New technology brings too many cows

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 reports The New York Times. The US 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." 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. 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.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. 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."