Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just 2 Bulls. That's Not Good
The drive to make more milk has had an unsavory side effect: Cows have become more genetically similar and less fertile. Scientists are trying to recover valuable genetic variation that was lost.
Chad Dechow, a geneticist at Penn State University who studies dairy cows, is explaining how all of America's cows ended up so similar to each other.
He brings up a website on his computer. "This is the company Select Sires," he says. It's one of just a few companies in the United States that sells semen from bulls for the purpose of artificially inseminating dairy cows.
Dechow chooses the lineup of Holstein bulls.
