roy Berg and Laird McElroy and their associates set out to design a long-term field experiment that answered one question: Is it faster to improve cattle from a crossbred base than from a purebred base, taking into account economic, geographic and management conditions of the day?
Thirty-five years ago, merely asking a question like that was daring.
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This was the era when, in a quest to breed stout, blocky, low-to-the-ground and supposedly efficient cattle, some purebred breeders were instead selecting for dwarfism.
In fact, it was a mad idea to even think of breeding up cattle from a crossbred base. Farran’s headline “Ponoka or Kinsella?” said as much.
U of A animal scientist Mick Price read Farran’s editorial to participants at the ranch’s field day last month.
In it, Farran wrote: “We are utterly astonished at the wild breed experiment taking place at the University of Alberta ranch.”
Farran said Berg’s plan to mix three breeds was insanity, especially one that didn’t even have a herd book. Its name was Charolais.
Farran predicted the offspring from the first cross will be slightly better, the second will be worse and “from thereon, there will be no hybrid vigor.”
At the time, Bob Church, now head of the Alberta Science and Research Authority and professor emeritus with the faculty of medicine at the University of Calgary, was a university graduate student. He said the industry was astonished the U of A had the audacity to use Galloway and dairy blood in its “synthetic” breeds.
Even worse, Church said then, the ranch had been purchased by the Alberta government using money from the Horned Cattle Trust Fund – checkoff money raised by the Hereford and Shorthorn breeds.
But secure with their funding, Berg and his team continued their research.
Money matters
Church said Berg told him at the beginning of the experiment that green – the color of money – was the only color that mattered in cattle production.
That attitude, Church said, helped make Alberta cattle producers receptive to the 1960s invasion of exotic breeds from continental Europe. “Revolution requires a period of incubation,” he said.
That incubation, nurtured by research at the U of A ranch, has allowed Alberta and Western Canada to become a leader in cattle breeding around the world, Church said.
It created an environment for programs like Beefbooster to flourish and for a firm like Alta Genetics to become an international leader.
“I dare say there’s not a farm or ranch in Western Canada not using some part of the research at … Kinsella.”
Nearly 30 years later, Frank Jacobs, when he was the editor of Cattleman magazine, wrote that buying the 5,500-acre ranch at Kinsella was “one of the smartest business deals ever made by a government.”
