SCIENCE’S ROLE IN ANIMAL HUSBANDRY POTENTIAL PRESERVING AND DEVELOPING DURING THE WAR YEARS

Abstract

The article presents a brief description the history of the domestic livestock industry systematic development with emphasis on the brightest pages of the Great Patriotic War. The connection between those distant years and modernity is established: thus, the collection of cattle skulls collected by Efim Fedotovich Liskun, which he donated to the K.A. Timiryazev Moscow Agricultural Academy, allowed on the basis of modern scientific methods to create genetic reference breeds and with their help to trace the preservation of authentic ancestral genomic components in modern breeds representatives. These samples were entered into the National Catalog of High Valuable Samples of Farm Animal Genetic Resources. The systematic work directly during the war is described, aimed at implementing the developments of scientists in production, helping livestock breeders to improve their qualifications and improve their performance, which was especially important during the difficult war period in the fodder shortages conditions. It was during the Great Patriotic War that works aimed at increasing the livestock reproduction efficiency were carried out, and today the method of cryopreservation of seeds is the basis of large-scale selection in animal husbandry. It also covers the work of zootechnicians-breeders, who saved unique cattle breeds representatives during the war, which allows scientists-agrarians to develop on their basis the agro-industrial complex of Russia.