Improvements to dairy cattle reproduction are made in a myriad of ways.

Reliability and stability exemplified by ABS second crop sires With the release of the January 2009 Sire Summary data, ABS second crop sires proved once again to lead the dairy industry with the addition of three ABS Diamond Sires (1,000 milking daughters) and two sires reaching the one million unit milestone.

Successful reproductive managers have only so many hours everyday to accomplish a multitude of tasks.

It wasn’t the 87,683rd Jersey registered last year that is credited with an amazing feat, nor was it the last one recorded on Dec. 31, 2008, but it was all 94,774 animals, their owners and caretakers, and the American Jersey Cattle Association staff and its members that combined their efforts to leave a lasting mark on history.

Any dairy producer will tell you that when it comes to getting a dairy cow pregnant, sooner is better than later. The sooner she’s bred, the sooner she’ll calve and the less time she’ll spend out of the milk-production cycle.

Artificial insemination (A.I.) as practiced by bees and many other flying insects has played an important role in plant reproduction for a very long time.

High reproductive success is fundamental to a dairy operation’s sustainability and growth in today’s dairy industry.

Dairyman Jason Nunes’ office at his 1,000-cow dairy in Buhl, Idaho, contains a computer, record books, a calendar and other office supplies typically found in workspaces on dairy farms.

The USDA decided in 2007 to make the switch from producing four sire summaries a year to three. Research Geneticist George Wiggans says there were two main reasons for the change. The first was to cut down marketing expenses for the nation’s A.I. companies. The second was to coincide with the International Bull Evaluation Service (Interbull), whose operational center is based in Uppsala, Sweden.

For the last 50 years, there have been numerous press releases and rumors that sexed semen is “just around the corner.” Well, in the 1980s, a breakthrough in sex sorting technology was made by USDA researchers in Livermore, California, and Beltsville, Maryland. The patents for this technology were licensed to XY Inc. in Fort Collins, Colorado, which performed a considerable amount of research during the 1990s to optimize efficiency of these sorting procedures.