Michael L. Looper I'm Michael Looper, research animal scientist, USDA ARS Dale Bumpers Small Farms Research Center in Booneville, Arkansas. My basic emphasis here is to increase the profitability of small farms. What I try to do is increase cow and calf efficiency as it pertains to smaller farms throughout the country. And, so what we try to do is increase the quality and also increase the food safety of those animals that are coming from small farms. We have the safest food supply in the world here in the United States but we are trying to increase that safety as much as we possibly can and minimize the changes of food-borne incidents. You know, if we can keep one animal that's infected with salmonella or E. coli from getting into a larger pen of cattle in a feed yard. These big recalls that we see a lot of times in the popular press and things like that how can we stop that or at least minimize that. How cattle are managed on the farm affects pathogens and so what we try to do is help farmers come up with new management schemes that make the cattle that going to harvest make it a safer product for the American food supply. So, can we go through and take a single blood sample or a single sample of some kind and measure a certain hormone, a certain enzyme and then allow a producer to make a management decision with the ultimate goal of having a commercialized chute-side test when we're running those animals or moving those animals through a handling facility. We take a single sample then that producer can make a decision I want to manage this animal this way or maybe I want to sell this animal or want to identify the superior animal. I'm a fifth generation small farmer I grew up in this part of the country in Arkansas so I want to do research that applicable that's applied on the farm because I know how small farmers operate and I know the small budget that a lot of times small farmers have to operate on so anything we can do to keep that small farm in business I think that's what they hired me to do. What we do in the laboratory is we go out and collect blood samples and then we centrifuge those samples down and separate out the plasma , the serum and again looking for markers or metabolites within that sample and can we tie that to some sort of performance standard. We also do different types of ultrasound. We're able to look at muscle, bone, fat. We think about a rib-eye we go to the supermarket and look at rib-eyes that's exactly what we're seeing there on that screen is the outline of that rib-eye. So we get a good idea of how that animal is growing, how that animal is developing on a certain forage, certain management scheme and so you can take different snap shots of that animal at different times along the production cycle and try to apply that back to the farmers. How can we apply these to make these more commercially available to the farmer. That he also, or she also, can use those tools to make management decisions on their own farm. One thing we also do is we have 2,000 acres here. Lots of forage, lots of grazing land here so we go through and we look at the nutrient value of those forages. Looking at food protein, fiber content of those forage samples. The availability of those forage samples and overall is there things that we can do differently to manage those forages to make those animals more efficient. One of the things that we worked with in the last few years is looking at the fertility of those cattle. We want an animal to have an annual calving interval and if we can identify blood hormones. Can we look at her fertility and say something about the animal. Can we say that animal is going to have a calf every year or maybe not may be there's going to be a threshold she has a calf every 18 months and again 12 months versus 18 months thinking about the profitability of that small farm. We want to identify those animals that are having a calf on an annual basis versus a longer interval. I can step back and say why I have been successful. It's because of the excellent collaboration within ARS at College Station, Texas; Lexington Kentucky; Marshville, Wisconsin and here at this laboratory as well. Outside ARS at universities, University of Georgia, University of Arkansas, Texas A&M. Also worked a lot with allied industry, different pharmaceutical companies. I have been invited to share a lot of our data here with county extension agents. That gets our message out. We do research and no one knows about it then how important is that research? It's a very humbling experience. It's an honor to be the Rothbart award winner this year. Again, it's not mine. Its ours. My collaborators, graduate students, research technicians, biological technicians, ag technicians here have all been instrumental in that and I like to work with people and I enjoy that interaction that collaboration and so we want to make an impact I think it shows what we are doing here at the Dale Bumpers Small Farms Research Center is making a difference that gives us that little nudge to say ok we're doing something and that catapults us to that next level I hope.