Ms Yingluck tastes dried fruit after attending the opening of Thaifex — World of Food Asia 2012 at Impact Muang Thong Thani yesterday. The fair runs until Sunday. THITI WANNAMONTHA

She said yesterday that the demand for food products in international markets has continuously increased since the beginning of this year and this consumption will help to push up growth in almost all categories.

This year’s revenue from food exports excluding major commodities such as rice and sugar is estimated at US$28 billion, up by 12% from last year.

“This is a very promising sign for both the production and export sectors. Now is the time for them to make the most of this business opportunity,” she said at the opening of Thaifex _ World of Food Asia 2012.

Organisers expect the five-day event ending on Sunday will fetch US$420 million.

Ms Yingluck said the Thai government has a standing policy of positioning Thailand as the Kitchen of the World.

Thai agricultural and food products are highlighted, while foreign investment in the local farm sector is promoted vigorously.

“This initiative creates added value for not only our agricultural sector, but also the industrial and service sectors,” she said.

Commerce Minister Boonsong Teriyapirom said the euro-zone crisis is a major concern.

His ministry will discuss the issue with Kittiratt Na-Ranong, a deputy prime minister and finance minister, in order to minimise the impact against Thailand, he said.

Mr Boonsong said the EU’s economic woes will likely affect Thai shipments and prompting the Commerce Ministry to adjust export strategies.

A greater focus on Asean markets is possible in order to ensure this year’s growth target of 15%.

Phongsak Assakul, chairman of the Thai Chamber of Commerce, said he supports the govenment’s policy of standardising the quality of Thai food sold abroad.

Promoting food ingredient exports is an effective way of beefing up taste, he said.

Mr Phongsak said he also encourages the government and food processors to concentrate more on making halal food in order to tap into Asean’s Muslim consumers, which number more than 250 million.

In fact, the overall Asean population of 601 million is a good alternative to ailing Europe as well, he added.

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VOLYS STAR started producing Premium Halal Poultry Products for the French market some 30 years ago.

The company’s Halal experience was rewarded with leadership positions in other Halal markets in, amongst others, Asia and the Middle East.

Teaming up with AYTAC FOODS, VOLYS STAR products, which are available in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Dubai, are now also available at Tesco’s in the UK. They will be starting with their Sliced Smoked Turkey Rashers. A must for anyone who wants to have a Halal BLT!

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Cambodia would invite experts from Muslim-major-ity countries in the region to teach local Muslims, known as ‘Cham’, how to process food according to Islamic doctrine, Mao Thora, secretary of state at the Ministry of Commerce, said yesterday.

“The institution, or centre, for Islamic food would be a state-run facility with recognised Halal food standards”, he said.

Although many of the nation’s Cham consider themselves Muslim, awareness of the rules governing Halal eating habits was low, some members of the Muslim community said yesterday.

“If we don’t how to do it, then we are not Muslims. So we want to know how to do it,” Othsman Hassan, a local Muslim and president of the Cambodian Muslim Development Foundation, said.

“If we want to know how to make halal food, we have to seek help from Islamic people. And we need this help without spending too much money.”

One of the first steps for establishing a centre would be installing a laboratory for food testing, Othsman Hassan said.

Identifying hygiene techniques customarily used in Muslim cooking would be another part of the process, he said.

Muslims cannot eat food that contains pork or blood.

Cows that had been electrocuted could also not be consumed, Othsman Hassan noted.

Leaders of Cambodia’s Cham population have said their community is poor and often feels marginalised.

Sourced:Phnom Penh Post

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The Expo is endorsed by Dubai Municipality, Abu Dhabi Food Control Authority and International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement (IFOAM), Germany to run at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre from November 27-29 2012

Dubai: The 10^th edition of annual organic and natural products expo, MENOPE 2012 (Middle East Natural and Organic Products Expo) is expected to attract more regional participation this year, apart from a host of global companies who have elicited enthusiasm to be part of the show.

In a statement, the organizers of MENOPE 2012, Global Links Dubai LLC, today said the Middle East’s one and only exhibition for natural, organic and halal products will run from 27-29 November this year at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre in the UAE.

“Even at this early stage of the preparations for MENOPE 2012, we have strong and enthusiastic response from both regional and global players endorsing the fact that the annual exhibition has a very strong reputation as a show which caters to the trade with a view to foster growth of this sector,” said Eng. Nadim Al Fuqaha, Managing Director, Global Links.

He said MENOPE 2012 is also looking at attracting a number of regional organic players from both the private and public sector in line with the growth the sector has witnessed over the last few years.

“There are more regional players in the organic market now as businesses realize the growth potential of the sector. We believe that the market has expanded in size as well as quality of offerings with local organic players sensing the need to cater to a sophisticated and aware consumer base with a large share of young people,” Eng. Nadim said.

The Middle East market has maintained the pace of growth of over 15 per cent CAGR in the organic products market though the base is still small and niche with potential to expand further.

“Our partners say that there is strong retail growth trend in the organic and natural products sector. Higher prices have always been a hurdle for increased uptake of products in this sector, but as the volume increases, the price line is also expected to come down. We believe that some amount of rationalization of  prices is already taking place in the market, encouraging more consumers to buy organic products as they  become more affordable,” said  Mr. Joby Mathew, Head, Exhibitions, Global Links.

MENOPE is Middle East’s only exhibition for natural and organic products and this year over 150 exhibitors from 25 countries will take part in the niche show. The three-day expo includes the third MEVEG Conference and a  conference on  Traditional Complementary and Alternative Medicines.

MENOPE 2012 is endorsed by the Dubai Municipality. It is supported by International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), Germany, Ministry of Agriculture Lebanon, Department of Agriculture Philippines, Agrar Marketing Austria, and National Chamber of Sri Lanka etc.

Last year there was significant country pavilion participation from Austria, India, Korea, Philippines, USA, Romania, Srilanka, Lebanon, and Taiwan. The participating countries in MENOPE 2011 included the UAE, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, China, Thailand, Malaysia and Slovenia, Canada, among others.

MENOPE 2012 will showcase a variety of products spanning across Herbals and Spices, Food & Beverages, Cereal Products, Supplements, Health Care products, Natural Living, Natural and Organic Cosmetics, Healing Products, Natural Remedies, Traditional Medicines, Spas, Relaxation facilities, and Fabrics. More information on the event is available at www.naturalproductme.com. The organizers can also be reached at info@naturalproductme.com.

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On Tuesday, the Malaysian Second Minister of Finance Ahmad Husni Mohamed Hanadzlah met with Riadh Bettaib, Tunisia’s Minister of Investment and International Cooperation, to discuss the prospective collaboration between Malaysia and Tunisia in Halal industries.

“Tunisia can be a platform for the development and export of Halal industries for the Muslim community in Europe and Africa,” said Hanadzlah during a press conference attended by the two ministers in Tunis.

According to TAP, Malaysia’s exports in the Halal industries’ sector are valued at an estimated  $11 billon, and the rate of exchange in these industries worldwide generates over $2.3 trillion dollars annually. The Halal industries’ sector refers to the production of food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals that abide by Islamic Law.

The Malaysian Minister of Finance stated that his country is willing to host over 30 Tunisian Halal companies in order for them gain experience from the well-established Malaysian Halal industry. He stressed the lucrative potential of developing this sector, given the high demand of Malaysian Halal industry products in countries with large Muslim communities.

Prospects of bilateral cooperation in the Islamic finance sector were also touched upon during the conference, and Hanadzlah stressed that Malaysia’s expertise in this field will be at Tunisia’s disposal.

Islamic Finance was first established in Malaysia in 1983. Since then, Islamic financial transactions total to $31 billion, accounting for 23% of Malaysia’s financial services sector.

Currenty, no Malaysian businesses are based in Tunisia. The only form of trade conducted between the two countries consists of the exportation of Tunisian dates and the importation of Malaysian natural oils.

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Over 350 companies from 22 countries will be participating at the annual Saudi food, hotel, hospitality & propac arabia show to be held in Jeddah from May 20-23, 2012, under the patronage of the Saudi Ministry of Agriculture and under the auspices of Engineer Hassan Sangoof, Director General, Ministry of Agriculture, Makkah Region.

Organised by Al-Harithy Company for Exhibitions (ACE), the event – Saudi Arabia’s 17th international Event for Food, Beverages and Catering, Hotel Equipment, Supplies and Services – is set for opening at 5 p.m. on Sunday, May 20 at the JCCI-owned Jeddah Centre for Forums & Events.

“This is the leading event in the Kingdom’s food, hotel, hospitality, processing and packaging industries, with a successful track record of more than fifteen years,” Zahoor Siddique, Vice President for Exhibitions, ACE, said.

The show has established Jeddah as the hub of the food, hotel and hospitality sector, and the Kingdom as a national showcase and forum where worldwide suppliers present their products and services, he added.

The event, propac arabia – the Kingdom’s comprehensive showcase for the industry – runs concurrently and will display a diverse range of exhibitor profile covering the entire spectrum of this industry. This is Saudi Arabia’s 17th International Event for Production & Processing, Printing & Packaging, Plastics & Chemicals.

The dual event hosts an impressive list of national pavilions from China, Egypt, Indonesia, Taiwan, Turkey, USA and individual companies from Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Korea, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Singapore, Tunisia and UAE; and Saudi companies representing international brands.

The show incorporates TopChef & Art de Table, jointly organized by ACE and Saudi Arabian Chef Association, which will feature culinary skills of chefs from the finest hotels and restaurants and adjudicated by a panel of international experts.

“Art de table will be yet another attraction of impressive table displays by leading hotels and restaurants,” Zahoor Siddique added.

The shows also enjoy the support of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Islamic Center for Development of Trade with Royal Host as the Main Sponsor and Fakieh Group as the strategic sponsor.

The show runs daily from 5 -10 pm, 20-23 May, 2012.

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Nestlé Malaysia, producer of the company’s biggest range of halal products, is celebrating its centenary.

Nestlé consumers worldwide have been able to buy halal versions of the company’s well-known brands such as Milo, Nescafé, Maggi, Kit Kat andNespray since the 1980s.

Today Nestlé Malaysia produces about 300 halal products in its food and beverage range which are exported to more than 50 countries worldwide.

Halal certified products are sourced, manufactured, imported and distributed in accordance with Islamic law to meet the needs of Muslim consumers.
Hub of expertise

Malaysia was Nestlé’s first market to apply for halal certification for all its food products. This followed the Malaysian government’s introduction of voluntary halal certification in 1994.

Nestlé Malaysia is now the company’s global Halal Centre of Excellence.

This means it offers policy guidelines, know-how and expertise on halal to other Nestlé markets.

Nestlé Malaysia’s Halal Policy outlines information on ingredients, sourcing, production, packaging and transportation of Nestlé halal products.

A Halal Committee which includes senior executives from various areas in the company was established in the 1980s. It has become part of the policy to ensure it addresses matters in relation to halal certification.

Centenary celebrations

Paul Bulcke, Nestlé’s Chief Executive Officer, emphasised the importance of Nestlé Malaysia at a recent event to mark the company’s 100th anniversary.

“Nestlé Malaysia plays an important role to the Nestlé Group,” he said.

“Not only because of the country’s unique location at the heart of the region which allows our business easier access to the South East Asian market.

“But also because of its strategic role as the biggest halal producer and the Halal Centre of Excellence in the Nestlé world,” Mr Bulcke added.

A number of other activities throughout the year will be led by Nestlé Malaysia to mark its centenary.
Nourishing generations

Nestlé started its operations in 1912 as the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company in the Malaysian state of Penang.

It set up its first factory 50 years later in Petaling Jaya, near to the capital of Kuala Lumpur, producing sweetened condensed milk, the beverage brand Milo, and tomato and chilli sauces.

The company now employs more than 5,700 employees in Malaysia. It operates seven factories, all of which are halal certified.

“What began as a small organisation 100 years ago is now a very successful business,” said Mr Bulcke.

“Over time the company has become a natural part of society, nourishing generations of Malaysian families.”
Halal worldwide

Other leading Nestlé markets which produce halal products include Indonesia and the Middle East.

In Europe, Nestlé’s halal products are manufactured mainly in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Nestlé halal products are also produced in the United States.

A halal inspection authority, such as the Halal Food Council of Europe, inspects the company’s factories with a Nestlé Halal Committee member to ensure products comply with Islamic law before halal certification is awarded.

A total of 85 out of Nestlé’s 456 factories worldwide are halal certified.

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Sher Halal Foods and United Halal Foods, based at the Cibyn industrial estate in Caernarfon, have combined debts of almost £650,000.

Administrators SFP, who hope to sell the two businesses, said they employed 35 people and had a turnover of £12m.

The companies set up in 2009 after a previous firm, Cig Cibyn, went into administration.

Daniel Plant, group partner at SFP, said the companies went into administration at the beginning of May due to cash-flow problems.

‘Business and assets sale’

“Despite having substantial turnover Sher Halal Foods Limited and United Halal Foods Limited were both unable to continue trading,” he said.

“We are undertaking a marketing campaign for a sale of the business and assets.”

Mr Plant added the problems faced by the two business at Caernarfon suggested an “increasingly tough environment for the food processing industry”.

The two companies moved to Cibyn in 2009, three months after Cig Cibyn went into administration.

At the time it was reported the sale would result in a major overhaul, designed to improve productivity and raise standards.

In November 2008, farmers’ unions said some of their members were owed thousands of pounds by Cig Cibyn in Caernarfon, with one farmer claiming he was £12,000 out of pocket.

The company went into administration, three weeks after making 51 workers redundant.

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Dairy scientists are the Gregor Mendels of the genomics age, developing new methods for understanding the link between genes and living things, all while quadrupling the average cow’s milk production since your parents were born.

Reuters.

While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Already, Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie has 346 daughters who are on the books and thousands more that will be added to his progeny count when they start producing milk. This is quite a career for a young animal: He was only born in 2004.

There is a reason, of course, that the semen that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie produces has become such a hot commodity in what one artificial-insemination company calls “today’s fast paced cattle semen market.” In January of 2009, before he had a single daughter producing milk, the United States Department of Agriculture took a look at his lineage and more than 50,000 markers on his genome and declared him the best bull in the land. And, three years and 346 milk- and data-providing daughters later, it turns out that they were right.

“When Freddie [as he is known] had no daughter records our equations predicted from his DNA that he would be the best bull,” USDA research geneticist Paul VanRaden emailed me with a detectable hint of pride. “Now he is the best progeny tested bull (as predicted).”

Data-driven predictions are responsible for a massive transformation of America’s dairy cows. While other industries are just catching on to this whole “big data” thing, the animal sciences — and dairy breeding in particular — have been using large amounts of data since long before VanRaden was calculating the outsized genetic impact of the most sought-after bulls with a pencil and paper in the 1980s.

Dairy breeding is perfect for quantitative analysis. Pedigree records have been assiduously kept; relatively easy artificial insemination has helped centralized genetic information in a small number of key bulls since the 1960s; there are a relatively small and easily measurable number of traits — milk production, fat in the milk, protein in the milk, longevity, udder quality — that breeders want to optimize; each cow works for three or four years, which means that farmers invest thousands of dollars into each animal, so it’s worth it to get the best semen money can buy. The economics push breeders to use the genetics.

The bull market (heh) can be reduced to one key statistic, lifetime net merit, though there are many nuances that the single number cannot capture. Net merit denotes the likely additive value of a bull’s genetics. The number is actually denominated in dollars because it is an estimate of how much a bull’s genetic material will likely improve the revenue from a given cow. A very complicated equation weights all of the factors that go into dairy breeding and — voila — you come out with this single number. For example, a bull that could help a cow make an extra 1000 pounds of milk over her lifetime only gets an increase of $1 in net merit while a bull who will help that same cow produce a pound more protein will get $3.41 more in net merit. An increase of a single month of predicted productive life yields $35 more.

When you add it all up, Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie has a net merit of $792. No other proven sire ranks above $750 and only seven bulls in the country rank above $700. One might assume that this is largely because the bull can help the cows make more milk, but it’s not! While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is named Ensenada Taboo Planet-Et. His predicted transmitting ability for milk production is +2323, more than 1100 pounds greater than Freddie. His offspring’s milk will likely containmore protein and fat as well. But his daughters’ productive life would be shorter and their pregnancy rate is lower. And these factors, as well as some traits related to the hypothetical daughters’ size and udder quality, trump Planet’s impressive production stats.

One reason for the change in breeding emphasis is that our cows already produce tremendous amounts of milk relative to their forbears. In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. At the same time, the number of dairy cows has decreased from a high of 25 million around the end of World War II to fewer than nine million today. This is an indisputable environmental win as fewer cows create less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and require less land.

At the same time, it turns out that cow genomes are more complex than we thought: as milk production amps up, fertility drops. There’s an art to balancing all the traits that go into optimizing a herd.

While we may worry about the use of antibiotics to stimulate animal growth or the use of hormones to increase milk production by up to 25 percent, most of the increase in the pounds of milk an animal puts out over the pastoral days of yore come from the genetic changes that we’ve wrought within these animals. It doesn’t matter how the cow is raised — in an idyllic pasture or a feedlot — either way, the animal of 2012 is not the animal of 1940 or 1980 or even 2000. A group of USDA and University of Minnesota scientists calculated that 22 percent of the genome of Holstein cattle has been altered by human selection over the last 40 years.

In a sense that’s very real, information itself has transformed these animals. The information did not accomplish this feat on its own, of course. All of this technological and scientific change is occurring within the social context of American capitalism. Over the last few decades, the number of dairies has collapsed and the size of herds has increased. These larger operations are factory farms that are built to squeeze inefficiencies out of the system to generate profits. They benefit from economies of scale that allow them to bring in genomic specialists and use more expensive bull semen.

No matter how you apportion the praise or blame, the net effect is the same. Thousands of years of qualitative breeding on family-run farms begat cows producing a few thousand pounds of milk in their lifetimes; a mere 70 years of quantitative breeding optimized to suit corporate imperatives quadrupled what all previous civilization had accomplished. And the crazy thing is, we’re at the cusp of a new era in which genomic data starts to compress the cycle of trait improvement, accelerating our path towards the perfect milk-production machine, also known as the Holstein dairy cow.

There are no more famous experiments in genetics than the ones undertaken by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel on five acres in what is now the Czech Republic from 1856 to 1863. Mendel bred 29,000 pea plants and discovered the most basic rules of genetics without any knowledge of the underlying biochemical mechanics.

Smack dab in the middle of Mendel’s experiments, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, but we don’t have any record of intellectual mingling between the two men. Even the idea of a gene as an irreducible unit of inheritance wasn’t presented until 30 years after Mendel began his experiments. The term and field of genetics would not be fleshed out until William Bateson and company came along in the early 1900s. And its form, DNA, would not be proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick with indispensable help from Rosalind Franklin until 90 years after his last pea plant died. All this to say: Mendel was ahead of his time.

What he had going for him was a dedication to data, to quantification. His fundamental insight was statistical.

Here’s the simple version of what he did. Mendel took pea plants that reliably produced purple or white flowers when they self-pollinated. Then he crossbred them, carefully controlling how the plants reproduced. Now, one might expect that if you breed a pea plant with a purple flower and a pea plant with a white flower, you’d get progeny that were sort of mauve, a mix of the two colors. But what Mendel found instead is that you either got purple flowers or white flowers. Even more amazingly, sometimes breeding two purple flowers would yield a white flower. Among the first generation of crossbreeds, the mix of flower colors occurred at a roughly constant ratio of about 3:1, purple to white. If the traits of two plants were being mixed to generate the next generation, how could two purple flowers yield a white flower? And why would this ratio arise?

Mendel took a conceptual leap and hypothesized that the plants had two possible copies of its plans (i.e. genes) to make flower color (or any of six other traits he analyzed). If the plant received two of the dominant plan (purple), the flowers would, of course, be purple. If it received one of each, the dominant plan would still reign. But if the plant received two recessive plans, then the flowers of that pea would be white.

The monk turned out to be right. For traits controlled by a single gene, things really do work as he predicted. Mendel’s insights became part of the central dogma of genetics. You can use the statistical method he used to calculate how likely someone is to get sickle cell anemia from her parents. In most genetics classes, Mendel is where it all starts and for good reason.

But it turns out that Mendel’s version of things doesn’t actually give a very clear picture of the kinds of things we care about most. “Mendel studied a few traits that happened to be controlled by a single gene, making the probabilities easier to figure out,” the USDA’s VanRaden said. “Animal breeders for many decades have used models that assume most traits are influenced by thousands of genes with very small effects. Some [individual] genes do have detectable effects, but many studies of plant and animal traits conclude that most of the genetic variation is from many little effects.”

For dairy cows — or humans, for that matter — it’s just not as simple as the dominant-recessive single-gene paradigm that Mendel created. In fact, Mendel picked his model organism well. Its simplicity allowed him to focus in on the simplest possible genetic model and figure it out. He could easily manipulate the plant breeding; he could observe key traits of the plant; and these traits happened to be controlled by a single gene, so the math lay within human computational range. Pea plants were perfect for studying the basics of genetics.

With that in mind, allow me to suggest, then, that the dairy farmers of America, and the geneticists who work with them, are the Mendels of the genomic age. That makes the dairy cow the pea plant of this exciting new time in biology. Last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, two of the most successful bulls of all time had their genomes published.

This is a landmark in dairy herd genomics, but it’s most significant as a sign that while genomics remains mostly a curiosity for humans, it’s already coming of age when it comes to cattle. It’s telling that the cutting-edge genomics company Illumina has precisely one applied market: animal science. They make a chip that measures 50,000 markers on the cow genome for attributes that control the economically important functions of those animals.

A snippet from Illumina’s animal science fact sheet.

***

Mendel may have worked with plants, the rules he revealed turned out to be universal for all living things. The same could be true of the statistical rules that dairy scientists are learning about how to match up genomic data with the physical attributes they generate. The statistical rules that reflect the way dozens or hundreds of genes come together to make a cow likely to develop mastitis, say, may be formally similar to the rules that govern what makes people susceptible to schizophrenia or prone to living for a long time. Researchers like the University of Queensland’s Peter Visscher are bringing the lessons of animal science to bear on our favorite animal, ourselves.

Want to live for a very long time? Well, we hope to discover the group of genes that are responsible for longevity. The problem is that you have genomic data over here and you have phenotypic data, i.e. how things actually are, over there. What you need, then, is some way of translating between these two realms. And it’s that matrix, that series of transformations, that animal scientists have been working on for the past decade.

It turned out they were in the perfect spot to look for statistical rules. They had databases of old and new bull semen. They had old and new production data. In essence, it wasn’t that difficult to generate rules for transforming genomic data into real-world predictions. Despite — or because of — the effectiveness of traditional breeding techniques, molecular biology has been applied in the field for years in different ways. Given that breeders were trying to discover bulls’ hidden genetic profiles by evaluating the traits in their offspring that could be measured, it just made sense to start generating direct data about the animals’ genomes.

“Each of the bulls on the sire list, we have 50,000 genetic markers. Most of those, we have 700,000,” the USDA’s VanRaden said. “Every month we get another 12,000 new calves, the DNA readings come in and we send the predictions out. We have a total of 200,000 animals with DNA analysis. That’s why it’s been so easy. We had such a good phenotype file and we had DNA stored on all these bulls.”

They had all that information because for decades, scientists have been taking data from cows to figure out which bulls produced the best offspring. Typically, a bull with a promising pedigree would reach sexual maturity and his semen would be used to impregnate a selection of about 50 test cows. Those daughters would grow up and start producing milk a few years later. The data from those cows would be used to calculate the value of that now “proven” bull. People called the process “progeny testing” and it did not require that breeders knew the exact genetic makeup of a bull. Instead, scientists and breeders could simply say: We do not know the underlying constellations of genes that make this bull so valuable, but we do know how much milk his kids will produce. They learned to use that data to predict who the best bulls were.

That meant that some bulls became incredibly sought after. The number two bull of the last century, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, had more than 16,000 daughters, 500,000 granddaughers, and 2 million great granddaughters. He’s responsible for about 14 percent of all the genetic material in all Holsteins, USDA scientists estimate.

“[In the past], we combined performance data — milk yield, protein yield, confirmation data — with pedigree information, and ran it through a fairly sophisticated computing gobbledygook,” another USDA scientist Curt Van Tassel told a group of dairy farmers. “It spit out at the other end predicted transmitting ability, predicted genetic values of whatever sort. Now what we’re trying to do is tweak that black box by introducing genomic data.”

There are many different ways you could model the mapping of 50,000 genetic markers onto a dozen performance traits, especially when you have to consider all kinds of environmental factors. So the dairy breeders have been developing and testing statistical models to take all this stuff into account and spit out good predictions of which bulls herd managers should ultimately select.The real promise is not that genomic data will actually be better than the ground-truth information generated from real offspring (though it might be), but rather that the estimates will be close enough to real but save 3 to 4 years per generation. If you don’t have to wait for daughters to start cranking out milk, then you can shave those years off the improvement cycle, speeding it up several times.

Nowadays breeders can choose between “genomic bulls,” which have been evaluated based purely on their genes and “proven bulls,” for which real world data is available. Discussions among dairy breeders show that many are beginning to mix in younger bulls with good-looking genomic data into the breeding regimens. How well has it gone? The first of the bulls who were bred from their genetic profiles alone, are receiving their initial production data. So far, it seems as if the genomic estimates were a little high, but more accurate than traditional methods alone.

The unique dataset and success of dairy breeders now has other scientists sniffing around their findings. Leonid Kruglyak, a genomics professor at Princeton, told me that “a lot of the statistical techniques and methodology” that connect phenotype and genotype were developed by animal breeders. In a sense, they are like codebreakers. If you know the rules of encoding. it’s not difficult to put information in one end and have it pop out the other as a code. But if you’re starting with the code, that’s a brutally difficult problem. And it’s the one that diary geneticists have been working on.

Their work could reach outside the medical realm to help us understand human’s evolution as well. For example, Kruglyak said, human population geneticists want to figure out how to explain the remarkable lack of genetic variance between human beings. “The typical [genetic] variation among humans is one change in a thousand,” he said. “Chimps, though they obviously have a much smaller population now, have several fold higher genetic diversity.” How could this be? Researchers hypothesize that human beings once went through a bottleneck where there were very few humans relative both to the current human population and the chimp population. Few humans meant that the gene pool was limited at some point in the pre-historical but fairly recent past. We’ve never recovered the diversity we might have had.

***

The number-one ranked bull in the world. Kathy DeBruin.

It might seem that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie is the pinnacle of the Holstein bull. He’s been the top bull since the day his genetic markers showed up in the USDA database and his real-world performance has backed up his genome’s claims. But he’s far from the best bull that science can imagine.

John Cole, yet another USDA animal improvement scientist, generated an estimate of the perfect bull by choosing the optimal observed genetic sequences and hypothetically combining them. He found that the optimal bull would have a net merit value of $7,515, which absolutely blows any current bull out of the water. In other words, we’re nowhere near creating the perfect milk machine.

The problem, of course, is that genomes cannot really be cut and pasted together from the best bits. “When you go extremely far for one trait, you’re going to upset some of the other traits,” Vanraden said. Breeding is a messy (i.e. biological) process, no matter how technologically sophisticated the front end. After decades of breeding cows for milk production, people realized (to their dismay) that the ability to generate milk and the ability to have babies were negatively correlated. The more milk you tried to order up, the less babies your herd was likely to have. While we’re nowhere near the hypothetical limit for Holstein bull value, we do now know that nature is not so easily transformed without some deleterious effects. We may have factory farms, but these machines are still flesh and blood.

Except for Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie and his fellow bulls, that is. Freddie is a disembodied creature, an animal that is more important as data than as meat or muscle. Though he’s been mentioned in thousands of web pages and dozens of trade industry articles, no one mentions where he was born or where the animal currently lives. He is, for all intents and purposes except for his own, genetic material that comes in the handy form of semen. His thousands of daughters will never smell him and his physical location doesn’t matter to anyone. He will be replaced very soon by the next top bull, as subject to the pressures of our economic system as the last version of the iPhone.

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Muslims and Jews are advancing, at different rates, toward new breakthroughs in frozen pepperoni pizza.

Daniel Gryfe, the 24-year-old operations chief of Gryfe’s Kosher Bakery near Toronto, launched a frozen kosher pizza in the U.S. last year. Now he is at work on the next model: pizza with soy-milk cheese and veggie pepperoni. Neither milk nor meat, it would satisfy not only Jews who keep kosher, but also vegans and the lactose intolerant. “We’re the first kosher pizza to go after the mass market,” says Mr. Gryfe. “We’ve got stone-ground, whole-grain crust.”

William Aossey, 65, founder of Midamar Corp., of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a Muslim. He sells a frozen pizza, too. His has real cheese and pepperoni made from halal beef-raised and slaughtered according to Muslim dietary laws.

As Mr. Aossey strives to bring his pizza — and his people — into the American culinary mainstream, his model is the Jewish struggle for freedom from the delicatessen. Gryfe’s hopes non-Jews will want to go kosher-vegan. Midamar is betting that Muslim Americans are ready to go Italian-Islamic. “We’ve had immigrants accuse us of ‘distorting the culture’ by feeding kids halal pepperoni,” says Mr. Aossey, whose father immigrated to Iowa from Lebanon. “But your children are going to grow up in this country. You cannot deny them American food.”

Mapping kosher’s progress, halal producers are coming to see that eating may be the fastest way to this country’s heart. Muslims can be as American as pepperoni pizza and still keep their faith. And halal-pizza makers can make a lot of money. “It’s the approach the Jewish community took 60 years ago,” says Mohammad Munir Chaudry, 62, who grew up in Pakistan and now heads the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America. “We are 60 years behind, but it’s not going to take us 60 years to catch up.”

Mr. Chaudry’s council, based in Chicago, certifies halal products with a “crescent M,” much like the circled “O” of the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifier. Asked if he has borrowed a page from the kosher book, Mr. Chaudry replies, “We borrowed the whole book.”

The book began with the leap of beef franks from the corner deli to a corner of the chain supermarket. Kosher stamps spread, letting observant Jews in on salsa, sushi and samosas. There are 86,000 products marked as kosher now, and by that measure sales are approaching $200 billion a year. Still, with fewer than six million Jews in the U.S., purchases by the faithful have their limits. To keep growing, kosher is going “natural.”

The tactic got an airing at Natural Products Expo West, a show that drew 2,700 organic, herbal and Earth-friendly exhibitors to the Anaheim Convention Center not long ago. Its organizer, New Hope Natural Media, of Boulder, Colo., set up a companion kosher show with 40 booths one floor below. Alongside them, in an ecumenical first for America, it also set up booths for a dozen purveyors of halal food. “It’s all about better-for-you foods,” says Fred Linder, New Hope’s president.

Neither kosher nor halal, of course, translates as “healthy.” Both forbid pork, and both require rituals for butchering meat that are comparable, although not interchangeable. Religious Muslims don’t drink alcohol. Religious Jews don’t mix milk and meat, nor do they eat shellfish. Neither group eats birds of prey or blood. The rules are complex, but one thing isn’t disputed: Calories and cholesterol don’t matter.

The perception of purity is close enough for Mr. Linder. “The growth possibilities,” he says, “particularly on the halal front, are enormous.”

That may be news to U.S. mass marketers. Estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from one million to seven million. In the rest of the world, with 1.4 billion Muslims, it’s a given.

Halal-product marketers see the possibilities as the global trade in processed foods and ingredients makes it harder for Muslims almost anywhere to know precisely what they are eating. Gelatin in yogurt can come from forbidden pigs, rennet in cheese from improperly slaughtered calves, and enzymes and artificial sweeteners from contaminated factories.

Malaysia would like to create a world body to validate what is or isn’t halal. The issue is bound to come up at the first World Halal Forum in Kuala Lumpur May 8. Like kosher certifiers, halal certifiers differ over rules and compete for fees. That may be one reason mainstream U.S. marketers haven’t pursued Muslim shoppers.

Politics is another. “They don’t know if there’d be a backlash from Islamophobes,” Mr. Chaudry says. His council certifies products of 2,000 U.S. companies, largely for shipments to Islamic countries.

In Europe, such fears may be fading. Antoine Bonnel, a French trade-show operator, noticed when Carrefour Group, the hypermarket chain, began wooing French Muslims. This year, it sold whole sheep in its parking lots for the feast of Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan.

In 2004, Mr. Bonnel put on the first-ever kosher-halal show in Paris and “made politics completely unimportant.” He mustered an all-American halal contingent in Anaheim: from steaks and chicken tortillas to lactose-free bouillon cubes. Retail buyers passed through the show: Wild Oats, Whole Foods, Albertson’s. Jalel Aossey, the Midamar founder’s 31-year-old son, told them all, “Halal is not a fad.”

But to some, the products are still a mirage. Jim Small, a buyer for Ralphs, Kroger Co.’s California chain, would like halal sections in his stores. But “there are no major distributors,” he says. “You don’t know even know where to look.”

And the halal-as-healthy idea may be lost in the wilderness. Ziyad Brothers, a Chicago halal-food importer, didn’t have their new Wild Garden Hummus Dip displayed at the halal show. It was upstairs, with the natural foods. “The consumer base on this is the American mass market,” says the company’s general manager, Nassem Ziyad. “It’s all natural and also shelf stable. It’s a pioneering product.” The label said “Product of Jordan,” with a small stamp: a circled “K,” for kosher.

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