Source: NCDA&CS, 1/27/22


Whether you’re familiar with modern day cow breeding practices or not, you’d be tempted to call a new effort at some of the state’s research stations “next level.” The idea isn’t exactly brand new, but it certainly hasn’t been around long enough to be called “old” yet either.

In fact, this new experiment at the research stations uses the same techniques that are common in human fertility procedures. By now, most people are familiar with the idea of a human surrogate mother. Well, in this new effort, the surrogate is a dairy cow.

The basic idea is to breed some of the dairy cows so that they produce beef offspring.

There’s a lot more to it, but yes, you read that correctly. Next level, right?

Again, the process to create human surrogates is well established, and it has been a growing practice for some dairy operations in recent years. Implementing it at the research stations is definitely experimental and ambitious. For Teresa Lambert, the director of the NCDA&CS Research Stations Division, it seems to be a reasonable thing to at least try. Several months ago, she got to thinking it was about time the research stations gave it a shot.

Her goal was to simply try to increase the value of certain cow offspring. That could mean returning more money to the state’s research stations to support projects aimed at helping farmers. In December, the first effort at dairy cow surrogacy was started, and now Lambert and others are evaluating the initial results to figure out what’s next

The goal of having dairy cows produce beef offspring is to increase the value of the calves that are born. In short, a dairy only needs a certain number of dairy cows to maintain operations at a certain size, so there’s always a “surplus” of calves born. If the calves born are a beef breed instead of a dairy breed, they’ll have a higher value for being sold or processed. Right now for example, a male/bull dairy calf is valued at about $5 to $15 compared to a beef cow that could draw closer to $2,000. (For a more detailed explanation see the note at the end.*)

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