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January 6, 2010

Rare Breeds, Frozen in Time

By BARRY ESTABROOK

NEWPORT, R.I.

IT didn’t take long for Chip, a Tennessee fainting goat sporting a luxuriant Vandyke beard and an
impressive pair of curlicue horns, to live up to his breed’s name. When Peter Borden, accompanied by a
stranger, entered the immaculate stable that Chip calls home, the goat pressed his velvety nose through the
bars of his stall, begging for a scratch. But at the visitor’s approach, Chip apparently had second thoughts.
His left foreleg stiffened, his brown eyes went glassy and he began to list to one side.

“There he goes,” said Mr. Borden, the executive director of the SVF Foundation, a heritage livestock
preservation facility here. The guest turned away, and Chip quickly recovered, his dignity intact.

Located on a 45-acre estate in Newport, SVF is the only organization in the country dedicated to conserving
rare heritage livestock breeds by freezing their semen and embryos, a technique called cryopreservation.
Chip, now SVF’s unofficial mascot, was the proof that the foundation had mastered the process. In early
2004, as a six-day-old embryo, he was flushed from his mother’s womb and spent the next several months
frozen. Thawed and transplanted into a surrogate Nubian doe, a common breed, he was born on May 7,
2004, a perfectly normal fainting goat.

The building adjacent to the one that houses Chip contains three stainless-steel tanks about the size of
commercial washing machines. About 45,000 semen and embryo samples from 20 breeds of rare cattle,
sheep and goats are preserved there in liquid nitrogen chilled to minus 312 degrees — essentially a frozen
ark. Each time the foundation freezes a batch of embryos from a new breed, it thaws a few and transplants
them into surrogate animals, repeating the test that Chip once passed.

Keeling over when frightened by a potential predator is not the most desirable trait in a small ruminant, so
it is easy to see why fainting goats became an endangered breed. In the eyes of modern agribusiness, Chip
and his companions at SVF are a collection of misfits.

Huge dreadlocked Cotswold sheep are too big and slow-growing for commercial acceptance. Sleek Milking
Devon cattle have the flaw of being dual-purpose livestock in a farm economy that demands specialization
— a bovine must produce either rivers of milk or massive cuts of well-marbled beef.

But in other ways, the foundation’s four-legged barnyard nerds are ideally suited to meet the demands of
evolving culinary and farming trends. “People are demanding choice at a time when commercial livestock

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Frozen in Time - A Fertility Bank for Rare Livestock - NYTimes.com

are being bred for consistency,” Mr. Borden said.

Consider goat meat, once relegated to Caribbean, Hispanic and Middle Eastern immigrant enclaves. A
decade ago, who would have guessed that it would become a culinary phenomenon, readily available at
farmers’ markets nationwide and cutting-edge restaurants like David Schuttenberg’s Cabrito in the West
Village, Rick Bayless’s Frontera Grill in Chicago and Tom Douglas’s Lola in Seattle? There is no way of
telling which of the forgotten breeds preserved by SVF might someday find itself in similar demand, but the
foundation will be prepared.

Chip will never end up on a kebab skewer, but a glance at his stocky wrestler’s build shows that he carries
plenty of meat. His squat stature means that, unlike other goat breeds, he can’t leap tall fences, making him
suited to small, diversified family farms near urban areas where goat meat is popular.

“These animals lend themselves well to the locavore movement,” Mr. Borden said. “They don’t need a lot of
attention. They do well on small pastures, and require no grain.”

Set on rolling hills among Newport’s mansions, the SVF complex, with its restored stone buildings that
resemble a Swiss village (the “SV” in the name), is an odd combination of an early 20th-century
“gentleman’s folly” hobby farm and a scientific facility. Visitors are confronted by locked electronic gates
and signs warning: “Biosecure area. Absolutely no trespassing. Please leave immediately.”

“Think of this as a safety valve program,” said Dr. George Saperstein, the foundation’s chief scientific
adviser, who is chairman of the Department of Environmental and Population Health at the Cummings
School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. “If there was a disaster, if something like the potato
famine of livestock ever hit, these frozen embryos would be made available, and in one generation we would
be back in business.” It is up to a small group of trustees and advisers to determine whether a severe
emergency or some other circumstance requires release of the frozen germ plasm.

That possibility is not altogether remote. For all their efficiency and high output, modern livestock breeds
have become a weak, inbred bunch, Dr. Saperstein said. Fifty years ago there were a half-dozen popular
dairy breeds in this country. But today, according to Lindsey Worden of Holstein Association USA, an
organization representing farmers and breeders, the country’s 8.6 million Holstein cows make up 93
percent of America’s dairy herd. Fewer than 20 champion bulls are responsible for half the genes in today’s
Holsteins.

As an example of how vulnerable our milk supply is, Dr. Saperstein points to a heat wave in California in
2006 in which some 16,500 Holsteins died, despite farmers’ efforts to save them with cooling mists of
water and fans. In contrast, the Pineywoods cattle in SVF’s collection were introduced into the forests of the
South by Spaniards in the 1500s specifically because they tolerated heat. In all likelihood, the hardy animals
would have survived the heat wave.

“Heritage breeds have not been continuously ‘improved’ by humans,” Mr. Borden said. “They have been
shaped by natural survival-of-the-fittest forces and can get along without human intervention. Typically,

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Frozen in Time - A Fertility Bank for Rare Livestock - NYTimes.com

rare varieties exhibit good birthing and mothering abilities. They can thrive on native grasses and other
natural forage, and many know how to avoid predators.”

The foundation, a nonprofit group, was founded by Dorrance Hill Hamilton, known as Dodo. Mrs.
Hamilton, 82, is a summer resident of Newport who inherited a major stake in the Campbell Soup
Company, making her one of the country’s wealthiest women, according to Forbes magazine. An avid
preservationist, she realized that the pastures and fieldstone buildings could not only serve as a greenbelt,
but would also be ideal for the conservation of livestock.

After consulting with Tufts scientists, she decided to create a frozen library of genetic material from farm
animals in danger of being lost to extinction. The facility operates on an annual budget of approximately $2
million supplied by Mrs. Hamilton.

“No one else was doing this work,” Mrs. Hamilton said through a spokesman. She was visiting Britain in
2001 when millions of farm animals were destroyed to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, and
she thought that something had to be done in case a similar outbreak happened here. “I didn’t have enough
land to maintain herds of animals, so I realized that cryopreservation was where we should go,” she said.

Before SVF, the preservation of heritage livestock was through natural reproduction and largely the purview
of dedicated amateur and professional breeders and organizations like the American Livestock Breeds
Conservancy and Slow Food USA, as well as organizations promoting specific varieties. “On-the-hoof
conservation is important,” Mr. Borden said. “But used in conjunction with it, cryopreservation is a great
long-term solution.”

In an operating room at SVF late last month, an 87-pound black-muzzled ewe lay anesthetized on an
operating table. She was one of about 300 Hog Island sheep, remnants of a tough, healthy and highly
maternal colonial population that had survived essentially as wild animals for hundreds of years on a
barrier island off Virginia. Technicians had given her fertility treatments to increase her egg production,
and six days earlier she had mated.

After examining the ewe’s womb through a strawlike laparoscope inserted into a tiny hole in her belly, Dr.
David Mastas, a Tufts veterinarian who spends nearly all his time working at SVF, enlarged the incision and
lifted her uterus from her abdominal cavity and flushed out four embryos.

Barely visible to the naked eye, they resembled salmon roe when magnified under a microscope. Once it
was determined that they were viable, the embryos were frozen. Dr. Mastas performed the procedure on
two more Hog Island sheep that day, resulting in 21 frozen embryos. A typical Hog Island ewe produces one
lamb each year.

About an hour after the procedure had begun, the ewe stood woozily in a stall next to the operating room.
Like two-thirds of the 100 or so animals at the facility at any given time, she was there on loan and would
be returned to her owner in Virginia. In other cases, the foundation leases animals or, occasionally, buys
them outright. Once these have had their germ plasm preserved, they are sold to other farms to create

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Frozen in Time - A Fertility Bank for Rare Livestock - NYTimes.com

satellite populations.

Having mastered the techniques of cryogenics, SVF has expanded its efforts to educating the public about
the value of conserving heritage breeds. To that end, the foundation is donating about $30,000 for a pilot
program with the Fair Food Farmstand in Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Working with
consultants, SVF and the farmstand started the brand Fair Food Farmstand Heritage Breed for meat, dairy
and eggs. The effort includes point-of-sale information explaining the merits of rare farm animals.

“We have to eat these animals to save them,” Mr. Borden said. “Ultimately, food is the reason heritage
breeds are important.”

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