Spectacular results predicted for cloning top breeding bulls

Waikato businessman Graham Bowen believes he can double his company's earnings from the nation's best dairy bull semen by cloning the bulls that produce it.

Cattle genetics company Ambreed New Zealand, based near Hamilton, this year sold 175,000 straws of semen from its two top bulls at $15 each to New Zealand and Australian farmers for gross earnings of $2.6 million.

Bowen, Ambreed's chief executive, said that by replicating the two bulls he could increase that to more than $5 million.

The two bulls were being cloned because demand from South Africa and South America for their semen had outstripped supply, he said.

"We have not been able to meet this demand because all of the semen goes into satisfying domestic and Australian markets," he said.

The first bulls to be cloned will be crossbred Amadeus, three-quarters jersey and one-quarter friesian, and friesian sire Extasy.

The 100,000 straws of frozen semen from Extasy and 75,000 from Amadeus sold out within a month.

But Bowen said that, while a joint venture with Australian-based Clone International would allow New Zealand to capitalise on its reputation for providing good dairy herd genetics, it was not a licence to print money.

Buying 131 bulls with potential, rearing them, "proving" them in terms of progeny testing and then slaughtering all but the best two had cost the company up to $500,000.

And Clone International executives estimate it could cost A$200,000 ($238,000) to clone a bull, compared with a market price of $600,000 to $2 million for an original elite sire.

However, the costs of cloning are expected to drop dramatically as the practice spreads.

Clone International uses the same technology as was used to create Dolly, the first cloned sheep. The technique involves removing the nucleus from an egg cell and replacing it in the nucleus of a cell taken from another animal.

Ambreed sells semen from local and imported bulls and is New Zealand's second-largest animal breeding company behind Livestock Improvement Corporation.

It has a joint venture agreement with Clone International, which is 25 per cent owned by Crown science company AgResearch's commercial arm, Celentis. AgResearch has considerable experience at cloning cattle for research, and will clone the two Ambreed bulls and up to eight others.

The cloned calves are expected to be born from host cows in about nine months, and once they are fertile, 12 months later, their semen will be harvested and exported.

Bowen said the clones from the Ambreed bulls could be exported if there were multiple births from the cloning.

"If we can get a multiple clone, we may keep one and market its semen and sell the rest. But we would prefer to hang on to them and sell their semen."

Clone International has already successfully cloned several elite dairy bulls in Australia.

- NZPA

Feature: Cloning

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