The Future of Chicken: Inside Cobb-Vantress's Genetic Revolution

Ever wondered how the chicken on your plate became so efficient to produce? The answer lies in cutting-edge genetic science happening behind the scenes at companies like Cobb-Ventress. Brandon Mulnix sits down with William Herring, Vice President of Cobb-Ventress, at the Animal Ag Tech Innovation Summit in Dallas to uncover the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence, camera technology, and poultry genetics.

With experience spanning beef cattle, pork, and now broiler chicken genetics, Herring brings unique cross-species perspective to genetic improvement. He walks us through Cobb's three-pronged approach to innovation: developing new genetic products, implementing cutting-edge science in their ongoing breeding programs, and staying ahead of scientific breakthroughs. The conversation reveals how every bird in their breeding program receives its own "social security number" and has countless traits measured to determine which individuals will create the next generation of broilers.

The most captivating revelations come when Herring details how AI and camera technology are revolutionizing trait measurement. Traditional subjective scoring systems are being replaced with precision phenotyping that can analyze bird locomotion and even monitor mating behavior to address industry-wide hatchability challenges. We also get an inside look at Cobb's impressive "Proving Grounds" facility where they can test 40,000 breeding females simultaneously and produce 100,000 broiler eggs weekly for evaluation. Their relationship with parent company Tyson Foods allows for comprehensive meat quality assessment, creating what Herring calls a complete "playbook" for each new genetic product.

Facing a future where beef prices reach record highs and pork supplies fluctuate due to African Swine Fever, Herring predicts continued global growth for poultry. For aspiring leaders, he emphasizes building teams with individuals smarter than yourself who can execute at high levels. Listen now for a fascinating glimpse into the technology shaping our food future and the leadership principles guiding agricultural innovation.

Hosted by Brandon Mulnix - Director of Commercial Accounts - Prism Controls
The Poultry Leadership Podcast is only possible because of its sponsor, Prism Controls
Find out more about them at www.prismcontrols.com

Chapters

• 0:26 Introduction to William Herring
• 2:53 Cobb's Three Core R&D Strategies
• 6:53 Precision Phenotyping Through Technology
• 13:04 The Proving Grounds Testing Facility
• 18:45 Leadership Insights and Industry Future

Transcript

Brandon Mulnix: 0:26

Welcome to the Poultry Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Brandon Mulnix, and I am recording today from the Animal Ag Tech Innovation Summit in Dallas, Texas. This is my first time actually recording from an event, which is pretty cool because today we're covering anything technology as it relates to all species and with me today I have William Herring, Vice President of Cobb Ventress. William, welcome to the show. Good morning and thank you, (William). William, can you introduce yourself to the audience, Sure?

William Herring: 0:59

First, good to be here. I've been in this role at Cobb for about two and a half years, lead Cobb's global research and development program, which includes all things genetic improvement. From a career perspective, I've started off in similar kinds of responsibilities, albeit at the university level in beef cattle genetics, then spent a big chunk of my career in pork production genetics integrated pork genetics at Smithfield Foods, and then moved on to PIC in a similar role and now working in broilers. So it's been fun to get experience and learn things as we move across the species with respect to genetic improvement.

Brandon Mulnix: 1:41

That's quite the background. It's becoming all more familiar as folks kind of intertwine between the species, because what you learn in one species can help, especially at someplace like Cobb Sure.

William Herring: 1:52

And of course you know, the biology is different as we move between to some extent. But the way we go about genetic improvement is really practically all the same. And I would argue, even as we look across crops, it's very similar. So we can practically all the same. And I would argue, even as we look across crops, it's very similar. So we can apply all the same principles to make a better product for customers and consumers.

Brandon Mulnix: 2:13

So, william, can you share a little bit about Cobb Vantrus?

William Herring: 2:16

Yeah, sure, cobb Vantrus is one of really two leading global genetics companies in the area of broiler or chicken genetics. Cobb's been around for a very long time. We operate in all countries where there is broiler or chicken production and chicken consumed. We have very strong business across North South America, europe, middle East and Asia and our primary product is a genetic package for maximizing profitability for integrators and producers that ultimately is a satisfying product for consumers.

Brandon Mulnix: 2:51

Excellent. Tell me about what your challenges are in R&D.

William Herring: 2:54

Yeah, I don't know that they're unique to Cobb, but we focus on really three primary strategies. Strategies and again they're all centered around delivering the best genetic product and package to the customer within their region and really based on the type of product that they harvest, whether it's a lighter weight product or if it's a heavier weight product in North America that's more white meat yield driven. So we focus on three primary strategies. Number one and this would be relatively new to Cobb would be what I would call new product development. So we have spent an enormous amount of, I would say, effort and capital to get that effort underway and you'll be seeing the fruits of that soon as we enter the market with new products. Secondly, a core strategy and this should be part of any good agricultural genetics business is around having the best science deployed around the ongoing genetic improvement program. So at the very top of the production pyramid we have farms where birds are housed that we measure lots of things that don't get normally measured in commercial poultry production. Measured in commercial poultry production, many times very labor intensive. But every bird that hatches ends up with its own unique let's call it social security number or identification, and that bird gets tracked all the way through our system. We measure numerous things depending upon what that genetic line is targeted for, and then ultimately those data are instantaneously transferred to our quantitative sciences team where we turn that into genetic values for whatever the traits are. All of that information gets passed back to our sites and farms where our team members then use that information to determine which birds make it to the next generation. So there's a lot wound up within that, what you measure, how you measure it. The genotyping so there's a lot wound up within that. It's what you measure, how you measure it, the genotyping strategies you might take on the genetic prediction, statistical methods that you may or may not use to make the absolute best decisions, to look into the crystal ball of that individual bird's DNA and decide who's worthy to create that next generation. So that's really strategy number two. And then the third one is looking towards the future, and that's not a long time horizon.

William Herring: 5:15

But as we go through agricultural genetic improvement, periodically there are breakthroughs that happen, maybe in an adjacent space, maybe within your own space, that you need to be prepared to take advantage of, and that's where really the research portion comes in play very much. So I'll use maybe some historical examples. If we go back to really kind of right after 2010, 2012, 2013,. Somewhere through there, the cost of genotyping came down quite a bit. The statistical ability to use genotyping with pedigree and what we were measuring, really accelerated and those two things came together and Cobb and others across different species were trying to be ready to use that very quickly Cobb did.

William Herring: 6:04

Then there's been other things like CRISPR, cas9 technology that provided some very interesting research tools. We'll see where those go. So we invest internally within our own research team and also externally with collaborators from across the world every year to try and network with those that are really involved in some of the best science so that we're positioned to be a part of those discoveries and then determine if we want to bring them back in. So those three strategies again are around new product development, being the best in class and implementing the best science, around ongoing genetic improvement and really looking to the future of scientific breakthroughs, if you will, that are important to make a better product for our customers and, ultimately, for consumers.

Brandon Mulnix: 6:51

So, when you talk about new product, new technologies, what's the difference between the? What brings you to a tech summit like this?

William Herring: 6:58

You know, it's a great place to look across species and see who a lot of the participants here are early stage startup type of groups. Some of the things they're working on, you know how can we bring that back into a genetic improvement program? One of the areas that we remain highly invested in and beginning to deploy, I'd say more and more, is around what I call precision phenotyping. I use the example of 2010, plus going back to that period of time where agriculture really stepped up its game using genotyping. That was a big if you plot traits, we really move traits at an accelerated scale using that technology. Part of that equation is how we measure things. As I mentioned before, we measure lots of different traits, all the way from things that impact morbidity and livability to simple things like growth rate, individual feed intake, different muscle yield variables, meat quality attributes, just anything that can be genetically controlled that ultimately contributes again to a customer experience or consumer experience. A number of those traits are honestly fairly difficult to measure, and I'll give you a couple of three examples. First, just as simple as the quality of the locomotion of a bird in this case, and I'd argue this is the same across all species. Historically that's been a human kind of subjective scoring system Pigs, cattle and I would say poultry which has been somewhat effective. So I'm not discounting what has been used, but it's clearly human-based and subjective. Today we have projects underway where we use camera technology to watch the bird in its natural state, link that to an individual identification or that social security number of that bird and monitor that bird as it moves freely around within the space that it's in. So if you imagine that video feed and all of that together, you can observe that bird. Through honestly, artificial intelligence algorithms. We can take all of that information and, as a first step, we can train that back on a set of data based on those subjective scores. As a first step, we can do that very well. Ultimately and this sounds a bit out there, but I've seen it now in practice we can then take that information to a next step and the algorithms can actually break apart and segment the quality of that locomotion into ways that the human eye really has a challenge with. So it's a simple trait, but that trait itself contributes to the longevity of that individual bird. So that's one area and we actually have a project underway doing that and it happens to be with the University of Georgia and their precision livestock and poultry group there in Athens.

William Herring: 10:06

A second one is around male mating behavior. Why is that important? Well, for those that keep up with metrics across the industry, particularly within the US. What we've seen across the industry is that Hatch has decreased year over year and is very impactful to, ultimately, the supply-demand picture, and there's a couple of major US integrators that are publicly traded and it gets mentioned in almost every quarterly earnings call. So it's all real. Usda data verifies this. I'd encourage you to look it up. So it's real and it has an impact. Why is that? Well, a lot of what we select for is really driven around.

William Herring: 10:50

Very efficient broiler production on the live side Makes perfect sense. I think an unintended consequence of that is negative impact on reproduction ability, and part of that is too. We really don't have a great way to accurately measure that at the individual male level, and that's again where this type of technology can come into place. We have a project in the latter stages with the University of Tennessee Precision Agricultural Group there in Knoxville where we are doing that again, using video feeds to monitor mating behavior and the quantity of that mating behavior and the quality of that behavior. So that would be a technology that we think would help assist in mitigating some of those things.

William Herring: 11:40

Downstream. It would be not a technology we would necessarily implement very far downstream in terms of deploying it, but certainly at our pedigree farms we use a lot of CT imaging technology within all of our pedigree sites to assess a number of things that we use today like yield, muscle yield, bone and joint health. But there are other areas like cardiovascular health that today we're using those same types of algorithms to deploy as part of our genetic selection and monitoring program. It's a project that we took on with Georgia Tech, with the Georgia Tech Research Institute. So kind of going back to that third strategy, really the second third strategy of accurately measuring things and then partnering with the right folks to take us down that pathway.

Brandon Mulnix: 12:29

It's so unique. I'm so used to layer and all the challenges within layers, but to hear what your challenges are in the broiler world and understanding that it's exciting that there's a lot of progress. I think of the computing power and the genetics and it would took a lot of computing power to get that genome mapped and figured out and you know there was a lot of work around that just on the human side, let alone that transferred over to the other species, which is pretty cool. When it comes to Cobb's vision for innovation, you guys do these prototype farms or these test farms that get to try out different technologies. Can you explain that a little?

William Herring: 13:04

bit. Yeah, we do. We've shared it in the media. Over the last, I would say, year and a half we invested quite a bit of capital into a site and it's on the east coast of the US. We call it Proving Grounds and it really folds into our first strategy around new product development.

William Herring: 13:21

Just from a Cobb perspective, probably the last really successful introduction in a big way of a product was in the mid-80s for Cobb, the Cobb 500, which is a great small bird package or a lighter weight package in the US today. So why has new product introduction been more limited? I would argue there hasn't been a really good infrastructure to test and validate products in a scalable way where customers can get really confident in the data that they want to look at ahead of time of utilizing and putting the product down. So we took one of our existing sites Again, it's in the Delmarva region on the East Coast invested constructing a number of new barns, retrofitting a number of new barns and basically I'd call it a small production pyramid where it has great-grandparents, grandparent production, then ultimately a fairly significant number of parent stock as you go through this. For example, if we want to test a new female product, we can test about 40,000 females at a time, twice a year through this new facility, and half of that product may be dedicated to a test female and the other half to a female we know a lot about to serve as a baseline or it could be a male, just depends on where we're at in our new product development timeline. So we get a huge amount, more than ever before in the industry breeder data first and foremost for us to get confident in and, if it looks like a product that is street-worthy, data that we can share with customers ahead of time. Also, it generates a large number of broiler eggs. So customers always want to know about the broiler data. A lot of that they can generate themselves if we can provide them with a test population of broilers to place. So we can generate about 100,000 broiler eggs per week for customers to utilize and have a look at.

William Herring: 15:19

It goes further than that. We have our own broiler testing facilities that we pass a portion of those to, so we grow the broilers out, test them for all the important traits of growth rate, livability, feed conversion, and then we have a processing facility in Fayetteville, arkansas it's actually the University of Arkansas's processing facility, so we can harvest a sizable number of birds. We share that every day with them and we're harvesting birds in there every day. Where we can hand debone, it's digital data collection platform so we can quickly get the data back into our database to assess that.

William Herring: 15:57

And then also something that is very unique, I think, to Cobb and something we have taken advantage of in a very sizable way over the last year and a half Cobb is owned wholly owned by Tyson Foods.

William Herring: 16:10

So you know our genetics do go to Tyson, but Tyson has some other assets that we have really tapped into that have helped us for our global genetic improvement program, and one of those is a better understanding and characterization of all things around meat quality. So when we harvest those birds that come through the processing facility, we send a portion of those samples over to the Tyson Discovery Center and the food science team there does a very thorough evaluation of the treatments that we provide and then that information gets passed back. That's really a unique opportunity for us is being owned by an integrator with those sorts of abilities. So all of that information bundled up together gives us a really good look, is a product that we want to go to, that we think we want to go to market with? Does it pass all of our tests first before we want to go to a customer?

Brandon Mulnix: 17:05

with it. It's interesting because as you develop product, you have the facilities and the capacity to run that product all the way through its life cycle and learn, not rely on a grower to grow that product for you to get you the data that you guys want as a company that's important to you to make your decisions on. That's putting a lot of control to the uncontrollable in the R&D space.

William Herring: 17:28

Yeah, it is. There's another thing that's really important to that as we're getting ready to enter with newer and different products, we also want to be able to show up with a playbook of how to use that product down through the system. So, whether it be what's the right weight guide for the females or males, you know what is there? A lighting guide that's slightly different, or an incubation profile, or that type of facility allows us to have a better understanding of that and show up with with a playbook for, you know, a more successful experience that's got to be very helpful for your growers, as they have that curve to go off from and the baselines.

Brandon Mulnix: 18:11

That way they're not necessarily looking at. Maybe what other people are doing in the industry that are not as vested as Cobb is in the success of that bird. So at least it gives them a very, very good goal to shoot for.

William Herring: 18:25

That's our hope, that's our goal for that process. So we've talked about birds.

Brandon Mulnix: 18:29

We've talked about Cobb. Let's talk about William just a little bit. This is a podcast about leadership, and you're in a position of leadership as a VP. I'm assuming you have a pretty good team around you. What is some traits of a good leader?

William Herring: 18:45

Well, first I'm going to say I don't think there is a silver bullet for that. Hey look, we're all different as individuals. We all have things where certain areas we're better at than others. For me and again, this is just for me but throughout my career, the thing that has helped me and the things I've been tasked with is being sure that my team, especially my direct team I try and recruit people that are way smarter than me, that work hard and can execute at a very high level. That sounds very simple, but the most important thing that I'm involved with is hiring and recruiting, and so it's something that I spend a lot of time on down through the organization, not only when there are opportunities for like my direct reports.

William Herring: 19:44

Conversely, if you don't and you know, let's say, you're a good and smart leader there aren't enough hours in the day to go down through the weeds and the details, to go behind people and be sure things are getting done. So at Cobb, for example, we clearly have a lot going on and we have to deliver on those things that we have going on, and so I have spent, certainly early on in coming into the role of assembling the right group from across agricultural genetics that can perform at that level and do those things. And I don't think it matters whether you're leading an R&D organization or the entirety of a business or if you're a production manager working across several sites and depending on people to get things done. For me that's been very critical. There's a lot of other things that are important, I suppose, but for me, to execute and create change in a business, that's been, throughout my career, the most important.

Brandon Mulnix: 20:50

As we wrap this up, because there's a lot going on today, what's one last thing that you can share with the future leaders of this industry?

William Herring: 20:57

It's going to be an exciting time and I'm going to say this from a livestock and poultry perspective in general Globally, as we look across some uncharted waters, across the species. We're here in Dallas, texas. A lot of the conference has probably a little heavier on the beef side, which you know well-deserved and it's always interesting to track. Beef in the US is living through a really interesting time of incredibly low cow inventory and, I'd argue, not super strong signals that that's going to increase All-time high multiples of live prices, which you know if you're making calves on the front side, that's a great deal. My point is is that ultimately downstream that's created a increased cost to the consumer, which is all fine and good, but it changes the dynamics across the protein consumption space.

William Herring: 21:56

I think it ultimately means on for chicken that there'll be continued growth and expansion globally to maybe offset some of that. I mean chicken's gonna be produced at a lower cost as a unit of production relative to beef. You've got pork somewhere in between. That's still dealing with the supply, demand off balances with ASF and other dynamics. So how that future looks exactly is, I think, really unclear, but it is going to be an interesting time, I do think, when it comes to poultry production, there'll be continued growth and expansion across the world incrementally, and it'll be a great and fun industry to work in. Well, william.

Brandon Mulnix: 22:41

I really appreciate your time Listeners. Most of the time we spend talking about eggs and egg production and other things, but you've got to remember the barnyard's got lots of different species. When we're talking agriculture, we're talking ag tech. It's exciting to see folks coming together and trying to solve problems, trying to help farmers, because there is so many different types of technologies, from drone technology to, I mean, there's all kinds of different ones here that are kind of exciting. Never realized I'd see a GPS collar on a cow, but it makes sense when you start to look at things. So, poultry listeners, thank you. Please share this podcast with your friends, family and the rest of the industry. Have a great day.