At an industry stakeholder presentation last Friday, the results of the dairy sexed semen field trial were discussed with a view to setting up a plan for commercial availability of sexed semen in 2014.

The timeframe for making sexed semen available to farmers for next spring is already very tight considering there would be a great deal of set-up and organisation required to get machines and personnel from sexing companies in Ireland.

While the research trial results have been very good (7% lower conception rate with frozen sexed semen compared with the conventional frozen semen), the AI companies are reluctant to take on the risk associated with bringing this new technology to farmers next spring.

The AI companies are looking to de-risk the proposal by sharing the cost with other potential industry beneficiaries such as meat and dairy processors. The AI companies claim meat and milk processors stand to gain by better throughput if more female dairy animals are producing milk or if meat factories get more, higher value, beef type animals as opposed to dairy type animals.

At the Friday meeting, it was decided that the three main AI companies, Munster, Progressive and Dovea AI, would discuss the trial outcome and proposals for commercial roll-out over the coming weeks with Meat Industry Ireland (MII) and dairy processors.

When dairy farmer profit figures are analysed for different usage levels of sexed semen, the most profitable option is to use sexed semen on both cows and maiden heifers for a number of weeks, followed by beef straws for the remaining weeks while there are still a good number of cows in heat.

The net profit effect for good fertility herds (68% six-week in-calf rate) is an increased net profit of between €28 and €35 per cow.

On top of this, industry estimates suggest better milk processing plant utilisation could be worth €7m per year.

For the beef industry, Andrew Cromie, ICBF, suggested that the potential to grow beef output from the dairy herd could be worth up to €20m per year.

On sucklers, Andrew Cromie said there had been a disappointing uptake among suckler herds, with only 40 herds signed up for 800 inseminations, which would not be enough to validate the sexed semen technology.