CALF_News_August_September_2021

34 CALF News • August | September 2021 • www.calfnews.net H EROES AMONG US By Patti Wilson Contributing Editor A ny person worth their salt grows up with an ambition of, in some way, making the world a better place. Our success may be through maintaining a solid family. Work, church and commu- nity involvement are important as well. Some reach beyond, making a difference in state or national concerns. Peter Van Soest, Ph.D., sailed far past all of us. He changed the world of animal agriculture. It is safe to say that it takes a unique individual to make this kind of impact. Ever Heard of Him? My bet is, almost none of our reader- ship recognizes his name. Van Soest revolutionized the way the nutritional value of ruminant animal forages are measured. He elevated the study of grass fiber and ruminant ecology to a fine- tuned science. Later, his methods spilled over into the field of human nutritional research. A Dreamy Beginning According to the Peter J. Van Soest website, he was born in 1929 in Seattle, Wash., and raised on a dairy farm in the picturesque foothills of the Cascade Mountains. At a time when his home- town of Snohomish was small and remote, Van Soest and his sister, Betty, attended a wooden schoolhouse that held the entire student population. Van Soest helped with farm chores, but much of his time was spent alone, pondering a wide variety of subjects. He loved reading history and analyzing the periodic table. The family radio was consistently tuned in to classical music. Van Soest’s father, a Dutch immigrant, had come from a family of artists; Van Soest spent time making oil paintings, usually landscapes of the surrounding mountains. According to his sister, Van Soest “spoke endlessly of geology, plants, the behavior of animals and the nature of evolution.” Considered an eccentric from an early age, he was teased and disregarded at school. Even his teachers looked upon him as being “deficient,” and his father doubted Van Soest’s ability to ever take over the family farm. The website describes Van Soest’s childhood solitude as “profound and ruthless.” It is thought that through this process, he “forged a single-mindedness that he maintained throughout his life.” He deeply believed that “empirical thought and education were the only way forward.” Academic Success Van Soest pressed on, receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in 1951 and his master’s a year later fromWashing- ton State College. His master’s thesis involved the study of calcium and magnesium metabolism. A subsequent doctoral degree came in 1955 when he researched the effects of low fiber diets in dairy cows and goats. After securing his Ph.D., Van Soest went to work at theWalter Reed Army Institute of Research at Beltsville, Md. This is where his light began to shine brightly. Research there began with metal chelation, or selectively bonding agents to metals. It reflected what was to become Van Soests’s greatest accomplishment. Moving to the Agricultural Research Service at the U.S. Department of Agri- culture in Beltsville was a next logical step, and it was there that Van Soest, with the guidance of a Lane Moore, Ph.D., developed his detergent system for nutrient and fiber analysis. In 1968 he moved on to Cornell Uni- versity in Ithaca, N.Y. A Permanent Change in Animal Science Van Soest’s focus was on ruminant ani- mals. He targeted on separating chemical components of forages into three catego- ries: those digestible to all animals, those indigestible without fermentation and those completely indigestible. The next step was to move beyond measuring chemical composition and include finding the exact energy output of feedstuffs. The most amazing fact that surfaces on Van Soest’s website reveals not what the new detergent analysis system did , but what it replaced . More than 100 years earlier, in the 1860’s, a crude fiber system was established that was the standard until, remarkably, 1968 . Van Soests’s critics argued that his work was a dead end, and insisted on using the old system that relied mostly on observa- tions of animal behavior. Pushing on at Cornell University, he refined his fiber digestion studies in Peter Van Soest, Ph.D., of Ithaca, N.Y., revolutionized the study of ruminant nutrition and feed analysis. Photo courtesy Cornell University Peter Van Soest, Ph.D. A Man with a Brilliant Mind