Dairy makers are hoping pured fruit and genetically screened cows can help win back consumers who have soured on milk.

U.S. milk sales are down 11% by volume since 2000, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Plant-based milk substitutes have taken some of the remaining market share. And a turn away from packaged foods has sapped sales of breakfast cereal, a key milk accompaniment.

Milk companies are fighting back with products they are billing as an improvement on the original.

"Innovation is the only way out," said Blake Waltrip, chief executive for the U.S. at A2 Milk Co., a New Zealand-based company that sells milk that lacks a protein that may cause indigestion for some.

Big food makers are testing new products, too. Danone SA's Sir Bananas product combines milk with pured fruit, which it hopes will stand out from other flavored-milk drinks and is now available nationwide. Fairlife LLC, a partnership between Coca-Cola Co. and Select Milk Producers Inc., is selling "ultra-filtered" milk it says contains more calcium and protein than regular milk. It is also offering milkshakes containing antioxidants and prebiotic fiber, which is intended to aid digestive health.

A2 uses genetic tests on its cows to make sure they will produce milk that contains only a protein known as A2, not the additional A1 protein that some research suggests could cause indigestion. The company has captured more than 8% of the market in Australia, up from about 3% in 2012, according to Euromonitor International, in one of the few developed markets where milk sales continue to grow.

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In Australia, where agriculture plays a bigger role in the economy than the U.S., "milk is still seen as a staple," said Alice Yu, research analyst at Euromonitor in Sydney. "Everyone has a bottle of milk in their fridge," she said.

A2 Milk hopes to convince U.S. consumers that its milk can help them avoid the indigestion many people associate with lactose intolerance. "Literally within an hour, the consumer knows whether this solves their issue," Mr. Waltrip said. The company, which started selling milk in California in 2015, has struck distribution deals with Whole Foods Market Inc. and Publix Super Markets Inc.

Competitors and some scientists question A2's claim that milk without the A1 protein is easier to digest.

In Australia, A2 Milk sued competitor Lion Dairy & Drinks alleging that the rival's advertising misled customers into thinking Lion's milk didn't contain the A1 protein. Lion filed a countersuit challenging claims that milk without the A1 protein is easier to digest. A2 Milk says scientific studies suggest a benefit.

A2 Milk will also face competition in the U.S. from fast-growing, plant-based milk alternatives. The National Milk Producers Federation and other industry groups are pushing Congress to bar the makers of those products from marketing them as milk.

The dairy companies are fighting over a shrinking pool of milk demand. Milk sales dropped 14% in dollar terms the year through June from that period in 2013, according to Nielsen figures. That is one reason farmers are pouring excess milk into their fields and manure pits. Farmers in parts of the Northeast and Midwest dumped more than 250 million pounds of milk last year, a recent record, USDA data shows. They are on pace to dump even more milk this year.

Dean Foods Co. lowered profit guidance and saw its shares tumble Tuesday as executives with the U.S.'s largest milk producer acknowledged their struggles with declining fluid milk sales, and no end in sight.

"At some point you will see a bottoming in this category, and I'm not sure when you will predict that," Dean Chief Executive Ralph Scozzafava told investors. The company earlier this year launched versions of its TruMoo flavored-milk drinks that it says are free from genetically modified material.

Nate Donnay, director of Dairy Market Insight at INTL FCStone, questioned whether A2 and other companies charging a premium for their enhanced milks can reverse the broader turn away from the beverage.

"The target market is fairly narrow," he said.

--Jacob Bunge contributed to this article.

Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com and Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 09, 2017 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)

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Dairies' fix for souring milk sales: genetics and bananas | Fox Business - Fox Business

A scientist from The University of Manchester has hit upon an innovative way to control greenflies which infest our gardens and farms.

Dr Mouhammad Shadi Khudr, discovered that living lacewing insects- which are used as a way to biocontrol greenflies are also effective after they have died.

Dr Khudr, an evolutionary ecologist based at the University's Division of Evolution and Genomic Sciences, discovered how genetic variations in greenflies' respond to the fear of predation by lacewing known as aphid lions.

The greenflys' genetic variation and life history influenced how they responded to traces of their predator.

He hit upon the discovery while looking at how different lineages of one species of greenfly responded to lacewings on a crop.

Even though each greenfly line had a distinct way of responding to the exposure to the traces of the aphid lion they all suffered from dramatic reduction in their reproduction, he says.

Dr khudr designed and lead the collaborative research, which was funded by the Freie Universitt Berlin (Free University of Berlin).

The research is published in the journal Scientific Reports today.

He said: "Whether alive or dead, lacewings make it more difficult for aphids to reproduce.

"The smell and visual impact of dead predators reduce the greenflies' capacity to give offspring and the way they clump together on the plants they infest."

He added: "This approach is at the crossroads of agricultural, evolutionary and ecological science.

"It is a unique way of understanding the effect of genetic variability corresponding with the risk of predation and thus should receive much more attention.

"It has organic, easy to produce and affordable applications and thus has a promising potential to help solve an age old problem which frustrates many gardeners.

"And it would be most interesting to see if this approach might also work with other pests and biocontrol agents in other agricultural systems."

Explore further: The genetics of life and death in an evolutionary arms-race

More information: Mouhammad Shadi Khudr et al. Fear of predation alters clone-specific performance in phloem-feeding prey, Scientific Reports (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-07723-6

Read the original here:
Genetics takes fight to gardeners' green foe - Phys.org - Phys.Org

As the ninth member to join the Ag Startup Engine (ASE), Peterson Genetics brings education, mentoring, and financing resources to Iowa entrepreneurs and start-ups focused on agriculture technologies.Here at Peterson Genetics, were excited about seeing the seed of a new idea grow into a successful business, says Mike Peterson, president of Peterson Genetics, Inc. Weve been providing soybean genetics to seed companies across the country for over 30 years, and hope that some of this knowledge can be put to use for the fledgling companies involved in the Ag Startup Engine.

The ASE, which is located at the Iowa State University Research Park in Ames, Iowa, was formed to address two fundamental gaps that prevent ag start-ups and entrepreneurs from being more successful in Iowa: early seed stage investment and organized mentorship from successful Iowa and Midwestern entrepreneurs.Launched two years ago, other ASE membersinclude Veridian Credit Union, Hertz Farm Management, Iowa Farm Bureaus Renew Rural Iowa, Next Level Ventures, Summit Agricultural Group, Ag Leader Technologies, Ag Ventures Alliance, and Peoples Company.Peterson Genetics reflects the heritage of seed industry entrepreneurs that have had such profound impact on the shape of modern agriculture, comments Kevin Kimle, director of the Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative at Iowa State University. We are very excited to have Peterson join the founding group of the Ag Startup Engine.The ASE works to provide agricultural entrepreneurs with a structured environment to help them move from a start-up concept to a seed-ready business. Working in partnership with ISUs Startup Factory Accelerator, the program is implementing an infrastructure for mentoring, rapid prototyping, product development, financing, and customer acquisition. ISUs Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative assisted in the creation and development of the ASE, which then advanced into a private sector entity governed by its members.Peterson not only brings his business expertise, but also his strong desire to foster entrepreneurship in agriculture, says Joel Harris, codirector of the ASE. If you want to succeed in starting an ag tech-focused venture, there is no better place to get started than the Iowa State University Research Park in Ames.

You can learn by visiting the Ag Startup Engine at agstartupengine.com.

Excerpt from:
The Ag Startup Engine Adds Peterson Genetics to Its Efforts - Agriculture.com

A push to put the power of discovery science back into livestock breeding as brought home a genetics world achiever, writes Andrea Fox.

Last updated09:20, August 10 2017

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Top genetics scientist Dorian Garrick has come home to New Zealand to head a new Massey breeding centre.

Returned world-leading Kiwi scientist Dorian Garrick likes to say his research at a US university was funded by the Islamic jihad.

The leader of the newly-launched Massey University Al Rae Centre for Genetics and Breeding has been able to utterthis little showstopperquite a bit lately in response to predictable inquiries about how he will cope with New Zealand's much-lamentedscience funding squeeze after America's comparative largesse.

It's nota word of a lie, says the professor, lured home from a stellar international career to lend gravitas to a venture which aims to build enviable expertise in quantitative breeding, genetics and genomics to benefit agriculture and create the next generation of scientists with these skills for the plant and animal breeding industries.

For the past 10 years, Garrick has held the Jay Lush endowed professorship chair in animal breeding and genetics at Iowa State University. The genesis of that chair was a $1 million donation from alumnus and Hizbollah kidnap victim Tom Sutherland. Sutherland hoped others who had benefited from the university's pre-eminent animal science programme would follow his lead to build the endowed professorship honouring Lush, considered the father of modern animal breeding and Sutherland's major professor.

Sutherland gave away many millions of dollars to charity after receiving $23 million compensation awarded by an American court in 2001 from Iranian assets frozen over Iran's role in financing Hizbollah militants. Sutherland, who died last year at 85, was abducted in Beirut in 1985 while dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut. He was held for six years, often chained to a wall in darkness, one of dozens of westerners taken hostage in Beirut at the height of Lebanon's civil war.

At his office in AgResearch's Ruakura campus Homestead, Garrick says while it was a boon to be able to tap the fruit of the Iran funds for his research and teaching at Iowa State, there's plenty to be positive about in his new job downunder.

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His salary has dipped a bit but his motivation in coming home was never money, he says. He always intended to return and has kept up his links with Massey, from where he graduated with first class honours in 1981 and which was his first employer. The new job isn't fulltime he's retaining an interest in a genomics software company he co-founded in the US.

But there's no getting away from the fact that the future of new AL Rae Centre, named in memory of another founder of modern animal breeding, Garrick's Massey professor Alexander Lindsay Rae, will depend on cold hard cash as much as the prestige of the Garrick name.

A cornerstone of the new discovery science centre was a $250,000 gift from the Norman FB Barry Foundation which enabled the funding of four PhD scholarships, one postdoctoral fellow, two eminent visiting scientists and funds for workshops.

"It's a small amount in the whole perspective of things but the advantage is it's not dedicated to a particular project. With most of our research grants, by the time you get it, you know where all the money is going to go," says Garrick, who gained his PhD at Cornell in the US.

"That means you don't have the money that if a student walks through the door showing a lot of interest, you can't say sit down, enrol, you're starting tomorrow. Or if we come up with some serendipitous discovery and we want to do a new trial next week, we don't have the funds to do that with research grants.

"Funding an additional student or an experiment can be done with unencumbered funds and that's where donations like the Barry Foundation's are tremendously valuable."

The new centre's co-director and key driver, Massey professor Hugh Blair makes no bones about how important unencumbered cash gifts are to science.

"The country's top students have been enticed away from discovery science in genetics because of greater salaries in banking and other agribusiness areas.

"Low salaries for PhD students in New Zealand have resulted in more attractive opportunities for talented people elsewhere..this has led to under-achievement in discovery science for a number of years, with similar science centres around New Zealand suffering from a lack of resources and a short-term focus driven by an industry keen on solving the issues at hand."

For years, Blair says, there has been a lack of research in quantitative genetics in favour of molecular genetics. "We want to marry these two areas to get a picture of the overall merit of the animal."

Garrick's wasted no time applying to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for "substantial" funds and says some funding is also promised from Beef + Lamb Genetics and DairyNZ. Funding and support conversations are also under way with sector participants such as LIC, CRV Ambreed and the wood industry Crown Research Institute Scion.

Wellington-born Garrick - hardwired for a career in science, his father had a doctorate in shark science - says some things in the New Zealand research science world are looking up since he left the country in 2002 to join Colorado State University, where he stayed for five years before going to Iowa State.

While he supports scientists getting overseas experience and seeking fresh mentors, his exit to Colorado was spurred by a cocktail of negative developments during his time in the AL Rae chair at Massey University, a post he took up in 1994.

"(Initially) I had seven PhD graduates and worked in a range of different industries including forestry. Some students came through our undergraduate ag-science programmes and others from offshore and we did a lot of direct research with industry.

"About that time New Zealand was swinging towards user-pays and capturing intellectual property and keeping ideas secret so they might be patented. The media was portraying agriculture as a sunset industry and the government was funding three year degree programmes rather than four year programmes.

"As each one of my PhD students finished I wasn't able to find a replacement to keep the programme going. I went from seven to zero PhD students. I designed a large experiment for the Dairy Board that would have involved genomics and was hopeful it would allow us to involve a number of graduate students, but Fonterra which inherited the project and created the subsidiary ViaLactica to manage it, wanted it to be kept fairly secret and run on their own properties, not involving graduate students."

The matings for this project had been completed but it would be several years before useful data would be generated for discovery, so it was time to leave, Garrick recalls.

He intended to stay at Colorado university three years but when the time was up New Zealand didn't have the jobs he wanted, which would have involved solving industry problems, publishing the results and bringing in graduate students. He stayed on in America.

"While I've been away the government changed its policy involving graduate students and we've had an increase in the number wanting to do post-grad study. There's been a bit of relaxation over intellectual property and patenting and a recognition that a lot of research is better when it's published or shared than when it's secret."

Garrick says he was approached to return home by parties in the dairy and sheep and beef industries. There was an indication funds might be available for discovery science.

Meantime Massey had met industry stakeholders around the country for feedback on what was required to do a better job on genetic improvement.

"They identified the need for graduate training and for people to work across species and disciplines. All that converged to create the AL Rea Centre."

The Waikato and Ruakura were chosen to host the centre because Massey did not have a direct presence there, it was "neutral" territory, and major industry organisations were headquartered nearby.

Garrick says the first bid for government funding has been made in collaboration with a number of those parties and researchers.

While his statistics mining and computer modelling work on theoretical problems to do with genetic prediction is a foreign language to most of us, his message to NZ Inc and farmers is simple.

"There are fantastic business value propositions for genetic improvement. Many organisations know this already. If they invest in genetic improvement the country will benefit to a much greater extent than the investment (involved).

"But most of them recognise there is market failure in these activities so they need to be partially supported by funding somewhere else. I would like people to recognise that we are here to help. We are here to help train students or perhaps staff already working in those organisations."

Farmers, he says, could encourage their levy funding organisations to invest in genetic improvement activities and to take more of a long-term view.

"I'm always interested in working with ram and bull breeders and have a history of working with them. If they have ideas about doing things differently, we can work with them to help them implement it on their own farms.

"If they see something unusual with a genetic basis, let us know. We have discovered quite a number of genes responsible for diseases in particular because some commercial farmer has contacted us about lambs or calves on their farm with an unusual attribute and we've been able to trace it back and show it comes from a particular sire.

"In many cases we are able to use genomics to find the actual cause or mutation responsible for that effect. Then that allows them to select against that if the attribute is unfavourable. Sometimes if you discover something unfavourable it improves your knowledge about favourable attributes at the same time."

-Stuff

See more here:
Top genetics scientist back for the future - Stuff.co.nz

ALAMOSA The Alamosa Live Music Association is pleased to present Genetics at Sundays at Six, August 20, in Cole Park, Alamosa. This Denver-based progressive rock band is sure to put on a great show! The concert begins at 6 p.m. and is free.

Genetics consists of four gentlemen from Michigan who decided to move to Colorado with a massive sound, and ready or not, they have hit the ground running. Their complex music with its heavy composition and heavy improvisation, combined with their wide scope of influences shimmering through their dynamic performance, makes for an amazing and unique live music experience.

They have made quite a footprint in the last year alone, not only playing the inaugural Arise music festival but also opening up for acts such as George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Toubab Krewe, Particle, Michael Kang (of SCI), David Murphy (formerly of STS9), Chuck Morris (of Nunchuck and Lotus), Dr.Fameus (Allen Aucoin of The Disco Biscuits), Ultraviolet Hippopotamus, Dopapod, Twiddle, and many more..

Genetics puts their all into every performance, and people are starting to talk. And with a full-length album in the works, and shows at bigger and bigger venues in BOTH Colorado and their home-state of Michigan, Genetics is preparing for a full-scale American brain-invasion.

Genetics is officially unveiling its second full-length album, Beast Mountain. Beast Mountain elaborates on the floaty-with-an-edge composition style, with plenty of unexpected twists and complex melodic layers. But this album also boasts a larger mission: bringing back the glory of the concept album. Evocative soundscapes take the listener on a thrilling journey through the woods, where something dangerous may be lurking amidst the soaring guitar harmonies, linear compositions, and danceable breakdowns. Almost a year in the making, the band recorded and mixed all 10 tracks themselves in their home studio.

ALMA Builds Community through Quality Live Music. For more information like ALMA on Facebook or go to http://www.almaonline.org.

Sundays at Six is generously sponsored by: 1st Southwest Bank, Alamosa Local Marketing District, Alamosa State Bank, Arbys, Body Tune Up, Chilis, City of Alamosa, Comfort Inn & Suites, Crestone Eagle, IHOP, Jay Meyer Insurance, KRZA, KW Farms, Movie Manor, Myers Brothers Truck & Tractor, Partnership Investments, Porter Realty, Rio Grande Savings & Loan, Salazar Natural Meats, SLV Federal Bank, SLV Health, SLV Rural Electric Co-op, Sports Print Plus, Steffens Quality Plumbing, Super 8, Treasure Alley, Valley Courier, Valley Motel, Valley Wide Health Systems, Wall, Smith & Bateman, Xcel Energy Foundation, and 2017 ALMA members.

Excerpt from:
Sundays at Six features Genetics on August 20 - Valley Courier