[Abby Brown] All living things have to reproduce, or make more of themselves, to go on living.
Some plants make seeds in order to reproduce, like flowers, dandelions and trees.
When an apple seed is planted, no other plant except an apple tree will grow
because the new tree will inherit unique traits of an apple tree, like a trunk and branches
and apples, just like sunflowers make more sunflowers and dandelions make more dandelions.
Baby animals also inherit traits from their parents. When a chicken hatches from an
egg you know it's a chicken because it has unique traits like a beak, wings, feathers and, well, chicken legs.
Same with cows, pigs and lots of other animals. Baby animals look a lot
like their parents, except smaller and cuter, because they inherit traits from their parents.
Sometimes the unique traits of animals help them survive in the wild.
(quack, quack, quack)
Ducks have webbed feet for swimming. Owls have wings for flying.
(hoot, hoot, hoot)
Fish have gills for breathing.
But, the animals we're seeing today don't live in the wild, they don't need to protect
themselves from predators and they don't even need to find their own food. These animals are
growing and reproducing in a research farm so that farmers can learn more about feeding the world.
Hi, I'm Dr. Karl Kerns and I study animal science.
We're at the Iowa State Robert T. Hamilton Poultry Facility.
This is an educational and research facility. So we research both growing chickens as well as
egg-laying chickens. And so we're doing education here for our undergraduates
and then doing research as well.
Students learn what the chickens eat and how we make genetic selection and breeding the
chickens so that we ultimately have an egg and chicken product for you, the consumer.
[Ben Drescher] Welcome to our broiler room at Iowa State University.
These birds were specifically chosen for their traits relating to meat. If you take a look at these guys
you can see they are a heavy muscled, really stout featured individual. They are also picked because they grow.
They put on about one pound of gain while eating one pound of feed.
[Kerns] Genetics is passing down traits from the parents to the offspring.
The history of genetics has helped us pick traits from the early 1900s to today to increase production.
As we know, the early 1900s there were only 1.6 billion people here on planet Earth.
Today we have just over 7 billion people. And in 2050, soon, we'll have over 9 billion people.
So, thus in the early 1900s we were producing about 150 eggs per chicken per year.
Today, the best chickens are producing between 290 to 300 eggs per year.
[Abby] I love eggs. My family loves eggs. People love eggs.
And they're full of protein no matter what color they are so they're really good for you. Thanks to what we learned about genetics
and chickens, farmers will always be able to produce enough eggs for everyone who loves them.
(music)
When you really think about all of the delicious dairy products like cheese and yogurt
and ice cream that are full of calcium and so good for our bodies,
it's pretty amazing that geneticists have figured out a way to produce
a dairy cow with just the right traits to make enough milk for all of it.
[Kerns] These dairy cows are milked six times a day.
On average they give us 8 gallons of milk a day. But some of the record holding cows can give us
up to 26 gallons per day. We have selected for traits since the 1950s
so we can have two and a half times more gallons produced per day.
[Abby] The animals here all have humans who give them food,
keep them safe and clean, and provide buildings for protection.
[Kerns] We have increased milk production in the last 50 years and that is the continued
goal for the next 50 years as we increase the number of people on this planet.
[Abby] 100 years ago there were way more farmers.
And today there are way more people to feed. Thanks to geneticists we can still get that job done.
Feeding the world is a huge job. And learning about genetics is an important part of that job.
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