Vets and morphologists are calling for a standardised assessment of semen straws given the growing demand for artificial insemination by beef producers.
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Morphologist and cattle producer Dr Viv Perry said the need for standardisation of straw assessment has been an issue for a number of years, but became more apparent to her recently while purchasing straws for her own breeding operation.
Dr Perry, who has an academic research background in the assessment of bull fertility and runs two commercial sperm quality assessment laboratories, said there has been an unprecedented demand for bovine reproductive services in the past year.
"An issue that we as breeders have in discerning which straws to buy is the differences in quality assessment that are available on the straws, and this is a problem widely reported by veterinarians," Dr Perry said.
"I was hoping we could get a standard approach to the assessment of the straws so that when people buy them, they all get a uniform report as to what is in the straw, so that they know how motile it is, how many sperm are alive and what the likelihood of fertility would be.
"Australia aims to maintain the gold standard approach to sperm assessment, and to achieve this, national standards should be upheld amongst laboratories and these standards understood by the practitioners and industry that use them.
"All semen buyers should be able to quickly look at the information on the straws and easily check that they pass the thresholds."
Dr Perry said that concentration, although not really a problem in the past, was now something that needed to be considered given the increased use of yearling bulls and findings of some straws containing less than required thresholds.
"It is important that we all receive a report on the straw when we purchase it and have an idea of what the important thresholds should be," she said.
"What we are looking for when we buy straws are the routine laboratory tests of sperm viability, sperm morphology and concentration or dose.
"It would be great if you know when you buy a straw, it came with a report as to how that straw is going to perform in your cow.
"Before I started buying straws myself, I couldn't really see what the problem was, but now that I'm on the other end of the stick, I realise that it's quite difficult to buy them with all the information that you need, on how fertile they're supposed to be.
"Most people wouldn't go out and buy a bull without knowing how it's going to perform, why would you be going to buy a straw, that is not cheap, without knowing how many live sperm are in it?"
Inverell based vets Greg Powell and Matt Verri agreed with Dr Perry, saying the lack of standardised reporting on semen straws did make reproductive services more difficult, particularly when it came to advising clients on artificial insemination.
Like Dr Perry, Mr Powell and Mr Verri, as well as Dr Glen Borrowdale who is also involved in semen freezing and assessment at their clinic, are also cattle producers themselves and have experienced the issues first hand when purchasing semen for their own programs.
"I just think there needs to be a standardised way of reporting it. It's something that has to be done and done properly," Mr Verri said.
"We AI several thousand cows a year here and we're getting semen turning up from all over the countryside, and I've only ever seen maybe two batches of straws with any quantitative information from elsewhere.
"There might well have been some quality assurance done at the point of making the straws, but that assurance isn't being provided with the straws so we're just not sure what standards it was done by, and we're then going in blindly to an AI program.
"It's very rare that people take us up on an offer of waking a straw up to do an assessment prior to an AI program, but it does happen occasionally and most of the time they're fine, but we have had incidences with straws that were of marginal quality.
"So I would say that we need a standardised approach in order for us to advise clients, and that's been the difficult part."
Mr Powell said that it had become increasingly difficult to discern the quality of the straws with the increasing number now available on the market.
"The whole bull fertility issue is very much the same thing, because there are more and more players getting into that field as well, and that's where the lines are getting blurred on what's being reported and what's not being reported," he said.
"All of a sudden they're involved in freezing semen as well and putting it in the marketplace, and it's becoming difficult to tell what's quality and what's not, so it's only getting more murky as more players get into it.'
After several good seasons and record cattle prices, there has been an upward trend of producers looking to intensify their breeding programs through the use of AI.
Both vets agreed with Dr Perry that the introduction and maintenance of standardised reporting would go a long way to increasing knowledge and awareness of AI amongst producers, particularly for those who may be new to the idea.
"We've got people who have been doing AI for years and we've also got people that are getting into it for the first time, and in probably the last three years, it's really taken off around here," Mr Verri said.
"We've had lots of new commercial clients ringing up and booking programs in after a bit of information, so there's a lot of fairly new players to the game."
