Even with animals, sex sells

Photo: Cameron Burnell/Taranaki Daily News

A potential breakthrough in livestock semen sex sorting may add hundreds of millions of dollars to New Zealand’s dairy exports.

Androgenix, a new company based at Auckland University’s Institute of Biotechnology, has been developing for almost three years a cost-effective process for sexing semen.

Co-founder and part-time chief executive Brent Ogilvie said he’s hoping to confirm Androgenix’s technology works this year. If successful, Androgenix will be able to offer semen sex-sorting technology to livestock insemination companies that is relatively low cost but with high fertilisation rates – two problems that have plagued others attempting to control the sex of livestock born.

Artificial insemination is big business, with the OECD market alone estimated to be worth more than US$2.4 billion (NZ$3.4b) a year. Dairy accounts for 63 per cent (US$1.5b) of the market. Effective sex selection could speed up the genetic improvement of herds, increasing productivity through the production of more genetically elite heifers, while reducing the time good milking cows are out of production. It will also reduce calving difficulty for younger cows.

Even if only 10 per cent of New Zealand dairy farmers harnessed the gains of using effective sexed semen, it would generate another $100 million of export returns a year for the dairy sector, said Ogilvie, whose firm Pacific Channel established Androgenix along with biotechnology research scientist Keith Hudson.

‘‘It’s a significant prize, a really high value marketplace if we can get it right. And it’s not just dairy. Our process could be applied to other livestock, such as swine,’’ Ogilvie said.

Androgenix has raised more than $5.5m to date, attracting large dairy farmers, artificial insemination companies and professional investors. David Henry, a director of Industrial Research and former Fisher & Paykel chief financial officer is chairman of the board and a shareholder, while Kevin Marshall, the former group director for research and development for the New Zealand Dairy Board, is another board director and chairman of the company’s scientific advisory board.