From Science, Plenty of Cows but Little ProfitAn Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

William Neuman, NYTimes.com
September 2009

After it is collected from a bull at a stud farm, semen is mixed with a
dye that sticks to DNA. A machine detects the extra dye sticking to X
chromosomes and sorts the sperm. The sorted semen is frozen and sold to
farmers who use it to inseminate their livestock.

(A fertility institute outside Washington is studying whether the same
technique can be used safely in people. If it won approval from the Food and
Drug Administration, the technology would let parents choose their baby’s
sex.)

A worker at Tony DeGroot's farm in Hanford, Calif., inseminating cows with
bull semen selected for the female chromosone. Photo / J. Emilio Flores for
The New York Times

Three years ago, a technological breakthrough gave dairy farmers the
chance to bend a basic rule of nature: no longer would their cows have to
give birth to equal numbers of female and male offspring. Instead, using a
high-technology method to sort the sperm of dairy bulls, they could produce
mostly female calves to be raised into profitable milk producers.

Now the first cows bred with that technology, tens of thousands of them,
are entering milking herds across the country — and the timing could hardly
be worse.

The dairy industry is in crisis, with prices so low that farmers are
selling their milk below production cost. The industry is struggling to cut
output. And yet the wave of excess cows is about to start dumping milk into
a market that does not need it.

“It’s real simple,” said Tony De Groot, an early adopter of the new
breeding technology, who milks 4,200 cows on a farm here in the heart of
this state’s struggling dairy region. “We’ve just got too many cattle on
hand and too many heifers on hand, and the supply just keeps on coming and
coming.”

The average price farmers received for their milk in July was $11.30 for
100 pounds, down from $19.30 in July 2008. The retail price of milk has not
dropped as much, but it is down 24 percent in a year, to an average of $2.91
a gallon for milk with 2 percent fat.

Desperate to drive up prices by stemming the gusher of unwanted milk, a
dairy industry group, the National Milk Producers Federation, has been
paying farmers to send herds to slaughter. Since January the program has
culled about 230,000 cows nationwide.

But the sorting technique, known as sexed semen, is expected to put
63,000 extra heifers into milk production this year, compared with the
number that would be available if only conventional semen had been used,
researchers estimate.

That number will jump to 161,000 next year, and farmers fear it could
double again in 2011. While that is a fraction of the 9.2 million milk cows
nationwide, the extra cows this year and next could roughly equal those
removed from production by the industry’s culling program.

Economists expect milk prices to recover only gradually, which has
farmers worried about the impact of so many extra heifers and the milk they
could produce.

“Just as the industry starts to recover from these difficult times, we’re
going to see these heifers enter the marketplace,” said Ray Souza, president
of Western United Dairymen, which represents farmers who produce about 60
percent of the milk in California. “At the very worst it could certainly
stop the recovery altogether and send us into another price recession.”

The sorting technology relies on slight size differences between the Y
chromosome, which produces male offspring, and the X chromosome, which
produces female offspring and has a slightly larger amount of genetic
material, or DNA.

After it is collected from a bull at a stud farm, semen is mixed with a
dye that sticks to DNA. A machine detects the extra dye sticking to X
chromosomes and sorts the sperm. The sorted semen is frozen and sold to
farmers who use it to inseminate their livestock.

(A fertility institute outside Washington is studying whether the same
technique can be used safely in people. If it won approval from the Food and
Drug Administration, the technology would let parents choose their baby’s
sex.)

When the technology was first marketed widely to farmers in 2006, it
represented a long-awaited breakthrough, and was embraced because global
milk demand was outstripping supply.

A typical Holstein herd using conventional breeding methods will produce
48 percent female offspring and 52 percent male. The male calves are usually
sold for little money to be raised as meat, and the females are raised as
milk producers. But the sorted sperm produces 90 percent or more female
offspring, allowing farmers to expand their herds more efficiently.

At Mr. De Groot’s farm on a recent afternoon, a worker removed a slender
pink tube of sexed semen from a liquid nitrogen canister, where it was kept
frozen. He passed it to a colleague who inserted it into a heifer’s body.
The cow munched on feed, seemingly oblivious. If the insemination took, her
calf would almost certainly be female.

The technology’s impact is being felt now, at the depths of the dairy
industry’s hard times, because of the long lag time in raising cows born of
sexed semen to the point that they have calves of their own and thus enter
milk production.

Mr. De Groot, 74, first turned to sexed semen during the long economic
boom because he wanted to expand his herd.

“When the world was short of milk we were all told, ‘We need more milk!’
Everybody was crying for more milk,” he said in his farm office, decorated
with trophies for the high quality of his milk.

But his plans were interrupted by the economic crisis, which caused
booming dairy exports to dry up and curbed demand at home, sending prices
tumbling. At the same time, feed costs remained high, squeezing farmers from
both sides.

Mr. De Groot, who has used the technology with only a portion of his
livestock, estimated that he would get up to 350 additional heifers a year
by using sexed semen. But he cannot expand his herd because dairy processors
will not buy the extra milk.

So for the time being, as the sexed semen offspring come of age, he will
put them into the herd in place of lower-producing animals. That will drive
up output too, though not as much as expanding the total number of cows.

Scott Bentley, dairy product manager at ABS Global, in DeForest, Wis., a
major producer of sexed semen, said that in the long run, the technology
should be a boon. But first, the industry has to get through its worst
economic crisis in decades.

“This is a really exciting thing,” Mr. Bentley said of the technology.
“And this is very difficult times. And you combine the two and realize it
didn’t work as well as we hoped.”

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