The Prize Committee unanimously agreed that the Wolf Foundation Prize in Agriculture for 1979 should be awarded equally to:
Jay L. Lush
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa, USA
for his outstanding and pioneering contributions to the application of genetics to livestock improvement.
Sir Kenneth Blaxter
Rowett Research Institute
Aberdeen, Scotland, United Kingdom
for his fundamental contributions to the science and practice of ruminant nutrition and livestock production.
Professor Lush has made major contributions to unravelling the hereditary contributions to animal production whereas Dr. Blaxter has unravelled the nutritional requirements of animals, especially ruminants. Thus their work has effectively contributed to both aspects of the factors regulating animal production: the control and exploitation of the genetic endowment, and the provision of the most favorable nutritional environment in which genetic endowment can be expressed.
Jay L. Lush has one more than any agricultural scientist both to investigate the genetic basis of traits important for animal production, to assess their value and to improve them by initiating breeding programmes of proven practical effectiveness. He has been responsible for inspiring a great band of graduate students and others who have disseminated his ideas and practical suggestions throughout the world and so led to the improvement of poultry, pigs, beef and dairy cattle. His contributions are of several kinds. First, he pioneered the value to the scientific breeder of adequate measurement of the performance of individuals, their progeny and their pedigree in order to assess the genetic worth of an animal. Secondly, he pioneered the assessment of the 'heritability' of a trait, i.e. the degree to which its expression reflected a genetic basis rather than the effects of a favorable or unfavorable environment. Thirdly, having demonstrated how the inherited potentialities could be measured and distinguished from those due to non-heritable causes, he synthesized these ideas into practical and workable animal breeding plans to promote an inherited increase in the yield of meat, milk or eggs. He has exploited his ideas as a University teacher, at a diversity of national and international gatherings and enshrined much of it in his major and most influential text 'Animal Breeding Plans'. He may truly be described as the 'father' of scientific animal breeding in the twentieth century.
Sir Kenneth Blaxter has spent virtually the whole of his career in the British Agricultural Research Service. Nevertheless, he has disseminated his discoveries and ideas through the media of international conferences, farming meetings and via the many visiting scientists who have worked with him at his research institutes. He is particularly distinguished for the precise and detailed studies he has made on the energy requirements of ruminants and the ways once the necessary energy has been supplied to the diet, that it is utilized in the animalīs metabolism. This has lead to a new understanding, both of the nutritional needs of the animal and of the most effective ways in which the diet may be made up and varied, and utilized most efficiently by the ruminant to produce more meat, milk or both. Thus the farmer can now control this aspect of the animalīs environment with far greater efficiency to give a higher yield at the most economical price.
His approach and practical proposals have been widely adopted throughout the world and, because he has enunciated the fundamental principles so clearly, it has proved possible to adapt or modify them to a diversity of farming systems.