China is buying imported bull semen again after years in which its cattle genetics trade nearly stopped, but it now accepts only semen from the best 10% of bulls in the exporting country, The Cattle Site reports, citing Reuters. The first batch from Australia arrived in April, Canadian suppliers are also shipping, and the United States and Britain could be approved soon, industry sources say.
Between 2019 and 2025 China halted live animal and semen imports from one supplier after another and curtailed embryo imports, often during political disputes. Some producers smuggled semen or live cattle in through Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam, a dozen industry people said. "Genetics get outdated very quickly," said Ian Lahiffe, an agricultural consultant in Beijing.
The gap is large. Chinese beef carcasses weigh around 150 kg against nearly 400 kg in the United States, according to USDA, and Chinese dairy cows give less milk. "Historically, Chinese cattle were bred for ploughing fields, and Western breeds for meat and milk production," said Hao Hongman of Beijing World Wide Sires. Chinese consumers ate almost twice as much beef in 2024 as a decade earlier, and imports of beef and dairy products run at $25 billion to $30 billion a year.
Each shipment goes through an expert panel review lasting more than four months, and some have been only partly approved. By the end of August China had received 92,573 straws worth around $700,000 from Australia and Canada, against roughly 10 million straws a year before the curbs. A Chinese audit team inspected ABS Global's Australian bull facility last year; ABS Australia expects to ship around 200,000 straws of Wagyu, Angus, Holstein and Jersey semen to China over the coming year, more than to all its other markets combined.
China declared self-sufficiency in animal genetics a national security priority in 2021 and has invested in local breeding centres, but industry participants say its own stock still lags. The United States, which supplies about 55% of the roughly half a billion dollars of bull semen traded each year, is expected to become China's main supplier again once approved.
Photo: Montanabw (an Angus bull) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: The Cattle Site
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