Sex is big business at dairy farms and focus of legal fights
SEX IS big business in dairy farming, which is why a battle is brewing in the US over new technologies designed to make sure only milk-producing cows are born.
Most of America’s 9.4 million dairy cows were bred using artificial insemination from bulls with specific genetic traits, but there’s still a coinflip randomness about the sex of the offspring. So, more farmers are paying a premium for semen that contains only the X chromosomes for females. It’s a small but growing business dominated by one company, Inguran in Navasota, Texas.
Over the years, dairies improved breeding to boost milk output using fewer cows. Sex- specific semen is a recent innovation, and it’s so promising that New Zealand’s Engender Technologies plans to sell its own version of the product in the US Companies also are fighting in court over patents for the technique. Farmers welcome more competition because sexsorted semen vials can cost US$ 30 for a typical dose, about double those that can’t guarantee a female calf.
“We have no choice but to pay,” said Russ Warmka, owner of a dairy farm in Fox Lake, Wisconsin, that milks 500 cows a day and uses sex-sorting semen on his heifers. “We spend our entire lives as farmers trying to breed a better cow. If we know we’ll get a heifer calf, we can spend a lot more on that semen.”
That’s because a young female that will eventually produce milk for four to six years is far more valuable to a dairy than a steer that gets shipped to a beefprocessing plant, said Albert De Vries, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville. At an auction Nov 28 in Springfield, Missouri, baby heifers sold for as much as US$ 350 ( RM1,400) each, while bulls sold for as little as US$ 50, according to the Springfield Livestock Marketing Centre.
Dairy farmers use artificial insemination to impregnate heifers shortly after their first year, and nine months later, a calf is born. After that, the cow produces milk for 10 months. Typically, she will give birth two to four times during her time on the dairy, before output drops and she is sold for slaughter.
On average, US cows produced a record 1,910 pounds of milk a month in the past year, up about 14 per cent from a decade ago, US Department of Agriculture data show. That’s allowed farmers to expand output while shrinking their herds.
Still, sex- determined semen for breeding remains relatively new and accounts for only three per cent of a global market, so there’s plenty of room for growth, as long as farmers can be convinced the extra investment will pay off.
“When you look at the dairy industry, this is a fundamental problem that hasn’t yet been widely resolved,” said Brent Ogilvie, managing director at Auckland-based Engender, which primarily serves the New Zealand dairy industry, the world’s largest milk exporter. “Sex is the most-important genetic trait. Farming is all about genetics, and most farmers don’t have control over the sex of their herd.”
In the US, the market dominated by Inguran. Sexing Technologies is Its unit provides the sorted semen which is marketed through the STgenetics unit. Inguran has patents on improvements to a technology first developed by a USDA researcher more than two decades ago. Using the cellsorting science of flow cytometry, the company says it can deliver heifer calves in about 90 per cent of pregnancies, which is a big increase on the 50- 50 chances of conventional semen. — WPBloomberg