Sex Is Big Business in Dairy Farming and the Focus of Legal Battles
- Startup says it’ll bring daughter-breeding sperm to more farms
- Other firms get patents ruled invalid, bring antitrust claims
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Sex is big business in dairy farming, which is why a battle is brewing in the U.S. over new technologies designed to make sure only milk-producing cows are born.
Most of America’s 9.4 million dairy cows were bred using artificial insemination from bulls with specific genetic traits, but there’s still a coin-flip randomness about the sex of the offspring. So, more farmers are paying a premium for semen that contains only the X chromosomes for females. It’s a small but growing business dominated by one company, Inguran LLC in Navasota, Texas.