If it breaks all the tails off, how do the straws pass post thaw motility? When it is being sorted the machines identify the dead cells that are not surviving the sorting process and sorts those cells off so they do not get packed in to a straw. Your're right in that the sorting process is tough...
In the club calf business where a steer over a heifer or a heifer over a steer can be at least $1000, a $50 straw of 90% accuracy sexed semen is pretty dang cheap.
With that big of a difference in the value of sexes, why would you take a 50/50 chance with conventional? ::)
The quality of the semen is not poorer with sexed semen. Its actually much higher than conventional. The reason that the conception rates are about 85% of what you get with conventional is that the straws are packed with fewer cells than conventional. So, its a concentration factor not a quality...
Where did you hear this? Sexed semen has been increasing in usage since its inseption and is not slowing down at all. It will never be 100%. Nothing ever is. However, even at 90%, there are still far more economic insentives to use it in many different beef production scenarios. With pretty much...
The 2.1 million dose straws are designed for AI. Just one straw per insemination.That's what we use and that is what Sexing Technologies uses on their own cattle as well.
Sexing Technologies south of College Station does a lot of IVF. They just built a brand new IVF center that is huge. Last time I was there they had over 1000 recipients.
<cowboy>
I'm really 50/50 on the subject.
However I've never thought that feeling some back fat on a steer gives a judge accurate info on the steer's grade. A backfat to imf correlation of 0.45 isn't that high.
::)
You can sort for both genders at any time. They make what they call a Primary gender and a Secondary gender. The Primary is not always the female. It depends upon the breed.
"Reverse Sorting" is when you take a Conventional straw of semen and thaw it out, then sort it in to Male and Female...
They're also driving fresh collections an hour over to that new sexing technologies lab in Fullerton for sorting. We had one done there a while back and things are great so far!
When you flush with sexed semen definitely use the 5.0 million dose straws, but also use 4 total straws. Use 2 the first breeding and then 2 straws the next. You need a total of 20 million total cells when flushing with sexed semen. <rock>