Dempsey at Large: ownership of breeding rights - a basic principle

Not being in dairying, I was only hazily aware that some AI companies were looking to assert ‘intellectual property’ ownership of the breeding potential of their bulls progeny.

It was only recently that I was taken through the details of what is intended.

My first reaction was disbelief – surely I had misunderstood what was intended, but no, if as a farmer I put my cow in calf to a specified bull and it is a male or a female calf, then I am not free to sell that calf for future breeding purposes without first asking the AI company I have a contract with. The sheer cheek of the proposal left me speechless.

It has overtones of the scandals that mired Monsanto, the US agri-business giant, as it threatened Indian farmers with litigation if they bought its GM seed and sold the seed from the subsequent crop for propagation.

But in fact Monsanto’s stance had some justification as breeders’ rights have a long history in the plant world where the seeds of a variety are genetically identical.

Animals are different where there are, by definition, two separate parents. A useful comparison is the horse sector. Coolmore had a singularly successful stallion in Galileo. The fact that Sheikh Abdullah sent one of his mares that gave birth to the phenomenally successful racehorse Frankel was never seen as giving Coolmore the right to assert ownership over Frankel’s progeny.

On a much more prosaic note, when my father was in dairying the Dublin District Milk Board’s AI services served an excellent Friesian cow we had at the time with a Friesian bull.

When the bull calf was born, one of milk board’s employees came out, inspected the newly born calf and said they would like to buy it, at a price to be negotiated, so that it could potentially join their AI stud. That approach strikes me as both straight forward and ethically correct.

It’s interesting that one of the companies involved, Progressive Genetics, in this new attempt to remove breeding rights from the farmer breeder, is a direct offshoot of what was the Dublin District Milk Board – how attitudes change. We have deliberately built in ICBF a genetics-based organisation where the data generated by farmers is owned by farmers.

To attempt to remove from farmer breeders the right to own what they have bred, using their own cows, is such a departure from established practice that it should be subject to rigorous analysis in Dublin and Brussels.

AI organisations in Ireland operate subject to Government licence through the Department of Agriculture. The full ownership of progeny by farmers should be a precondition of being allowed to operate. Legal steps with a view to clarifying and copper-fastening the legislation should be put in place.