Economic opportunities for sexed semen on commercial dairies

Dairy producers and others have been discussing the use of sexed semen for many years. Sexing bovine semen is possible because X-sperm have 3.8% more DNA than Y-sperm. This difference can be identified with a flow cytometer by staining the sperm with a fluorescent dye that binds to the DNA. The technique is reasonably accurate (10% error rate) but still very expensive and slow, which has limited widespread commercial application in the dairy industry. Here, we explore the opportunities for commercial use of sexed semen on large-scale dairies based on current information. We note that there are technical and practical limitations of using sexed semen on large dairies. To shed light on what might be expected from this technology in the future we examine the use of sexed semen on dairies in Denmark, where we can look at a familiar example without making implications about the situation in the U.S. – which will be studied in the future.