A student-managed business at Berry College near Rome is shipping embryos taken from the college's cattle herd to South America.
Berry Farms Genetics Enterprise is working to complete the $27,000 order, The Rome News-Tribune reported.
The business will be shipping 99 embryos taken from the college's Jersey herd to a dairy in Argentina, said Shannon Soafer, a senior from Rossville who is the interim leader of the Genetics Enterprise.
During the last five years, the genetics program has distributed embryos from the Berry herd to dairy producers across the United States and this marks the second international shipment.
The order from Argentina would go a long way toward recouping the expensive cost of harvesting — technically called flushing — the embryos, said Rebecca Stephens, a senior from Carrollton who runs the business side of the genetics program.
"Over the year this last flush season, I think we spent about $10,000 flushing, that's purely vet bills," Stephens said. "It doesn't count student labor or anything else. It can be expensive bit it's well worth the price to get all these embryos."
Many of the embryos being shipped to Argentina are considered particularly special because a large number of them were flushed from Medley, the last surviving Jersey cow born in the Normandy Barn complex on the Berry Mountain campus.
"We have about 25 female offspring from her specifically and they're all over the county, all over the place," Soafer said.
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