By Regan Kats
Prairie View senior
Every day at exactly 12:34 I crave a juicy hamburger. Luckily for me, I can buy one from any number of the millions of restaurants in the country. I can’t imagine a world where I wouldn’t be able to buy one because we ran out of beef.
Embryo transfer (ET) is the process of harvesting fertilized, 7-day-old embryos from a donor female, and then injecting a single embryo into a recipient female, also known as recips, to carry out the pregnancy. The ET process can first be traced back to the 1890s, when Walter Heape performed the first successful procedure in rabbits. It wasn’t until 1949 that the first successful bovine transfer was accomplished. While the technology surrounding ET is constantly developing, the basis for what is used commercially today mostly came about in the 70s.
Lots of people associate artificial insemination (AI) and embryo transfer as the same thing. However that is far from the case. Artificial insemination is the practice of using previously harvested semen from one bull in order to inseminate more cows than the bull could physically service. This provides more extensive use of a superior bull over a wider range of cows. Using ET with one bull’s semen will result in all the offspring being full siblings, butr they won’t all be genetically identical. Because ET involves fertilization of the eggs in the cow, one way or another the semen has to be deposited into the uterus. One of the benefits of ET is that the semen can be utilized at a cheaper cost than AI, as it’s cheaper to buy three units to inseminate a donor cow than it is buying a unit per cow for your entire herd. In order to be able to harvest multiple eggs, the cow has to be super-ovulated through multiple injections of follicle-stimulating hormone. Another version of ET is through in vitro fertilization. Similar to the process that women go through, eggs are harvested from the female and then fertilized in a sterile lab environment.
Many purebred seedstock producers utilize embryo transfer to provide leaps and bounds of genetic improvement in one breeding season. ET allows for a donor cow to be flushed several times during a year. Therefore a producer can become more efficient in the use of higher producing females. Another way to lower operating costs is to use cheaper commercial cows as recipient cows. Millions of seedstock catalogs are sent around the country every year, and lots of similarities can be found in the pedigrees. Many buyers will find a sire group of bulls they like or some fancy heifers that descend from certain cows. ET helps producers generate and offer more of the genetics that consumers want to buy. Not only can producers sell high demand genetics, but the cattle are often more consistent and predictable.
Embryo transfer isn’t always the most cost effective choice. Commercial cattlemen don’t often need or want to personally flush their cows, but they can still utilize the benefits of ET. The easiest route is through the purchase of ET bulls. More often than not, the producers sell more than just one ET bull from a mating. By buying these bulls, commercial cattlemen can generate a more consistent calf crop without the added labor of the AI process. Another way to benefit as a commercial producer is renting out cows as recip cows. Sometimes purebred producers don’t have enough cows to use as recips, or maybe don’t have enough grass to run them. This opens the door for commercial producers to earn a little extra money.
According to FarmBureau.org, farm and ranching families only comprise 2 percent of the U.S. population. So, how does ET affect the other 98 percent? With the exponential growth of the world’s population, more and more food needs to be produced to meet the growing demand. The only way to accomplish to this increasingly difficult task is to produce more with less. In crops, farmers strive for higher yields, and in beef production we are trying to produce more pounds of beef per head at the cheapest cost of gain.
To do this, producers have to be aware of the type of cattle we produce and constantly strive to improve not only our own herd but the industry as a whole. As with the growing population, the genetic advancements need to be growing exponentially as well. First we had AI, and it helped us to start producing more pounds of beef with fewer animals. Now the human population is gaining and growing faster than the beef industry has been able to keep up with. With ET and the huge genetic advancements it can provide, the beef industry now has another weapon in its arsenal to combat the challenges it faces today.
The use of ET benefits a wide range of people – everyone from the purebred breeder carefully selecting the next mating to the young diner waitress serving hamburgers at lunch. Luckily for me, when I get hungry from working out on the ranch I can come into town and sink my teeth into the only food that can satisfy my hunger – beef.
Regan Kats, a 2016 Logan High School graduate, is a senior majoring in animal science at Fort Hays State University. Regan is the son of Michael and Shannon Kats, Prairie View.
This essay on a topic in agriculture was researched and written by a student as part of a project in a senior animal science class at Fort Hays State University. The project director is Dr. Brittany Howell, associate professor of agriculture, bjhowell@fhsu.edu, 785-628-4015.