You’ll have to listen a lot more closely to hear the calculator sing the same song when a bull calf arrives. And if you do hear it, you’re luckier than are most folks these days.

”Ten dollar bull calves have been one of the biggest drags on the dairy industry over the past four or five years,” shrugs Colorado State University Physiology Professor George Seidel. “The majority of dairy bull calves end up being used for veal or beef, and this practice will continue.

At least half your calf crop faces this low-return scenario. Sure, the occasional heifer streak and slump throws monthly numbers off a bit, but year-in, year-out most operations average half bull calves and half heifer calves. Let’s face it. You have a lot of choices when it comes to inputs on your farm, but pre-selecting the sex of calves hasn’t been one of them.

And, to set you straight right off the bat, you still can’t preselect the sex of calves on your farm. But the technology to do so via artificial insemination is here now and its commercial licensing release is imminent.

”By 2011, there likely will be sexed frozen semen commercially available from a limited number of bulls,” predicts Seidel.

That said, we’re not quite there yet, although the reach and technology have been rapidly improving over the past decade.

”We’ve filed several patents in relation to all aspects of the technology and are putting the jigsaw puzzle together,” Jacobson says. Eventually he anticipates about 300 commercial licenses to be sold worldwide.

In the meantime, researchers have successfully bred several generations of cattle using the processes. “The true litmus test was to send the knowledge to a far-distant place and let someone else also achieve the same success,” says Jacobson. “We sent semen sexing know-how -- we didn’t do it for them -- to our partners in England and they replicated our results.” Last May, several heifer cows were born in the United Kingdom using A.I. and preconception semen sexing technology, marking the first births of their kind outside the United States.

The next challenge, he says, is to gear up for mass use of the technology. “What we need now is repeatable proof on large numbers of animals. We’re going to prove it works again and again and again.”

Nearly 1,000 U.S. heifers have been bred A.I. with sexed semen to date.

Yet that’s not enough replication to satisfy the researchers. Large XY Inc. breeding field trials are planned for this year with 10,000 females in England and 5,000 females in the United States. The results are expected to provide significant research documentation on factors like pregnancy rates, abnormal offspring rates and actual sex-selection rates.

Current sexed-semen accuracy is tagged at 90%. Researchers are working at improving the fertility to greater than 90% of fertility of unsexed semen and using lower sperm numbers per dose. They’re also checking in refreezing the semen after sexing, adding even greater distribution opportunities.

“This technology makes the most sense economically if it’s used for millions of cows annually,” says Seidel. Perhaps that’s the best answer to whether the technology will be available for a $10 premium or if the cost will be significantly higher.