How lasers, bull semen, & genetic science are changing the fate of male dairy calves

Pity the male dairy calf. But, maybe, pity them a little less these days thanks to advances in bull semen technology.

With no hope they will ever produce a drop of milk, male calves have been seen as a disappointing burden for dairy farmers, rather than as valuable assets..

But that’s changing, at least a little, thanks to advances in genetics that have moved an age-old practice from dirty barns to shiny labs, and has left farms with fewer—but tastier—male calves.

Three facts

Three facts influence almost everything at a modern dairy farm:

1) Only female cattle (cows) produce milk; 2) A dairy cow must give birth to a calf to produce milk; 3) Because of 1 and 2, any dairy farm ends up with far more calves—of both sexes, but especially males—than it needs to keep its herd at the desired population. In Canada, that equates to roughly 470,000 male dairy calves each year.

(As for the extra female calves, quotas on milk production in Canada reduce the ability to expand herds even when farmers want to do so.)

So what happens to those extra calves?

At least half are sold to veal producers, while the rest end up in the dairy-beef industry. But because they come from animals bred for milk-producing, not beef-growing, the male calves are inefficient and relatively uneconomical. Their ugly-ducking status means male dairy calves are often subject to fewer beneficial early feedings and are broadly less healthy than other more-wanted calves.

But that could be becoming less common, thanks to ongoing technological advances and a whole lot of bull semen.

The genes

What do dairy farmers want? Milk. How do they get it? Genetics.

Farmers have deliberately altering the genes of their animals for thousands of years; there is nothing new about the knowledge that a well-bred cow and a well-bred bull will produce off-spring similar to—or more productive than—its parents (Throughout this remember: “cow” and “bull” are terms that always specify the sex of the cattle they describe.)

When it comes to breeding more-productive cattle, the goal is always to match the best cow genes with the best bull genes. (It’s more complicated than that because dairy cow production can be influenced by an array of genes that influence everything from leg strength to milk production to general health.)

You need a bull and a cow to create a calf—and trigger the cow’s milk-producing impulse. But, because a bull can impregnate multiple cows, you don’t need the same number of bulls and cows.

Dairy farmers need lots of cows to produce milk. But they only need access to a handful of sires to get those cows pregnant. And because sires are comparatively scarce, only the best male calves with the very best genes are chosen to become breeders.

Now, shifts in genetic science are changing both the number of male dairy calves that are born, and the value of those that do emerge from their mothers’ wombs.

The girls

Calves on dairy farms today are no longer necessarily divided 50/50 between male and female offspring, and it’s all thanks to crystals, lasers, and cylinders of semen.

Today, farmers can give their best cows “sexed” bull semen. That semen is sorted for the chromosomes that determine what sex the resulting calf will be. The semen isn’t a guarantee, but cows given it can produce female calves up to 90% of the time.

How do you get cow-creating semen? You run it through a machine called a flow cytometer, according to Paul Meyer, a sales manager at the Abbotsford-based cattle genetics giant Westgen. Cytometers aren’t just for semen. They are commonly used in labs to analyze characteristics of all kinds of cells. In this case, the cytometer uses an electric crystal to break semen into tiny sperm droplets. It then uses a laser beam to analyze each and every droplet. Sperm with two X chromosomes contain 4% more DNA than those with one X and one Y chromosome. The machine applies a positive- or negative-charge to each sperm cell that helps direct them into appropriate tubes. Sperm in the X chromosome tube will then be used to impregnate a cow with what will most likely be a female calf.

But sexed semen is expensive. And because it is more expensive, the sexed semen typically goes to the best dairy cows so they can pass on their productive and healthy genes to the next generation of dairy cows. Less-productive and less-fertile dairy cows won’t get the expensive sexed semen. Instead, they’ll get the normal semen so they can get pregnant, have a calf, and continue producing milk. Their progeny, whether male or female, are likely to be surplus either way.

Sexed semen has dramatically increased the odds that a farmer’s best cows will give birth to another female calf. That has had knock-on effects for a farm’s efficiency. The ability to reliably get female offspring from one’s best cows means farmers will keep fewer animals produced by middling milk-producers.

Sexed semen is one of an array of genetic technological advances that mean farmers can now be confident that each future generation will be better milk producers than their predecessors. (Genetic testing, for instance, now allows the quality of a sire to be determined before it ever impregnates a cow. Since bulls can’t produce milk, breeders would historically look at their offspring’s production to determine the quality of a sire. Now, though, studies suggest that DNA analysis can provide more reliable—and much earlier—evaluations of sire quality.)

But even as a herd’s genetics are advancing—and even as more of its calves are female—a dairy farm still doesn’t have fewer redundant animals. Which is where we come to our second advance in dairy genetics: the beef.

The beef

In the past, surplus calves—most, but not all, of them male—had little value. And that sometimes left them subject to poor treatment by owners with little incentive to protect their well-being.

That is sometimes still the case. But today, farmers have an increasing economic incentive to keep surplus calves healthy and relatively happy, whatever their sex.

Surplus dairy calves have long been eyed as potential sources of meat. But Meyer says those calves were not particularly profitable because Holstein cows are not efficient at converting feed to meat.

(Holsteins are the most common dairy cow in the world—they make up 93% of all Canadian herds and are best known for their black-and-white colouring and the sheer volume of milk a cow can produce.)

The life of cattle is largely determined by financial calculations. When the cost to feed a cow becomes more than the value of its milk, an animal’s days are numbered. Similarly, beef cattle are generally “finished” when they stop growing after a year and a half. It doesn’t make economic sense to keep feeding, sheltering, and maintaining a beef animal if its increasing value falls behind the cost of the food. Such calculations inevitably leave bred-for-beef cattle with short lifespans.

Some beef producers have attempted to find ways to prolong the lives of their cattle by producing “mature beef” from older animals and feeding them grass, rather than grain. But it’s difficult to change the tastes of consumers. If people are willing to pay more for (or eat) the meat of older cows, that will shift the calculations. But we’re not there yet. A Pennsylvania farmer raising “mature beef” wrote that such older meat doesn’t taste bad, but it does taste differently from the meat most consumers are familiar with. Costs also play a factor, because feeding a cow for a dozen years inevitably costs more than feeding one for two years. So an old cow also has to fetch a higher price to be worth a farmer’s time.

Dairy calves were historically bred from good milk-producers, not meat-growers. And so farmers have seen cows that aren’t prime milk producers and bulls without prime genetics as a byproduct, rather than an asset.

But in recent years, farmers and organizations like EcoFarm in Abbotsford have begun giving semen from Angus beef cattle to Holstein dairy cows whose progeny they don’t expect to become milk producers. The breeding results in new “Holstein Angus” cattle, with meat that is both tasty and efficient to produce.

“This has really taken off in the last couple of years,” said Bill Vanderkooi, the chair of the EcoFarm Innovation Association. “Those calves are becoming very, very highly sought-after in the beef industry.”

EcoFarm buys about 15 head of Angus Holstein cattle each week. Most are male. The calves are raised onsite and fed wheat-grass produced at EcoFarm’s indoor vertical-growing system. Their meat is branded Hank’s Grassfed Beef—with marketing emphasizing the care given to animals—and sold to BC restaurants and retail stores.

“Some of these Holstein Angus crosses are almost fetching a premium to a regular beef animal, which is crazy to think about,” Vanderkooi said.

Many such calves from the Fraser Valley are sold to feedlots based in Alberta, where they become integrated into Canada’s main supply of beef.

The dairy industry is generally seen more favourably by the public than the beef sector. But despite their early date with the slaughterhouse, one recent study suggests that a life spent on beef farms is often better than life as a dairy cow. And creating calves that are valued for their beef can brings benefits to the young animals before they get moved to a feedlot.

Westgen’s Meyer is careful to say that farmers are naturally inclined to treat animals well, adding that increased regulations about colostrum feeding has improved the care of young calves of all sorts. But he says the economics of dairy beef is providing new incentives to encourage farmers to do even better by their youngest cattle.

So, he said, the development of dairy-beef breeding has been a “boon from an animal care perspective.”

There was a day when male calves were seen as useless byproducts to be moved off a dairy farm as quickly as possible. Increasingly, though, Meyer said farmers know that doing more than the minimum and investing in their male calves’ health will pay dividends financially.

“When you make a more valuable calf, you make it in everybody’s interest to take care of that calf better.”