About 1 in 5 embryos you transfer may already be dead on arrival — and your microscope can’t see it. That’s not bad luck. That’s a leak.

Executive Summary: About 1 in 5 of the IVF embryos you transfer may already be dead or dying on transfer day, and your microscope can’t tell you which ones. That’s the claim from EmGenisys founder Dr. Cara Wells, and even if her exact 20% is still hers to prove, the biology behind it is well documented — lab-grown embryos run pregnancy rates 10 to 40% lower than flushed ones, and field IVP outcomes sit around 42% fresh and 38% frozen. Run 100 IVF transfers on your top donors, and roughly 20 duds burn $1,660 to $2,160 in synch and transfer fees alone — before you count the pregnancy and the $3,000-to-$4,200 replacement heifer you’ll never raise in a market short 800,000 head. Wells’s fix is a $50,000 machine’s job done with software: mount a phone to the scope you already own, shoot a 30-second video, and get a 0-to-100 viability score independent of the old Grade 1-to-4 call. The catch is honest — no independent study has yet replicated her number across multiple herds, and her company sells the tool. If your fresh IVF rate has sat well under 50% for three rounds straight, the piece hands you a 30-day audit to run before you blame another recipient. And with IVF now producing roughly 80% of the world’s bovine embryos, a leak this size isn’t just your problem — it’s a brake on how quickly the whole industry moves its best genetics.

Dr. Cara Wells estimates that about one in five of the IVF embryos going into cows on transfer day are already dead or dying, with virtually no chance of making a pregnancy. Wells is a reproductive physiologist and the founder of EmGenisys, and she didn’t land on that number in a boardroom. She got there watching which embryos actually settled into pregnancies at the 35-to-60-day check — and noticing that the tool everyone trusts, the visual quality grade, couldn’t reliably tell the live ones from the dying ones. If you’re running IVF on your best donors, that’s not a lab curiosity. That’s your genetics budget leaking from the middle. 

Here’s why it matters now. IVF isn’t a boutique tool anymore — it’s how the industry makes embryos. So a failure rate that hits your elite matings hardest isn’t a rounding error. It’s real money; it’s slower genetic progress; and most operations blame the recipient when the problem may already have walked in the door dead.

The IVF Takeover: Where Is the Money Leaking?

In-vitro production has taken over the embryo business. The International Embryo Technology Society counted 2,468,877 embryos collected or produced in farm animals worldwide in its 2024 report, up 2.4% over the prior year. Over a million of those were cattle embryos, and roughly 80% of all bovine embryos produced globally are now in-vitro-produced rather than flushed the old way. Most of that volume runs through a handful of labs — Trans Ova in the US, Boviteq in Canada, and a growing bench of regional providers — and that’s where your pricing and your options get set. Flushing shrinks. IVF grows. That’s the whole trend in four words. 

But IVF embryos don’t get pregnant as reliably as flushed ones, and both the labs and the producers planning around them have priced that in. Trans Ova puts well-managed fresh IVF pregnancy rates at around 45–50%, with frozen a little lower. Canada’s Boviteq advertises a direct-transfer frozen pregnancy rate of 55 to 60% using its own culture-media system — so the ceiling has moved, but even the good numbers still leave many embryos that don’t take. 

The field study numbers are blunter. One published morphokinetic trial pegged IVP pregnancy outcomes at 42% for fresh transfers and 38% for frozen — well below what flushed embryos deliver. Your lab won’t hit those figures to that decimal place. But the headwind is real, and every IVF program is pushing into it.

For years, the fix was assumed to live downstream. Bad recipient. Thin body condition. A sync protocol that slipped a day. All real problems. But Wells flipped the question: nobody was checking whether the embryo itself was alive and developing normally when it went in.

Why Can a Grade 1 Embryo Still Be Dead on Arrival?

Morphology grading is a snapshot. You look under the scope once, count the cells, assess the shape, and call it a Grade 1 or 2. What it can’t tell you is whether that “pretty” embryo is actually still developing — or already shutting down.

That’s not just Wells’s opinion. Fieldwork on bovine morphokinetics found that IVP embryos rated top grade still had pregnancy outcomes in the low 40s and high 30s. The prettiest embryo under the microscope isn’t reliably the one that sticks. That’s why a Grade 1 can still be dead on arrival. 

Her method records a short video and measures morphokinetics — the timing and pattern of the embryo’s cellular movement — and scores it against a model built on real pregnancy outcomes. “My research and the literature show that about 20% of all transferred embryos are actually dead or dying at the time of transfer,” Wells told RealAgriculture in September 2025. “Just by identifying that 20% and eliminating those, pregnancy outcomes improve by about 20%.” The score runs 0 to 100, so you set the bar — not the microscope. 

Now, fair is fair: labs and embryologists who rely on morphology grading would push back on the size of that number. Grading remains the field’s proven, everyday standard, and no independent study has yet replicated the 20% figure across multiple herds. But the biology underneath Wells’s argument is well documented. A 2019 review of the post-transfer consequences of IVP embryos found pregnancy rates 10 to 40% lower for cattle carrying lab-produced embryos than for those carrying flushed ones. Every IVF embryo grows in artificial culture media, and that dish stresses an embryo in ways the oviduct never does. So a meaningful fraction arriving damaged isn’t a sales angle — it’s baked into how IVF works, industry-wide. 

Here’s the one caveat worth saying out loud: the specific 20% figure is Wells’s own read of her research and the literature, not an independently replicated industry number, and her company sells the fix. The direction is well supported. The exact size of it is hers to prove at scale. 

How a TED Talk and a Kitchen Table Started This

Cara Wells didn’t set out to build software. She’s a reproductive physiologist, and the whole thing turned on a video she happened to watch — a TED Talk on MIT’s Video Motion Magnification, a tool that reveals hidden movement in ordinary footage. Wells’s leap was simple. An embryo is a rapidly dividing organism whose cellular activity you can’t see in real time, even under the best microscope — so what if video could mine out those hidden signatures of life? 

Then COVID shut everything down, and the work moved to her kitchen table. Wells sat there, measuring embryo diameters every five seconds and quantifying how each embryo’s shape shifted over time. She worked with Texas Panhandle ET veterinarian Dr. Russell Killingsworth, tracking which embryos actually made pregnancies at the 35- to 60-day checks. A pattern came out of the noise: embryos that make pregnancies show moderate, middle-of-the-curve activity, while the ones at the fast and slow extremes mostly don’t. 

Six years on, that kitchen-table method is a machine-learning platform. One published study alone drew on 6,900 thirty-second smartphone videos of bovine embryos recorded during routine ET. That’s not a lab demo — that’s barn reality. 

And here’s what it isn’t: a $50,000 machine. It’s software. An embryologist mounts a phone to the microscope they already own, records a roughly 30-second video, and uploads it through a web app. The system returns a viability score from 0 to 100 plus a sex prediction, both generated independently of that 1-to-4 morphology grade. It isn’t judging how the embryo looks. It’s measuring what it’s doing. 

Running Your Own Numbers: 100 Transfers on a 400-Cow Herd

Say you milk 400 cows and put 100 IVF embryos on the ground this year, all from your top donor matings. Apply Wells’s estimate, and roughly 20 of them were never viable.

Start with the direct burn on those 20. Recipient synchronization runs about $18 to $28 a cow, and the transfer fee another $65 to $80 per recipient, per The Bullvine’s own ET cost work. At the low end, 20 × ($18 + $65) = $1,660. At the high end, 20 × ($28 + $80) = $2,160. That’s synch and transfer alone — before the recipient cow herself, her open days, or the drugs. Plug in your own embryo count and per-cow costs, and it scales straight up. And if you’ve ever watched an ET calf sell for less than it cost to make, you know the setup bill is the least of it — we ran that math in the $4,917 breakeven on ET Holstein calves.

But the setup cost is the small line. University of Florida economist Albert De Vries famously pegged the value of a dairy pregnancy at $278 in 2006. Two decades later, in a market starved for replacements, that number vastly underestimates the opportunity cost. With springing heifers fetching $3,000 to $4,200 and the pipeline short an estimated 800,000 head across 2025–26, a dead embryo isn’t just a lost sync fee — it’s a forfeited option on a premium future asset, in the exact market where that option is worth the most in living memory. Want a hard per-embryo number? You’d need your own calf survival rate, heifer ratio, and rearing cost to discount that $3,000 to present value. That’s worth an afternoon with your own records. 

Genetic Progress vs. Multiplied Mistakes

IVF isn’t about making embryos. It’s about multiplying your best donors — more calves a year from the cows you rate highest, carried by lower-merit recipients. Trans Ova cites one donor that failed in conventional flushing, then made 80 pregnancies in five months through IVF; another breeder aspirated 10 heifers five times each and pulled 103 female pregnancies. That multiplier is the entire point. And it only pays if the pregnancies stick. 

So a dead embryo from a top donor isn’t a random miss. It’s a branch that never grows on the pedigree tree — the same slow drain we mapped in when your elite genetics start costing you real money, except here it hits before the calf is even conceived. And when your whole program leans on a handful of donors, a run of dead embryos narrows your genetic base fast — the trap we broke down in your top heifers all trace to three cow families. Multiply that across the million-plus IVF cattle embryos made every year, pulled disproportionately from the top of the pyramid, and a farm-level nuisance starts looking like a brake on how fast the whole industry moves its best genetics forward. 

Options and Trade-Offs for Your Operation

There’s no single right answer here — there’s a right answer for your herd. Here’s how the paths break down.

Audit before you buy anything (do this in the next 30 days). Pull your last three IVF transfer rounds and calculate your real pregnancy rate, split fresh versus frozen and, if your records allow, donor by donor. If your fresh IVF rate sits well under the roughly 50% Trans Ova reference after three rounds, that’s your flag. The risk: small samples lie, so don’t blame the embryo until you’ve logged enough transfers to mean something and ruled out recipient factors. Block off one afternoon this month and do it. 

Run a controlled pilot before committing to screening tech. Score one block of transfers, leave another block unscored, and compare pregnancy rates. This makes sense for high-value seedstock operations where one elite calf pays for the trial many times over, especially at today’s $3,000-plus replacement values. The risk: run it too small, and you’ll read noise as proof. 

Tighten donor and recipient management in parallel. Recipient age and quality move conception on their own — one Iowa State dataset put virgin-heifer recipients at 73% pregnant versus 56% for two-year-olds — and IVP embryos start at a hardiness disadvantage. This always makes sense, whatever screening you adopt. The trap: treating management as the only lever — which is the exact blind spot this story is about. 

Wait and watch, if you’re an occasional user. The signal to move from watching to piloting is multi-herd, peer-reviewed, embryo-level data confirming both the non-viable fraction and the pregnancy uplift. For smaller operations that do occasional IVF, letting the evidence mature is the cheaper, more defensible play. The trade-off is honest: wait, and you get proof, but you give up a year of possible gains if the tech proves out.

Key Takeaways

• If your fresh IVF pregnancy rate has sat well below ~50% for three straight rounds, stop assuming it’s the recipient and start asking your provider what they measure about the embryo itself. 
• If a provider quotes you a pregnancy-improvement number, ask whether it’s backed by multi-herd data you can see — or a single-source estimate. Wells’s own 20% figure is the latter until it’s independently replicated. 
• If you run high-value seedstock, a scored-versus-unscored pilot may pay for itself on a single elite calf in a $3,000-plus replacement market — but only if it’s big enough to mean something.
• If you’re an occasional IVF user, waiting for peer-reviewed, embryo-level pregnancy data is the defensible call, not a cop-out.

The next time a preg check comes back light, don’t reach straight for the recipient. Ask the harder question first: are you sure that embryo ever had a chance — or have you been solving for the wrong variable and calling it management? Pull your last three transfer rounds this week and run the fresh-versus-frozen split. What does your provider actually know about whether those embryos were alive when they went in — and what’s that answer worth against a heifer you’ll never get to raise?

Complete references and supporting documentation are available upon request by contacting the editorial team at editor@thebullvine.com.

Learn More

• The $4917 Breakeven: When Your ET Holstein Calves Sell for Less Than They Cost to Make — Delivers the exact line-item budget to calculate your absolute financial threshold for embryo transfer work, arming you with a critical diagnostic floor before putting high-priced duds into expensive recipients.
• From $1.5 Million to $150000: The Dairy Genetics Shakeout and Your Next Move — Details how the commercial combination of genomics and juvenile IVF slashed generation intervals down to 12 months, mapping the long-term strategic adjustments needed to survive an industry that compresses breeding cycles by 67 percent.
• From Parkinson’s Cell Therapy to 1000 Sorters: How STgenetics’ Hidden Hardware Changed Sexed Semen — Exposes the staggering 33-point conception gap between top and bottom dairy herds using identical single-cell sorting technologies, proving that back-end management can completely neutralize high-tech lab advantages.

The Sunday Read Dairy Professionals Don’t Skip.

Every week, thousands of producers, breeders, and industry insiders open Bullvine Weekly for genetics insights, market shifts, and profit strategies they won’t find anywhere else. One email. Five minutes. Smarter decisions all week.

Dairy spent years lobbying for H-2A access and finally got it on June 17. Same stretch, a Fresno court let a $2B wage cut stand — and the undocumented crew already milking your cows got nothing.

Executive Summary: On June 17, 2026, USCIS opened the H-2A guest worker program to dairies that can prove a “temporary or seasonal” labor need — the industry’s biggest immigration win in decades, and one corn, soybeans, and poultry couldn’t pull off, because farms staffed by immigrant labor produce 79% of U.S. milk. But read the fine print: you still can’t put your year-round milking crew on H-2A, eligibility is judged farm by farm, and the all-in cost runs roughly $877/cow — often right on top of what you’re already paying. The same stretch handed agriculture a DOL wage rule, now in effect after a Fresno court denied the UFW’s injunction on May 13, that cuts guest-worker pay by $2 billion (26–32%), with new AEWR rates taking effect July 1. None of it helps the undocumented workers already in your parlor, who got zero new protection. And the real exposure hasn’t moved: Drumgoon Dairy lost 38 of about 50 workers — 70% of the crew — in one I-9 audit and spent $110,000+ rebuilding, while a labor gap costing just 8 lbs/cow/day on a 400-cow herd bleeds about $662 a day before a single SCC penalty. If you lean on immigrant labor, the 30-day move isn’t filing H-2A paperwork — it’s running an I-9 self-audit, so you know your exposure before someone else finds it.

The Elliott family moved from a 140-cow farm in Northern Ireland and built Drumgoon Dairy near Lake Norden, South Dakota, into a 6,500-cow operation running 20 robots over nearly two decades. Then a Homeland Security I-9 audit pulled 38 of about 50 workers — roughly 70% of the crew — in a matter of days, and Nicole Elliott was running the place when it had to spend more than $110,000 rebuilding afterward. One paperwork check, and an operation that took 20 years to build suddenly faced the question every short-staffed dairy does: who’s milking tonight?

That’s the version of dairy’s labor crisis that never makes the press release. And it’s the pressure that pushed the industry to its biggest immigration win in decades. On June 17, 2026, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued Policy Memorandum PM-602-0200, opening the H-2A guest worker program to dairy operations that can show a “temporary or seasonal” labor need. If you run cows, this matters — just not in the clean, solved-problem way the celebration suggests.

The short version: dairy got a legal door it never had. The longer version is worth your time, because of what that door does and doesn’t open.

What Actually Changed on June 17

For decades, dairy was effectively locked out of H-2A. The program was built for seasonal work — fruit, vegetables, nursery crops that need a crew for a few months and then send them home. Cows don’t work that way. They need milking 365 days a year, so dairy never fit the “seasonal” box, and specialty crop growers used the program while dairy farmers watched from the sidelines.

The new memo doesn’t create a new visa. It reinterprets the old rule, telling adjudicators that dairying can involve a temporary or seasonal need and must be judged on a case-by-case basis, like any other H-2A petition. USDA welcomed it. The Green Bay–based Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative called it a meaningful step for an industry that’s been asking for exactly this clarification for years.

Here’s why dairy had the leverage to get this when corn, soybeans, and poultry couldn’t. A 2015 Texas A&M AgriLife study for the National Milk Producers Federation found:

• 51% of all dairy workers are immigrant labor.
• Farms employing immigrant labor produce 79% of the U.S. milk supply.
• Pulling those workers out would push retail milk toward $6.40 a gallon and hit the broader economy by $32.1 billion.

Those figures are now a decade old, but the dependency hasn’t eased. That’s not a labor-rights pitch. It’s a grocery-shelf pitch — and it lands in rooms where immigration arguments stall out.

Why Was Dairy’s Argument the One That Worked?

Every ag sector says it’s essential. Corn says it. Poultry says it. They all have lobbyists making the same case. So why did dairy walk out with a memo nobody else got?

Because dairy’s ask was narrow and legal, not broad and political. The industry didn’t ask Washington to invent a new “dairy visa.” It pointed at the statute and said the law already lists dairying as eligible agricultural labor — your interpretation of “seasonal” is what’s broken. The Farm Bureau framed it the same way: flexibility, not amnesty. That’s a correction USCIS could make in a nine-page memo without waiting on Congress. One is a political ask. The other is a legal fix. And legal fixes are a lot harder to say no to.

But the same thing that made the ask winnable also caps what it delivers:

• Eligibility still hinges on proving a temporary or seasonal need, judged on a farm-by-farm basis.
• Immigration firm másLabor says very few dairies can actually satisfy that standard under the current framework.
• You can’t file H-2A for your year-round milking crew. You’d have to carve out something genuinely time-bound — a calving-season role — and prove you don’t need that same job the rest of the year.

That’s where most dairies hit the wall. A continuous-flow operation can’t easily claim a “season” when cows freshen every week of the year. The farms most likely to qualify are the ones with a concentrated calving block or a seasonal feed-and-forage push — not the bulk of confinement dairies. So read the memo for what it is: a real crack in a door that was fully shut, not the door swinging open.

How This Plays Out in a Real Barn

Drumgoon wasn’t a one-off. In June 2026, an ICE raid hit Outlook Dairy in New Mexico, where owner Bos had 55 workers on payroll at sunrise and 20 by sundown — 35 gone in a single action, and milk production effectively stopped overnight. When the crew vanishes, the clock that matters isn’t political. It’s biological.

Miss milkings and cows pay for it fast. DairyNZ’s guidance notes that a quarter of cows not milked for seven days developed mastitis, with somatic cell counts spiking above 400,000 cells/mL and taking days to return to normal. The WH Miner Institute reports that even mild mastitis costs 11 to 18 pounds of milk per cow per day — and sometimes production never fully returns.

Here’s the barn math you can map straight to your own operation:

• A labor disruption costing a conservative 8 lbs/cow/day on a 400-cow herd = 3,200 lbs/day.
• At USDA’s 2026 all-milk forecast of $20.70/cwt, that’s about $662 a day walking out the door — before SCC penalties, dumped milk, or vet bills.
• Run that for a week while you wait on emergency labor, and you’re past $4,600.

The cows don’t pause for paperwork.

And the lost milk is only the part you can see on the bulk-tank ticket. A short-handed crew cuts corners on heat detection, fresh-cow checks, and footbaths — the quiet jobs that show up three weeks later as open cows and lame cows. Iowa State Extension’s 2024–26 cost work estimates that the change in reproduction value is about $6 per cowwhen performance slips, with a missed breeding pushing the calving interval out by roughly 21 days. That’s the second wave of a labor shock, landing after the headlines move on. When neighboring farms sent workers to Drumgoon after its audit, that’s the wave they were trying to head off.

The Same Memo on a 2,000-Cow Operation

Scale changes the math, but not the constraint. On a large Western or Midwest dairy, the fixed costs of H-2A amortize better — a housing build or legal bill spread across 20 workers stings less per head on 2,000 cows than on 400. Bigger operations often already have bunk-style housing and HR staff, which makes the program’s housing, transport, and record-keeping rules more realistic. Wisconsin Public Radio reported that at least 14% of Wisconsin farms approved for visas this year already have dairy herds — mostly using H-2A for non-milking field and forage work.

But even at 2,000 cows, the wall is the same:

• You still can’t put your core milking crew — the ones on that 72-hour clock — on H-2A year-round under this guidance.
• You’re still bound by the one-year contract maximum and three-year cap, with workers required to return home.
• A continuous-milking operation with cows freshening evenly has less obvious seasonality to point to than a smaller herd with a tight calving window.

The memo hands big dairies a scalpel for specific seasonal jobs. It’s not a blanket over the year-round labor gap that keeps the lights on in the parlor.

What Does the “Win” Actually Pay Your Operation?

Less than the headlines suggest — and here’s the part the press releases skip. The same stretch of 2026 that handed dairy its H-2A door also brought a Department of Labor interim rule, effective October 2025, that rewrote how H-2A wages get set. The Economic Policy Institute estimates:

• Over 350,000 H-2A farmworkers will see pay cut by $2 billion or more in 2026.
• That’s a 26% to 32% reduction in their wages.
• In some states, H-2A pay drops from the $15–$20/hour range toward $8–$17.

So the employer side of agriculture got two things at once: dairy got access, and the whole sector got cheaper guest labor. That changes your per-cow math if you use the program. But say it plainly — those savings come straight out of worker paychecks. The United Farm Workers sued to block the rule, and on May 13, 2026, a federal judge in Fresno denied their request for an injunction, so the wage cut is in effect while the lawsuit grinds on toward a ruling on the merits. DOL is set to publish new wage rates under it effective July 1, 2026. The rule could still be struck down later — so don’t treat those lower numbers as permanent in a long-term budget.

Run the program cost honestly before you celebrate. H-2A requires you to pay the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, provide free housing, cover travel both ways, and hit a “three-fourths guarantee” on contract hours. Non-wage costs land around $10,000 per worker, with federal fees adding well over $1,000 a head.

The number to run before you celebrate: The Bullvine’s own modeling pegs all-in H-2A dairy labor at roughly $877 per cow per year — often right on top of, or above, what you’re already paying.

How that lands depends entirely on your size, because the fixed costs spread differently across the herd:

The table isn’t a verdict — it’s a reminder that the same memo pays out very differently on a 400-cow tie-stall than on a 2,000-cow freestall. Run your own number before you decide the win is yours.

What Happens to the Crew Already in Your Barn?

Nothing changed for them on June 17. The memo helps future hiring. It offers no legal status, no protection, and no pathway for the undocumented workers already milking your cows — the people who rode out every audit and every enforcement wave. They woke up on June 18 in the same position as June 16. Years of essential work, and still no door to legal status.

That’s the hard truth under the celebration. A large share of dairy’s immigrant workforce is undocumented — in some studied regions like the Northeast, estimates run as high as 90%, though that’s a regional figure, not a national census. Fixing that would take something this memo isn’t:

• A true year-round ag visa, or
• A legalization track tied to work history.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act was the best-known attempt at the latter. It passed the House twice with bipartisan support but stalled in the Senate, and the Center for Migration Studies estimated it would have legalized about 235,600 undocumented agricultural workers and their families. It never became law. Until something like this does, your most experienced people remain essential and exposed.

Options and Trade-Offs for Farmers

There’s no single right move here. There are paths, and each one has a real cost.

• Use H-2A for genuinely seasonal roles. Works for larger operations with defined calving or breeding seasons, or time-bound forage work. Requires housing, legal help, 75-to-120-day lead times, and compliance systems. The risk: most core milking jobs still won’t qualify, and you front every dollar before a cow gets milked. The October 2025 wage rule makes the cost side look better than it did in 2024 — but those rates rest on a court fight that’s still live, so don’t build a decade-long plan on them.
• Run an I-9 self-audit this month. Works for every operation, regardless of size — this is the 30-day move. Requires a few hours and an honest look at your paperwork. The risk: you find problems you’d rather not see. But Drumgoon let 38 workers go after exactly this kind of DHS check. Knowing your exposure beats discovering it during a raid.
• Build a written 72-hour contingency plan. Works for any herd leaning on immigrant labor — statistically, most of them. Requires mapping who does what, lining up backup labor, and deciding now which pens you’d triage first. Drumgoon leaned on neighbors sending workers over — but that’s a favor, not a plan. The cows line up whether you’re ready or not.
• Look hard at automation. Works for operations facing chronic labor gaps that can carry the debt. Requiresserious capital; robots are a multi-year bet, not a 72-hour fix. The catch: Drumgoon’s 20 robots still didn’t insulate it from a DHS audit.

Key Takeaways

These are decisions to make, not points to remember.

• If you run defined calving or breeding seasons, ask your immigration attorney whether one specific, time-bound role could qualify for H-2A — but don’t assume your milking crew does.
• Before you budget H-2A, run the per-cow number. At roughly $877/cow all-in, check whether it beats your current labor cost or matches it — and remember a 400-cow herd dilutes fixed costs far worse than a 2,000-cow one.
• Do an I-9 self-audit this month. If one DHS check pulled 70% of Drumgoon’s crew and cost $110,000+ to rebuild from, the question isn’t whether you’d survive it — it’s whether you know your exposure before someone else finds it.
• If you lost 40% of your crew tomorrow, can you name who milks, which pens get triaged, and where your backup labor comes from? If not, that’s this week’s job.
• If you rely on long-term undocumented workers, factor in that the memo gives them zero new protection. Build that risk into your staffing plan, not your press clippings.

So Where Does Your Operation Actually Stand?

Picture an audit hitting you next Tuesday. How many of your people are still standing in the parlor Wednesday morning — and do you actually know, or are you guessing? That’s not a political question. It’s a milk-check question, and the answer is sitting in your I-9 folder right now.

The June 17 memo handed dairy a tool. Whether it fits your herd comes down to your size, your seasons, and your balance sheet. We’re breaking down the full H-2A cost-per-cow model by herd size — where it pencils, where it doesn’t, and how the July 1 wage rates change the math — in next week’s Bullvine Weekly. That’s where the real numbers live.

Run Your Numbers

Dairy Profit Projector — Drop that $877/cow H-2A figure into your own herd size, milk price, and ration and see what it does to your 12-month whole-herd margin, IOFC per cow per day, and breakeven milk price — before you decide the visa win actually pencils on your farm.

Complete references and supporting documentation are available upon request by contacting the editorial team at editor@thebullvine.com.

Learn More

• Dairy Finally Got Its H-2A Door. In Wisconsin, It Costs About $25 an Hour to Walk Through. — Insight into the true, hidden side-by-side cost difference between visa contracts and local hiring. This analysis exposes how a 39% domestic turnover rate silently inflates labor budgets past the H-2A administrative baseline.
• Outlook Dairy Lost 35 of 55 Workers Before Lunch. Then the Cows Lined Up. — Arms you with a concrete shift-by-shift coverage map strategy to handle sudden immigration enforcement actions. Delivers the exact 72-hour operational protocol needed to safeguard cow health and parlor throughput when human capital vanishes.
• Dairy Tech ROI: The Questions That Separate $50K Wins from $200K Mistakes — Reveals the precise $27.05 hourly wage crossover threshold where automated milking systems generate positive financial returns. Dismantles vendor trade-show performance claims by matching capital allocation to specific herd infrastructure and scale limits.

The Sunday Read Dairy Professionals Don’t Skip.

Every week, thousands of producers, breeders, and industry insiders open Bullvine Weekly for genetics insights, market shifts, and profit strategies they won’t find anywhere else. One email. Five minutes. Smarter decisions all week.

Forest Glen’s 2,200 Jerseys run 77.8% A2A2 by breed — but that’s not why Costco buys the milk. The genetics were the easy part. The buyer and the 3-year clock weren’t.

The quick numbers: ~2,200 registered Jerseys · organic since the mid-1990s · milk flows into Costco’s Kirkland Organic A2 line ($15.79–$22.99 per 4-pack) · Jerseys run ~77.8% A2A2 by breed · a 0.15% protein bump pencils to 25–40¢/cwt.

Robert Kircher was about 11 years old when he started working summers with the Jersey cows at Forest Glen, the Dayton, Oregon, operation he now co-owns and runs with his brother, Stewart, and owner Dan Bansen. Three decades and an Oregon State dairy science degree later, the two Forest Glen herds — Forest Glen Jerseys and Forest Glen Oaks — milk roughly 2,200 registered Jerseys, certified organic since the mid-1990s. And here’s where it gets interesting: “A lot of our milk goes to Nancy’s, to Costco for Costco Organic A2 milk,” Kircher said this June. 

That’s a premium lane most operations — especially Holstein herds — can’t access without years of work. The genetics that got Forest Glen there? Those were never the hard part.

What’s Actually Changing

A2 milk is fluid milk from cows that carry only the A2 form of beta-casein, a protein some consumers find easier to digest — though the human-health evidence remains thin and contested. The market doesn’t much care about the debate; it’s buying. A2 fluid milk carries a 25–50% premium in many markets. The broader A2 category was valued at about $2.44 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $2.66 billion in 2026. Costco’s Kirkland Organic A2 whole milk ranges from $15.79 to $22.99 for a 4-pack of half-gallons, depending on the warehouse and date.

Organic is no longer niche, either. Organic fluid milk’s share of total US fluid sales more than doubled, from 3.3% in 2010 to 7.1% in 2024. Stack an A2 claim on an organic claim, and you’re selling into the part of the dairy case that’s actually growing while conventional fluid keeps shrinking. 

Genetics determine who can even play. Jersey cattle carry the A2A2 genotype at about 77.8% breed-wide — third-highest of any breed, behind Guernsey at 86.4% and Brown Swiss at 84.1%. A2A2-tested semen is readily available, but building a fully A2A2 herd takes years of selective breeding — there’s no shortcut, and understanding that timeline is crucial to planning your genetic strategy. 

The Genetics Didn’t Happen Overnight

Here’s the piece most “switch to Jerseys” pitches skip: Forest Glen isn’t just a big Jersey herd, it’s a deep one. Back in 2010, the AJCA-recorded lactation average across the herd was 16,529 lbs of milk, 737 lbs of fat, and 614 lbs of protein — serious component output for a grazing-organic Jersey operation. Dan Bansen was recognized with national Jersey awards for that breeding program. 

The herd has bred its own genomic sires, too. Forest Glen Visionary Marker (29JE3897) was released as a genomic young sire that ranked among the top Jersey bulls at the time, and the operation has historically carried multiple cows and heifers ranking in the top 1.5% of the breed on GJPI. Translation: the A2 and component story here rides on 30 years of registered-Jersey selection — not a quick semen swap.

That’s the honest gap between Forest Glen and a Holstein operator reading this. You can buy A2A2 Jersey semen tomorrow. You can’t buy 1996.

How This Plays Out on a Real Farm

The component math is tangible. As a breed reference, Jersey milk contains about 4.9% fat and 3.8% protein, compared with Holstein’s roughly 3.7% fat and 3.1% protein. The national all-breed average has itself climbed to about 4.30% fat and 3.28% protein in 2025, so your own gap depends on where your herd already sits. For a processor paying on protein concentration, that difference shows up on every load. 

Run a 300-cow herd at around 22,000 lbs a cow — about 66,000 cwt a year — through the numbers, and the two sides of the bet sharpen up fast.

The premium is real, but it’s small. The volume swing is the big one — and which way it cuts depends entirely on how far toward Jersey you go. One honest caveat on that −$211,000: it’s gross milk sales, before the lower feed and replacement costs a Jersey herd incurs, which claw back a chunk of it. Component premiums are also set region by region under federal milk marketing orders, so plug your own order, processor, and production into the same three rows before you trust anyone’s headline figure.

That’s the trap in “Jerseys give less milk.” Go full Jersey or pure-Jersey crossbred, and you’ll likely ship less; one Irish dataset put pure Jersey crossbreds about 625 kg per cow below Holsteins. But a first-cross Holstein × Jersey (F1) can actually beat the parental average — that peer-reviewed 5.6% bump. The premium shows up later; the volume change hits early. F1 crossbreeding is the lever that softens the gap you have to eat in between. 

What Would the Transition Actually Look Like, Year by Year?

Walk it forward on a real calendar, because the sequence is where operations get hurt. 

• Year 1: You start breeding A2A2-tested Jersey or component semen onto your Holstein dams, and you begin the organic land and feed clock if you’re chasing the organic-A2 lane. No new revenue. Higher feed cost if you’ve gone organic.
• Year 2: Your first crossbred heifers are growing but not milking; if you’ve pushed hard toward full Jersey, your earliest culling-and-replacement decisions start nicking volume. Still no premium cheque.
• Year 3: Your first F1 or Jersey-influenced animals freshen, components climb, and — if you sequenced it right — your organic certification comes through, and a premium contract can finally activate. That’s the earliest a premium dollar realistically lands. So you carry two to three years of cost before the upside shows. Forest Glen absorbed that runway back in the 1990s. You’d be absorbing it against today’s feed and interest costs.

The Mechanics Behind It

There’s a quiet split underneath all this — between what the breeding index rewards and what the premium market pays. On April 1, 2025, the USDA’s Net Merit (NM$) index reduced protein’s weighting from 19.6% to 13.0% and increased fat’s weighting from 28.6% to 31.8%. CDCB has been straight about why: the change reflects recent component price trends in the commodity-and-cheese market most farms sell into.

So two things are true at once. The index is calibrated correctly for the market most producers are in. And it’s miscalibrated for the market Forest Glen is in. If you’re chasing a fluid A2 protein premium but still ranking bulls on NM$, you’re using a tool built for a different milk cheque.

CDCB already publishes a better-fit tool — Fluid Merit (FM$), one of the lifetime merit indices refreshed alongside NM$ in April 2025, built around the fluid market rather than cheese yield.

How Much Does Waiting on the Buyer Actually Cost?

More than the feed bill — it can cost you the buyer. The organic whole-herd transition runs 12 months of documented organic management before milk qualifies, a one-time exception under the USDA rule. But the land underneath has to be clean for three full years first, so the real-world runway is closer to three years, not one. A2A2 herd conversion stacks on top of that. By the time you’re certified and qualified, the contract slots may already be filled. The Bullvine has reported that major processors locked much of their long-term supply in 2023–2024 while planning current expansions, often favoring larger, consistent-volume operations. 

And premium pay doesn’t erase costs. Forest Glen makes the organic-A2 model work, but Kircher is blunt about the squeeze: “It’s been pretty tough. We’re getting near to what we were seeing pricewise in 2014. But 10 years ago, all your costs were a lot lower.” Organic feed costs more, Oregon’s overtime rules apply the same as to any dairy, and the processor captures the bulk of the retail premium. The lesson isn’t speed — it’s sequence: get the market signal first, then start the clock you can’t reverse.

Is Your Genetic Strategy Pointed at the Wrong Cheque?

Pull your last twelve months of milk cheques and look hard at what they actually reward — protein concentration, fat, fluid, or volume. Then check whether your sire selection matches. If you’re selling into a fluid or A2 premium market but ranking bulls on NM$ — which now leans harder toward fat than it did — or chasing PTA Protein pounds instead of PTA Protein percent, your genetics may be drifting away from your own pay structure. 

It’s a thirty-minute job. Pull the cheque, pull your sire list, lay them side by side, and see if they tell the same story. Most operations have never done it.

The Strategic Playbook

Four moves, in the order they actually protect you. No single path fits every barn — but the sequence matters more than the breed.

• Test what you’ve already got — start this month. A2 genotyping is available as a standalone test or as a genomic add-on through labs such as UC Davis VGL. Map your herd, then filter your next semen order for A2A2 status plus positive PTA Protein %. Low cost, low risk, and it tells you whether you’re already sitting on a qualifying pool. What it won’t tell you: whether a buyer exists. That’s the next move, not this one. 
• Secure the buyer before you build. This is the discipline most transitions skip — and it’s the one that protects the other three. Forest Glen’s milk has a contracted home through Nancy’s Probiotic Foods, the Springfield Creamery family operation running since 1960, which gives the farm a stable outlet for organic Jersey milk. Get a letter of intent or a cooperative commitment before you spend Year 1 feed money. But treat an LOI as a maybe, not a yes: sequencing failure (no buyer at all) and counterparty failure (a soft commitment that evaporates) are different risks. Pin down volume and term in writing before the feed order changes. 
• Crossbreed toward A2A2 and components — but mind how far you go. A first-cross Holstein × Jersey can hold or even gain volume while lifting components; a push to full Jersey trades volume for concentration. Works when a buyer conversation is already moving. Fails when you build the genetics before the market exists. The deeper you breed toward Jersey, the bigger the volume bet you’re making. 
• Stack revenue beyond the milk cheque. Forest Glen runs a 370-kilowatt digester generating about 3.1 million kWh a year for Portland General Electric, sells registered Jersey genetics, and moves composted fiber to Willamette Valley vineyards. None of that is milk; all of it is margin. Works when you’ve got the scale and capital to build it — not a standing-start play in Year 1. 

The thread running through all four: check whether your genetics already match your pay structure before you spend a dollar changing either one. 

Key Takeaways

• The genetics were the cheap part. Forest Glen’s edge is a contracted home through Nancy’s into Costco’s A2 line — line up your buyer before you breed or certify a single cow.
• Run your own three rows before you trust the pitch: a 0.15% protein bump pencils to 25–40¢/cwt, but a full-Jersey shift can cost six figures in gross volume that lower feed and replacement costs only partly claw back.
• If you sell into a fluid or A2 premium market, stop ranking bulls on NM$ alone — its protein weighting dropped to 13.0% in April 2025, and Fluid Merit (FM$) is built for the cheque you’re actually cashing.
• The clock is the killer, not the breed. Organic land runs a three-year wait, and A2A2 conversion stacks on top, so the slots may be full by the time you qualify — which is why securing the contract comes first.

The Real Question for Your Operation

Forest Glen didn’t pivot into a premium lane. They were already most of what that lane required — a registered Jersey herd, organic since the mid-1990s, running high-A2A2 by breed and breeding its own top-1.5% genetics — before the A2 category took off. So the real question for your operation isn’t “should I run Jerseys.” It’s this: if a premium buyer in your region went looking for a reliable supply next year, would your genetics and your certifications already qualify you — or would you be three years and a contract short? 

Robert Kircher started learning these cows at 11 years old. The position he’s in now took thirty years to build, and even then, he’ll tell you it’s “been pretty tough.”

Run Your Numbers

Component Value Tracker — This whole story turns on what protein is worth in your check. Run the tracker to put a real dollar figure on that 0.15% bump in your herd, and see whether breeding for components pencils against the volume you’d trade away.

Complete references and supporting documentation are available upon request by contacting the editorial team at editor@thebullvine.com.

Learn More

• TPI 2026’s $17500 Protein Trap: Breeding Holsteins for a Protein Market That Doesn’t Exist — Arms you with a blunt audit strategy to check if your sire choices are accidentally chasing a low-value protein ratio rather than total component pounds, protecting your farm from a multi-thousand-dollar genetic margin drag.
• Why the A2 Boom Bypassed Heritage Breeds – And What’s Actually Working — Exposes the harsh plant math that dictates premium lane access, proving why a 150-cow heritage herd’s volume disappears into the tank without a pooled neighborhood stream or a 50,000-pound daily processing minimum.
• A $45 Heifer Test Now Decides Who Qualifies for Gene-Edited Milk — Delivers a critical genetic playbook warning that early adopters capture the margin while latecomers catch a commodity, utilizing low-cost heifer genomic profiles to position your herd before the next specialized processor contract window slams shut.

The Sunday Read Dairy Professionals Don’t Skip.

Every week, thousands of producers, breeders, and industry insiders open Bullvine Weekly for genetics insights, market shifts, and profit strategies they won’t find anywhere else. One email. Five minutes. Smarter decisions all week.

Pull the first-test SCC by lactation group tonight. If your heifers walk in at 200K while your mature cows hold the rolling average near 140K, your bulk tank’s been lying to you.

Executive Summary: The national DHI somatic cell average has stayed flat at 181,000 cells for two years running, and new University of Minnesota research suggests part of the reason may be hiding in your heifer pen, not your parlor. A study from Brad Heins’s WCROC program — presented at ADSA 2026 by Ph.D. researcher I. M. Rott — is testing whether a heifer’s residual feed intake during growth tracks with the somatic cell count she’ll carry into her first lactation, on the theory that more efficient animals have more energy left for immune development. The catch for most herds: a clean bulk tank reading 140K can mask first-lactation heifers walking in at 200K, because mature, lower-SCC cows drag the rolling average down and bury the problem. That matters because first-test SCC is largely a forecast, not a snapshot — a 2005 J. Dairy Science study associated heifers fresh at 50,000 cells with 119–155 kg more milk across the lactation than those at 1,000,000, and the damage doesn’t reset. Run the barn math: on a 300-cow herd at 24,000 lbs, the federal SCC adjustment for a 250K-to-150K move is lunch money (~$6,000/yr), but a $1.00/cwt over-order quality premium is worth ~$72,000 a year — roughly $216,000 over three years — riding on whether your replacements freshen clean. The genetics gap is real, too: CDCB’s Feed Saved index is built on lactating-cow data, so it isn’t yet capturing any heifer-period RFI-to-SCC link, and nobody’s published whether chasing efficiency hard helps or hurts SCS. The 30-second takeaway — pull your first-test SCC by lactation group; if your heifers run more than 50,000 cells above your rolling average, your tank’s been lying to you, and the fix is 18–24 months upstream.

It’s 9 PM at the kitchen table. The DHI report is open on the laptop, the rolling bulk tank somatic cell count reads a comfortable 140,000 cells per milliliter, and by every number a producer usually checks, this herd has milk quality handled.

Then pull one more report — first-test SCC broken out by lactation group — and a different story shows up. The first-lactation heifers are walking in at 200,000 cells, while the second- and third-lactation cows quietly drag the average back down. The bulk tank isn’t lying. It’s just answering the wrong question. Read by lactation group, though, and the heifers tell on themselves.

That gap is the thread behind new research out of the University of Minnesota, presented this week at the 2026 ADSA Annual Meeting in Milwaukee. And it’s why a producer who’s sure he’s beaten his somatic cell problem might be one heifer group away from one he never saw coming.

Two Years Flat While Premiums Have Never Paid Better

Here’s the number that should bug anyone watching a milk check. The U.S. national DHI test-day average somatic cell count sat at 181,000 cells per milliliter — unchanged from 2023 to 2024, according to a CDCB/USDA summary report (reported via Agproud/Progressive Dairy, June 2025). Two years. No movement. And milk quality premiums have rarely paid more than they do right now.

The work prompting a rethink comes out of the University of Minnesota’s West Central Research and Outreach Center (WCROC) in Morris, where Dr. Brad Heins runs the dairy program. A study from that group — presented at ADSA 2026 by Ph.D. researcher I. M. Rott, with co-authors Isaac Salfer, Brad Heins, and Isaac Haagen — digs into the genetics of how efficiently young animals eat. The starting point sits roughly two years before a cow ever walks into the parlor — in the heifer barn, with something most producers have never tied to udder health at all: how efficiently she eats.

The producer who’ll see himself in this isn’t the one fighting a visible SCC crisis. It’s the one whose rolling average looks fine, who stopped sweating milk quality a while back, and who has no idea his replacement pipeline is quietly restocking a subclinical problem with every group that freshens.

And that’s the trap. A clean rolling average is a lagging indicator built mostly from cows who’ve already proven themselves. It tells you how your mature herd is milking today. It tells you almost nothing about the heifers about to replace them.

The Parlor Is a Warning Light. The DHI Report Is a Diagnostic.

Why is early SCC so hard to walk back? Because the damage doesn’t reset.

A 2005 study in the Journal of Dairy Science (88:938–947) tracked first-lactation heifers and found that those testing at 50,000 cells in early lactation were associated with an estimated 119 to 155 kg more milk over the lactation than heifers testing at 500,000 or 1,000,000 cells. The effect held across nearly the whole lactation, even when later test-day counts came back down. Once a subclinical infection sets up at freshening, you’re managing around it for the rest of that lactation, not erasing it.

That’s what makes a heifer’s first-test SCC the most predictive cell count she’ll ever post. It’s not a snapshot. It’s a forecast.

So the parlor protocol — the teat dips, the dry-cow therapy, the milking hygiene the industry has spent 30 years sharpening — is often cleaning up downstream of a problem that was already locked in. Put it this way: your bulk tank tells you something’s wrong. Your DHI report, read by lactation number, tells you where it came from.

Much of that infection never announces itself, either. Analysis of large-scale first-test data, summarized through Progressive Dairy in 2024, points to fresh-heifer mastitis — much of it subclinical, much of it established at or before calving — as a primary driver of first-lactation SCC. Subclinical infection at freshening commonly runs three to five times the clinical rate.

The Subclinical Iceberg: A herd showing a 6% clinical mastitis rate in fresh heifers is often sitting on an implied 18–30% subclinical infection rate that never lands in a single health record.

Think about what that means for a replacement strategy. You can buy the best fresh-cow protocol money can rent, and it still won’t touch the heifer who walked in already infected. The window to influence her closed months earlier, in a pen that most operations manage as a cost center and nothing more.

What Does Feed Efficiency Have to Do With a Clean Udder?

This is the connection nobody’s drawn yet, and it’s the heart of what the Minnesota group — Rott, Salfer, Heins, and Haagen in UMN’s Department of Animal Science — is working to characterize. The link runs through Residual Feed Intake, or RFI.

RFI strips out body size and growth rate and asks one clean question: is this heifer using her feed well, or burning extra to make the same gain as her pen-mates? A negative-RFI heifer is efficient. A positive one is eating more than her growth justifies.

The WCROC dairy measures this with precision automated feeders that capture individual dry matter intake — not pen averages. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most heifer programs feed by pen, which means the efficient heifers and the wasteful ones eat the same ration, gain similar weight, and nobody can tell them apart until they freshen. By then, it’s two years too late to do anything about that group.

The efficiency signal itself is well documented. A 2024 study in the Journal of Animal Science found that low-RFI Holstein heifers ate 7.5% less feed per day than high-RFI herdmates, with no difference in body weight or average daily gain, and produced 7.7% less methane and gave off 5.6% less metabolic heat in the process. The Minnesota team’s ADSA 2026 abstract (Rott et al., “Genetic parameters for residual feed intake traits in Holstein calves”) takes the next step: pinning down how heritable that calf-stage efficiency is, and how it correlates with other traits.

What the early WCROC direction suggests — and what the full data set will test — is that the efficient, negative-RFI heifers tend to post lower first-test SCC. But here’s the honest line, and it stays in. The specific effect size — how strong the genetic correlation is between calf-stage RFI and somatic cell score, across how many animals — isn’t something this article should state until it’s read straight off the abstract or a published paper.

The Immune-Development Hypothesis — Why the Link Is Plausible

So why would feed efficiency and udder health travel together at all? The leading hypothesis is about where the energy goes.

A growing heifer partitions every megacalorie she eats — toward frame, toward fat, toward maintenance, toward immune-tissue development. An efficient animal, the thinking goes, wastes less on maintenance overhead and has more left to build the tissue that defends her, including the immune machinery around a developing mammary gland. An inefficient heifer burns more just to stand still, leaving less for everything else. Same ration. Different allocation.

There’s biological backing for the energy-partitioning piece. Research on heat production — including work showing that low-RFI heifers give off 5.6% less metabolic heat — indicates that efficient animals lose less energy to maintenance. The leap the Minnesota team is testing is whether the spared energy actually translates into better immune readiness at freshening, measured as lower first-test SCC.

This is where the discipline matters. Right now, this is a hypothesis with a plausible mechanism and early directional data — not a proven causal chain. The data suggest an association. They haven’t yet proven that feeding for efficiency causes a cleaner udder. A producer who treats it as settled science is getting ahead of the researchers themselves. But a producer who ignores it until it’s textbook-confirmed is leaving a two-year lead time on the table. The honest middle ground: it’s plausible enough to shape a mating list and a heifer-pen conversation, not yet strong enough to bet the farm on.

What’s not in doubt is the cost of getting udder health wrong. A 2018 Journal of Dairy Science analysis found that a cow at 250,000 cells produces about 1.6 kg less milk per day than one at 50,000, and converts feed less efficiently by roughly 0.04 kg of milk per kg of dry matter. She costs you milk and burns extra feed. That penalty is worth running barn math on even before the genetic correlation is nailed down.

The Barn Math, Built Step by Step

Here’s where the SCC story stops being academic and starts showing up on a milk check. Walk through it with clearly labeled assumptions so you can swap in your own.

Start with a 300-cow herd milking 24,000 lbs per cow per year — that’s 7.2 million lbs, or 72,000 cwt annually. Now the premium. The federal-order SCC adjustment itself is modest: at mid-2026 cheese prices, roughly $0.00083 per cwt for every 1,000 cells below the 350,000-cell benchmark. Moving a herd from 250K to 150K — a 100,000-cell improvement — is worth about $0.083/cwt on that mechanism alone. On 72,000 cwt, that’s roughly $5,976 a year — call it $18,000 over three years. Real, but not the headline.

The headline lives in the over-order and processor quality premiums, which are contract-specific and far larger than the federal adjustment. Many Upper Midwest and premium-tier processors pay tiered quality bonuses that can stack $0.50 to well over $1.00/cwt for consistently low-SCC milk. At a conservative $1.00/cwt spread between a threshold herd and a premium-tier herd, 72,000 cwt is $72,000 a year. Hold that for three years, and you’re looking at a $216,000 swing — most of it riding on whether your replacement heifers freshen clean or freshen at 200K.

The numbers tell the real story: the federal adjustment is lunch money, but the over-order tier is a down payment on a barn. That’s why the heifer pen is a milk-quality investment, not just a feed cost — and why the action step below is a phone call to find out which tier your milk actually qualifies for.

Does This Hold for Grazing and Organic Herds?

Most of the RFI research base — and the CDCB index built on it — comes from confinement Holsteins on a TMR. WCROC is a useful exception worth flagging, because it runs both a conventional and a certified-organic, pasture-based dairy at Morris, and Heins’s program has long worked in grazing and crossbred systems.

That matters for how you read this. On pasture, individual intake is harder to measure, and RFI rankings can shift because grazing animals express efficiency differently than animals at a feed bunk. The directional logic — efficient heifers may freshen cleaner — may travel across systems if the immune-development mechanism holds, though the Rott et al. calves were measured at WCROC and the specific system behind the data isn’t confirmed in the abstract title. The specific numbers almost certainly won’t transfer one-to-one from a confinement trial to a grazing herd regardless.