Replicating Genetic Merit:

Cloning as a Reproductive Technology for Beef Cattle

Over the past several decades, reproductive technologies like artificial insemination and embryo transfer have gained popularity in the beef industry by allowing producers to magnify the impact of high-profile genetics.

Lately, the suite of reproductive services has evolved to offer cloning as another option for producers to further their use of top performing cattle. Replicating Genetic Merit

While commercial cloning is new to the beef cattle world, the concept of cloning has been around for around a century. Scientists first started cloning amphibian species in the early 1900s, but the first mammals were cloned in the 1980s. 1996 marked the first mammal, Dolly the sheep, being cloned by a method called “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” which is still the method commonly used in cloning livestock today. Since then, other livestock species like cattle, pigs, and horses have been cloned. Replicating Genetic Merit

Cloning has gained recent interest in agriculture media because of proposed changes to food regulations. In 2025, Health Canada proposed delisting food derived from cloned cattle and swine, or their progeny, as novel foods. In short, this would mean that beef from cloned cattle would not require a pre-market safety assessment and would not be identified as coming from a clone or its progeny. A scientific review concluded that food products from clones and their progeny are equally as safe as food products from traditionally bred livestock. Health Canada has since paused the publication of this change in November 2025 due to public pushback. Replicating Genetic Merit

In essence, somatic cell nuclear transfer involves taking the DNA from the animal being cloned and inserting it into an “empty” egg from any donor cow. This cell is then cultured in the lab to the early stages of an embryo and implanted into a recipient cow to be carried to term. Apart from the actual nuclear transfer, most of this process closely resembles modern in vitro fertilization embryo transfer. Replicating Genetic Merit

Cloning live animals is different from lab grown protein. To create lab-grown meat, stem cells are taken from a live animal and cultured in the lab with nutrients to produce muscle and fat tissues. This process takes place on scaffolding to form the replicating cells into the shape of a cut of meat. In the case of cloning, after producing an embryo, a calf is carried through normal gestation and birth. Replicating Genetic Merit

“Cloning is generally nowadays done using somatic cell nuclear transfer,” says Dr. Lawrence Smith, a professor at the University of Montreal who specializes in livestock reproductive technology. “You take tissues from animals that have already gone through their normal life, or it can also be done from cells recovered from different stages during development before birth.” Replicating Genetic Merit

As Dr. Smith explains, collecting these “somatic cells” that form the body of an animal is not very invasive. “We mostly use tissues from the skin, or occasionally also from the blood.” These cells are the source of the genetic material, meaning that the animal that provides the tissue sample will be the animal that is cloned. Replicating Genetic Merit

“To do a nuclear transfer, we also require the use of an oocyte, or a female gamete,” says Dr. Smith. “In most cases, at least in cattle, this is obtained from processing plant materials. We recover the ovaries from a cow or heifer at a processing plant and aspirate the oocytes from the ovarian follicles.” This part of the process is similar to the first stage of in vitro fertilization for embryo transfer. For embryo transfer, unfertilized eggs, or oocytes, are collected from a live cow, whereas for the purposes of cloning, the same procedure is used to collect eggs from a recovered ovary. Replicating Genetic Merit

After collecting eggs, technicians enucleate them, meaning they remove the DNA. This step is why cull cows are used as egg donors—the genetic material in the egg is not used in the cloning process, so it is most cost effective to collect eggs from the ovary of a cull cow instead of a live donor. Replicating Genetic Merit

Next, it’s time to take the nucleus from the somatic cell, where the DNA from the animal to be cloned is located, and insert it into the unfertilized egg. “With the enucleated oocytes, we can initiate the process of in vitro culture in the incubator,” says Dr. Smith. “Usually it’s a 24-hour preparation of that gamete to get it to a stage where it will be used for a nuclear transfer. After that, we use either nuclear injection or nuclear fusion to introduce the nucleus of the somatic tissue into the oocyte.” Replicating Genetic Merit

After the combination of the cloned animal’s DNA and the “empty” egg, the process of cloning becomes similar to embryo transfer. “The gamete is then activated to initiate development,” says Dr. Smith. “Usually in beef cattle, we culture them for seven or eight days in the incubator, and then once they reach the stage of a blastocyst, or the early development stage of the embryo, we can then transfer it into a recipient cow that’s been synchronized.” Replicating Genetic Merit

“From then on, it’s basically following normal gestation and seeing that embryo attach and produce the fetus,” says Dr. Smith. “And after nine months, we should be able to get a calf.” Replicating Genetic Merit

While artificial insemination and embryo transfer offer cattle breeders the chance to use high profile sires and dams, they don’t guarantee that the genes you want from that animal make it into the calf. When two animals are mated, naturally or artificially, the calf receives half of its DNA from the dam and half from the sire. Which 50 per cent of each parent’s DNA the calf receives is random, hence why full siblings are not genetically identical. The appeal of cloning is that it offers a breeder the chance to create an exact genetic replica of a high performing animal. Replicating Genetic Merit

Since cloning produces an exact genetic copy of an existing animal, it’s important to note that cloning is “not producing anything new in terms of genetic advancement,” says Dr. Smith. “So it doesn’t increase genetic value. It just copies something that’s already available in nature.” Replicating high quality genetics may still offer value, but it’s important for breeders to know that it is not technically generating genetic progress.

Several breeders have cloned high end sires or dams to increase the production potential from that combination of DNA.

Because cloning requires specialized equipment, personnel, and laboratory setups, it is a relatively expensive process. As a result, cloning isn’t likely to be used for large scale breeding purposes. Instead, cloning can appeal to seedstock producers managing very high value genetics, where the value of preserving or expanding the impact of genetics might justify the cost of cloning.

Several reproductive technology companies in North America now offer cloning as part of their suite of services. Seedstock producers have found appeal in cloning for two main reasons. First, several breeders have cloned high end sires or dams to increase the production potential from that combination of DNA. For certain markets, cloning has even appealed to replicate the genetics of a winning show steer into an intact bull, allowing them to produce more successful show steers.

Another opportunity from cloning is a sort of “insurance policy” on top end breeding stock. Breeders can collect tissue samples from a top end animal during their lifetime so that in case the animal dies or is injured and cannot breed, they can be cloned to preserve their genetic merit. 

While cloning offers opportunities, it is also known to be relatively inefficient, which can add to the cost of the technique. “The efficiency of cloning is low because there are some developmental problems that happen during gestation,” says Dr. Smith. “The issues are mostly related to the development of the placental tissue, so the tissue that interacts with the recipient dam and calf. Because of that, a lot of these fetuses end up dying during gestation or coming to term with some sort of an anomaly, such as large size or umbilical cords that are larger than normal.” 

“These are situations that can happen in nature also, but they happen more often when you are talking about cloned gestations,” says Dr. Smith. “Ideally, you would have these calves surveyed during birth. Sometimes the calf has immature lungs, so if you have access to veterinary care that can follow this animal for the first week after birth, then that will usually sort the problem.”

Producers should also understand that just because two animals are genetically identical does not mean that they will develop or produce exactly the same. “Not everything that the animal produces is related to genetics,” says Dr. Smith. “There’s also the other portion coming from the environment. So, it doesn’t mean that all clones will be exactly the same in terms of production because obviously it depends a lot on the environment they’re exposed to.”

This concept differs a little bit between male and female clones. “If you’re talking about the genetic contribution as a breeding animal, then you can assume that if it’s a male, the semen of a cloned bull will be exactly the same as its original,” says Dr. Smith. “On the female side, it’s a little bit different. There are other genes that are present in the cell, outside the nucleus, called the mitochondrial genes. The mitochondrial genes of clones come from the oocytes that we get from the cull female. So, there is a very small percentage of the genetic background of a female animal that is different from one clone to another.”

While not a fit for every operation, cloning is now a part of modern reproductive biotechnology available to Canadian beef producers. For breeders of high value genetics, the benefits of replicating top performing animals may outweigh the costs of cloning, helping magnify the genetic influence of prolific seedstock as artificial insemination and embryo transfer have.

This was first published in Volume 6 Issue 1 of ABP Magazine (February 2026). Watch for more digital content from the magazine on ABP Daily.