Re: Do dairy farmers transplant fetuses to breed better milk producers?

Hi Rick,
thank you for your question. Embryo transfer is a rather new technologiy, and it is becoming increasingly common in breeding cattle.

Now, why does it make sense to do embryo transfer?
When farmers are breeding livestock they try to select the animals for certain criteria. For example they will try to get a lot of offspring from a cow that is giving a lot of milk, and the daughter cows will inherit this trait. But a normal cow will only have about 4 to 6 calfs in her lifetime – and some of them will be bulls, they also inherit the „good- producer-genes“, but of course it’s not immediately useful. A cow can, however, donate a lot more embryos than six - so there will be more offspring available for the farmer.

Before embryo transfer was invented a common method to get more offspring related to a good milk producer was to use the sperm of the father of this cow or of a son of her for artificial insemination. This doesn’t give you more daughters of this cow, but more sisters or grandchildren. Whith this method there can be a lot more relatives of good producers – and a cow in Texas can have a calf from a Bull in Canada because the semen - like embryos can be stored and shipped frozen. This method is still widely used.

Embro transfer is only used for exceptionally good cows, because it is still more complicated and therefore more expensive than artificial insemination.

I did a search whith yahoo using the words CATTLE EMBRYO TRANSFER and got the homepages of two companies that offer embryo transfer for cattle:

http://www.transova.com/embryos.html

http://www.acornemb.com/ services.htm

Eva