The national cattle herd is shrinking, but the quality is improving and the breeding companies are growing. Looking into the future, perhaps in three years’ time we will have enough replacements to start growing the national dairy herd again.

This week on page 11, Aidan Brennan details the growth in the usage of artificial insemination on Irish dairy farms. The positive spin-off is not only for the breeding companies – farmers benefit, the co-ops benefit, the marts benefit, and the meat factories benefit. It is impossible to curb the march of technology and the capacity it has to change a sector. Yes, it can be slowed down but inevitably change happens.

The Irish Farmers Journal invested, with industry partners, in the first research trial on the widespread use of sexed semen in Ireland over ten years ago now. The results then showed herds with poor fertility need to be very careful using sexed semen. Secondly, the semen from some sires reacts very poorly to sex sorting.

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These results are very much still in evidence today, but farmers have found solutions. Only high fertility cows and maiden heifers get sexed semen. Using a team of sires reduces the risk. On Tullamore Farm, we are now using sexed semen in the suckler herd.

In the meantime, the ‘sexing’ technology has improved and the quality of sires available from AI companies has improved. Teagasc played a part in cajoling and coaxing the new technology by setting up a sexing laboratory in Moorepark in 2021 to allow sorting take place in Ireland.

ICBF statistics tell us that five years ago 30,000 sexed straws were used on Irish dairy farms. This year, over 200,000 sexed straws have been used. Five years ago in total there were 1.05m inseminations recorded on Irish dairy farms, and this year 1.28m straws have been used.

There was a time when the directors and executives of the Irish breeding companies felt that new technologies such as sexed semen would reduce the revenue and profit generating capacity of the industry. They feared reduced sales would see the gradual decline of the industry, which would reduce the capacity for them to invest further in facilities and improved genetics.

Those in favour of trying to get sexed semen technology into widespread use at the time argued differently. They argued the rise of beef AI usage would go a long way to balance out any reduction in dairy inseminations.

They also argued that inseminations would continue for longer each season as milking herds grew in size. The ‘positive gang’ have been proven right. Much like the growth of round bale silage from the mid 1980s, sexed semen looks set to be another tool that farmers are adopting in earnest and at scale.

The results published this week show more AI used than ever before and significantly increased beef AI usage in dairy herds. Five years ago, there were 244,000 beef AI inseminations on dairy cows – that figure is now 560,000.

Wider industry challenges still exist, and many changes have happened that nobody saw coming. Beef calves out of milking cows making €500 each at four weeks of age wasn’t envisaged. A shortage of replacement heifers wasn’t anticipated. Latest US trends show the US cattle herd is now at its lowest for over 50 years.

Companies in the global breeding industry continue to evolve. Scale and financial firepower are creating global giants in this sector.

Sexing Technologies that owns the intellectual property (IP) for sex sorting owns over 90% of the new AI sires listed on the US equivalent of the EBI list. Big companies dominate European indices.

Creating elite nucleus female herds and using new breeding technologies on these elite females is fuelling the growth of elite genetics globally. The main Irish breeding companies have a long way to go yet on this.

We need to step onto the ladder fast. It is important Irish farmers are not disadvantaged. Are international partnerships or joint ventures being considered? Importantly, Irish breeding companies need to be able to grow further with exports of the best Irish high fertility, high milk solids genetics.