Female fertility limitation can be overcome to the best degree possible with GeneFlow’s high yield embryo technologies.
Whereas bulls can father 50 calves per year via natural mating, and up to 10 000 calves per year by AI, cows produce only one calf per year. Therefore superior quality bulls can contribute significantly to the genetic improvement in a manner that cows can’t.
Furthermore, because bulls can have lots of offspring for progeny test measurement their breeding value estimates are far more accurate than cows’, which generally have low accuracies.
This situation of low breeding value estimates for cows is being changed up with the arrival of genotyping, which, in the Single Step process, means cow breeding worth estimates can be up to doubled in accuracy and made much more useful in dam selection decision making.
Thus the arrival of genotyping and Single Step breeding value estimates actually worsens the “bottleneck” that female fertility places on genetic improvement – this is because, with higher accuracy of breeding value estimates, the value of a “good” cow is presented more clearly but is unable to be fully exploited because of the low fertility of that cow.
This cow fertility limitation can be overcome to the best degree possible with embryo technologies, but especially by GeneFlow’s high yield IVF which can deliver around 35 to 45 calves per year.