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Brazil unveils $4 million supercow, twice as meaty as others of her breed
Brazil has hundreds of millions of cows, but one in particular is extraordinary.
Worth $4 million, Viatina-19 FIV Mara Movéis is the most expensive cow ever sold at auction, according to Guinness World Records. That’s three times more than the last recordholder’s price. And — at 1,100 kilograms (more than 2,400 pounds) — she’s twice as heavy as an average adult of her breed.
Along a highway through Brazil’s heartland, Viatina-19’s owners have put up two billboards praising her grandeur and beckoning people to make pilgrimages to see the supercow.
Climate scientists agree that people need to consume less beef, the largest agricultural source of greenhouse gasses and a driver of Amazon deforestation. But the cattle industry is a major source of Brazilian economic development and the government is striving to conquer new export markets. The world’s top beef exporter wants everyone, everywhere to eat its beef.
The embodiment of Brazil’s cattle ambitions is Viatina-19, the product of years of efforts to raise meatier cows. Prizewinners are sold at high-stakes auctions — so high that wealthy ranchers share ownership. They extract the eggs and semen from champion animals, create embryos and implant them in surrogate cows that they hope will produce the next magnificent specimens.
“We’re not slaughtering elite cattle. We’re breeding them. And at the end of the line, going to feed the whole world,” one of her owners, Ney Pereira, said after arriving by helicopter to his farm in Minas Gerais state. “I think Viatina will provide that.”
The snow-white cow’s eye-popping price stems from how quickly she put on vast amounts of muscle, from her fertility and — crucially — how often she has passed those characteristics to her offspring, said Lorrany Martins, a veterinarian who is Pereira’s daughter and right hand. Breeders also value posture, hoof solidity, docility, maternal ability and beauty. Those eager to level up their livestock’s genetics pay around $250,000 for an opportunity to collect Viatina-19’s egg cells.
“She is the closest to perfection that has been attained so far,” Martins said. “She’s a complete cow, has all the characteristics that all the proprietors are looking for.”
In Brazil, 80% of the cows are Zebus, a subspecies originating in India with a distinctive hump and dewlap, or folds of draping neck skin. Viatina-19 belongs to the Nelore breed, which is raised for meat, not milk, and makes up most of Brazil’s stock.
The city of Uberaba, where Viatina-19 lives, holds an annual gathering called ExpoZebu that bills itself as the world’s biggest Zebu fair. Held several weeks ago, it was a far cry from the Brazil that’s imagined abroad. The dress code was boots, baseball caps and blue jeans. Evening concerts drew 10,000 spectators belting out their favorite country songs. But the main attraction was the daily cattle shows where cows compete for prizes that boost an animal’s auction price.
The most prestigious auction is called Elo de Raça, held April 28. As the first cow entered the paddock, speakers blared Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” But that cow was a mere appetizer before this year’s starlet, Donna, and three of her clones; the final sale price put her total value at 15.5 million reais ($3 million.)
A commodities boom in the 2000s turbocharged Brazilian agriculture, especially with a rising China buying soy and beef. Today, agriculture’s influence extends to Brazil’s Congress and the national consciousness. And Brazil, along with the U.S., is at the forefront of cattle genetics.
Showstoppers like Donna and Viatina-19 are rarities in Brazil, which has more than 230 million cows, according to the USDA. It’s the world’s largest beef cattle population, and that’s problematic; huge swaths of Amazon rainforest have been slashed to create pasture, releasing carbon stored in trees. And cows belch methane that’s far worse for the climate.
Genetic improvements that reduce cows’ slaughtering age are helpful but limited ways to reduce warming. Simpler, more effective measures include planting better grass for grazing and regularly moving cattle from pasture to pasture, said Beto Veríssimo, an agronomist and the co-founder of an environmental nonprofit called Imazon.
Meanwhile, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been working to open new markets. Last month, he met Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, home to the premium, marbled Wagyu beef; he urged his counterpart to taste Brazilian meat and become a believer.
“Please,” he said, addressing his vice president at the event, “take Prime Minister Fumio to eat steak at the best restaurant in Sao Paulo so that, the following week, he starts importing our beef.”
Clones coming soon
Down the highway from the Elo de Raça auction is the laboratory of the company Geneal Animal Genetics and Biotechnology. In a small pen behind it, a cloned calf recently lay in the sunshine, still too unsure of its newborn legs to stand. Another born by cesarean section 20 minutes earlier pressed backward against a stall’s rear wall, unsettled by this strange new world. Clones of Viatina-19 are due in a few months, said Geneal’s commercial director, Paulo Cerantola.
Some ranchers wouldn’t want a big herd of her clones. High-maintenance cows like Viatina-19 aren’t profitable on a large, commercial scale because they couldn’t meet their energy needs from grass alone, said P.J. Budler, international business manager for Trans Ova Genetics, an Iowa-based company focused on improving the bovine gene pool.
“For the environment and the resources that it would take to run a cow like (Viatina-19), she fits the mold ideally, but she’s not the answer for all cattle everywhere,” Budler said.
Viatina-19’s owner, Pereira, said she gets special treatment to boost egg cell production, but would thrive were she put to pasture — where almost all his elite cattle feed.
Meanwhile, Viatina-19 is pregnant for the first time, and Pereira’s eyeing expansion; her egg cells have sold to Bolivian buyers and he wants to export to the United Arab Emirates, India and the U.S.
His veterinarian daughter, Martins, is looking even farther ahead.
“I hope she is the basis for an even better animal in the future, decades from now,” she said.
CBS News
Tajikistan nationals with alleged ISIS ties removed in immigration proceedings, U.S. officials say
When federal agents arrested eight Tajikistan nationals with alleged ties to the Islamic State terror group on immigration charges back in June, U.S. officials reasoned that coordinated raids in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia would prove the fastest way to disrupt a potential terrorist plot in its earliest stages. Four months later, after being detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, three of the men have already been returned to Tajikistan and Russia, U.S. officials tell CBS News, following removals by immigration court judges.
Four more Tajik nationals – also held in ICE detention facilities – are awaiting removal flights to Central Asia, and U.S. officials anticipate they’ll be returned in the coming few weeks. Only one of the arrested men still awaits his legal proceeding, following a medical issue, though U.S. officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive proceedings indicated that he remains detained and is likely to face a similar outcome.
The men face no additional charges – including terrorism-related offenses – with the decision to immediately arrest and remove them through deportation proceedings, rather than orchestrate a hard-fought terrorism trial in Article III courts, born out of a pressing short-term concern about public safety.
Soon after the eight foreign nationals crossed into the United States, the FBI learned of the potential ties to the Islamic State, CBS News previously reported. The FBI identified early-stage terrorist plotting, triggering their immediate arrests, in part, through a wiretap after the individuals had already been vetted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement sources confirmed to CBS News in June.
Several months later, their removals following immigration proceedings mark a departure from the post-9/11 intelligence-sharing architecture of the U.S. government.
Now facing a more diverse migrant population at the U.S.-Mexico border, a new effort is underway by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to normalize the direct sharing of classified information – including some marked top-secret – with U.S. immigration judges.
The more routine intelligence sharing with immigration judges is aimed at allowing U.S. immigration courts to more regularly incorporate derogatory information into their decisions. The endeavor has led to the creation of more safes and sensitive compartmented information facilities – also known as SCIFs – to help facilitate the sharing of classified materials. Once considered a last resort for the department, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has sought to use immigration tools, in recent months, to mitigate and disrupt threat activity.
The immigration raids, back in June, underscore the spate of terrorism concerns from the U.S. government this year, as national security agencies point to a system now blinking red in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, with emerging terrorism hot spots in Central Asia.
A joint intelligence bulletin released this month, and obtained by CBS News, warns that foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the attack nearly one year ago and its aftermath to try to recruit radicalized followers, creating media that compares the October 7 and 9/11 attacks and encouraging “lone attackers to use simple tactics like firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, and vehicle ramming against Western targets in retaliation for deaths in Gaza.”
In May, ICE arrested an Uzbek man in Baltimore with alleged ISIS ties after he had been living inside the U.S. for more than two years, NBC News first reported.
In the past year, Tajik nationals have engaged in foiled terrorism plots in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as Europe, with several Tajik men arrested following March’s deadly attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow that left at least 133 people dead and hundreds more injured.
The attack has been linked to ISIS-K, or the Islamic State Khorasan Province, an off-shoot of ISIS that emerged in 2015, founded by disillusioned members of Pakistani militant groups, including Taliban fighters. In August 2021, during the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, ISIS-K launched a suicide attack in Kabul, killing 13 U.S. service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians.
In a recent change to ICE policy, the agency now recurrently vets foreign nationals arriving from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries, detaining them while they await removal proceedings or immigration hearings.
Only 0.007% of migrant arrivals are flagged by the FBI’s watchlist, and an even smaller number of those asylum seekers are ultimately removed. But with migrants arriving at the Southwest border from conflict zones in the Eastern Hemisphere, posing potential links to extremist or terrorist groups, the White House is now exploring ways to expedite the removal of asylum seekers viewed as a possible threat to the American public.
“Encounters with migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries—such as China, India, Russia, and western African countries—in FY 2024 have decreased slightly from about 10 to 9 percent of overall encounters, but remain a higher proportion of encounters than before FY 2023,” according to the Homeland Threat Assessment, a public intelligence document released earlier this month.
A senior homeland security official told reporters in a briefing Wednesday, that the U.S. is engaged in an “ongoing effort to try to make sure that we can use every bit of available information that the U.S. government has classified and unclassified, and make sure that the best possible picture about a person seeking to enter the United States is available to frontline personnel who are encountering that person.”
Approximately 139 individuals flagged by the FBI’s terror watchlist have been encountered at the U.S.‑Mexico border through July of fiscal year 2024. That number decreased from 216 during the same timeframe in 2023. CBP encountered 283 watchlisted individuals at the U.S.-Canada border through July of fiscal year 2024, down from 375 encountered during the same timeframe in 2023.
“I think one of the features of the surge in migration over recent years is that our border personnel are encountering a much more diverse and global population of individuals trying to enter the United States or seeking to enter the United States,” a senior DHS official said. “So, at some point in the past, it might have been primarily a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. Now, our border personnel encounter individuals from around the world, from all parts of the world, to include conflict zones and other areas where individuals may have links or can support ties to extremist or terrorist organizations that we have long-standing concerns about.”
In April, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that human smuggling operations at the southern border were trafficking in people with possible connections to terror groups.
“Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a time when so many different threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once, but that is the case as I sit here today,” Wray, told Congress in June, just days before most of the Tajik men were arrested.
The expedited return of three Tajiks to Central Asia required tremendous diplomatic communication, facilitated by the State Department, U.S. officials said.
Returns to Central Asia routinely encounter operational and diplomatic hurdles, though regular channels for removal do exist. According to agency data, in 2023, ICE deported only four migrants to Tajikistan.
Robert Legare and
contributed to this report.
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