No one's saying it's going to happen, but what if all the cows died? And the pigs. And the chickens. And (please God, [strike]no[/strike] YES) the goats. All of them. Is there a plan? Breathe easy, livestock lovers. Housed in a vast storehouse in Fort Collins, Colorado, the USDA has 700,000 straws of liquid nitrogen-preserved sperm, from 18 different species. They're ready.
"Let's say another foot-and-mouth disease comes along, killing off our cows," says Dr. Harvey Blackburn, repository coordinator. "We have the ability to repopulate entire breeds."
The National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP) started in 1999. Its facility stores a huge mishmash of semen — rare and vintage samples, combined with the most common breeds on the market.
The everyday strains are just as important as the heirloom semen, if not more so.
The repository stores samples from sheep, turkeys, goats, bison, pigs, elk, chickens, fish and cows. Every straw has a story. There are 30,000 salmon milt samples, obtained from the Nez Perce tribe in Idaho. There's rare sheep semen from Kazakhstan, near sheep's center of domestication. There's even a full backup of 20,000 exclusively bred cows on the Island of Jersey, progenitors for Jersey cattle all over the globe.................By Congressional decree, the NAGP will never charge you for the use of their samples, whether you're a scientist, breeder or farmer. The only catch: You have to show it's something you couldn't obtain elsewhere (i.e., a private company).
