By taking some tissue from a cow's ear 'reincarnated' super cows that are capable of producing 18 tons of milk a year and over 100 tons of milk in a lifetime.
CHU DAYE: Scientists with the Northwest A&F University successfully saw the births of three cloned cows with highly desired traits in Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region recently, marking the first successful effort by Chinese scientists to collect, restore and conserve the germplasm resource of “super cows” in China with the somatic cell nuclear transfer method and efficiently reproduce them.
The first calf weighs 56.7 kilograms and was 76 centimeters tall and 113 centimeters long at birth, and it bore the exact shape and skin pattern of its cloned target, read a press release from Northwest A&F University… The calf, along with two others, came from cloned targets raised in different farms in China. These are super cows, capable of producing 18 tons of milk a year and over 100 tons of milk in a lifetime…
By taking some tissue from a cow’s ear, scientists led by Jin, in the words of the press release, “reincarnated” these super cows, which is a prerequisite for the breeding of China’s own super cows. The new method… means that people can preserve the genes of these super cows in a timely manner, produce a concentrated herd of super cows, and provide excellent resources for future breeding and selection of China’s proprietary super cows, according to Jin…
China is 70 percent reliant on overseas purchases, the press release said… “We plan to take two to three years to build up a herd comprised of over 1,000 super cows, as a solid foundation to tackle China’s reliance on overseas dairy cows and the issue of the risk of being ‘choked’,” noted Jin…
China has roughly 6.6 million cows – the famed highly productive breed Holstein Friesian cattle – that were imported over the years. However, only about five in 10,000 such cattle in China are highly productive, long-lived and stress-resistant at the same time in their living environment in China, factoring in such issues as the climate…
Cows in China face exhaustion as it rapidly expands the scale of its Holstein Friesian cattle herds with constantly improving demand for dairy products as the ranks of the Chinese middle class swell… Major breakthroughs are also being achieved in “bottleneck” seed sectors such as corn, soybeans, broiler chickens and breeding pigs, helping to further reduce reliance on imports amid rising geopolitical risks. SOURCE…
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