Few, if any, cow-calf producers pregnancy-test their cull beef cows when they send them to market. For that, one small but select group of manufacturers is extremely grateful, as are thousands of others who use their product. For they all rely on what some of those cull cows contain: bovine fetal blood.
The blood is one of the 350 by-products that come from cattle after they have been processed. The most common of these are hides and various edible offal items. Less common items, including fetal blood, are used in the pharmaceutical and other industries, and many of them cannot be replaced by other material.
That’s true of serum, which is produced by separating it by centrifuge from the red blood cells in fetal bovine blood. That’s why serum sells for as much as $900 per liter. The total value of serum produced in 2017 might have approached $900 million.
No official data exists as to how much fetal bovine blood is produced annually in the U.S. Estimates however suggest that production was approximately 1.6 million liters in 2015, which yielded 800,000 liters of serum. Production and yield in 2016 was likely 6 percent higher as total commercial cattle slaughter was 1.8 million head larger in 2016 than in 2015.
Production in 2017 was likely up another 5 percent and it might be up another 4-5 percent this year. That’s because cow slaughter so far this year is running well ahead of last year. Through the week ending April 13, total cow slaughter was up 7 percent, with beef and dairy cow slaughter up 10 percent and 5 percent, respectively.
This increase is vital for serum manufacturers because as much as 80 percent of all fetal bovine blood is sourced from cull cows. As many as 8-10 percent of all cull cows at the point of slaughter are found to be carrying a fetus. Pregnant fed heifers account for much of the other 20 percent. But only 2-4 percent of all fed heifers slaughtered are found to be carrying a fetus.
More importantly, a breakdown of fetal bovine blood supplies from cull cows suggests that an estimated 70 percent of the blood comes from beef cows, while the other 30 percent comes from dairy cows. As noted above, the main reason for this is that beef producers often do not pregnancy-check the cows they identify for culling, while commercial dairy producers often do. Beef cows also are exposed much more to bulls for mating than dairy/milking cows so are more likely to be pregnant.
The three largest producers of fetal bovine serum in the U.S. are Thermo Fisher Scientific, which has one serum manufacturing facility, in Grand Island. NY; HyClone GE, which has a facility in Logan, UT; and Sigma-Aldrich. These three companies and other manufacturers all have long-term contract agreements with suppliers of fetal bovine blood, i.e., all beef packers. Most manufacturers have hundreds and even thousands of customers, ranging from commercial users to research laboratories.
These companies aren’t household names but the serum they produce is vital for animal and human health, as the serum is used to make animal and human vaccines. Moreover, there is no real alternative to using serum from bovine fetal blood, as I found out when I attended the recent annual meeting of the International Serum Industry Association (ISIA). In fact, ISIA has just adopted a new marketing slogan: “Nothing works like serum.”
Attending ISIA’s meeting was an opportunity to find out more about this extremely valuable by-product of the beef industry. ISIA is in its 13th year of existence and now has 65 companies or state and federal agencies as members. Just over 150 people attended the meeting and I chatted with attendees as far away as Uruguay and China. The current chairman of ISIA’s board of directors is an English woman. Bovine fetal blood is collected in many countries around the world and serum is manufactured in some of those countries, so it is truly a global product.
As one might expect, the production of serum is both rigorous in producing a disease-free product and heavily scrutinized by the industry itself and by regulators. That’s why ISIA CEO Rosemary Versteegan kicked off the meeting with a presentation covering ethics and compliance. Other presentations included an examination of the gamma irradiation of serum, traceability, and a regulatory update.
In past years, the serum industry faced issues involving tainted serum or serum that didn’t come from bovine fetal blood, although none of this occurred in the U.S. My takeaway from the ISIA meeting is that serum manufacturers take their work extremely seriously and are providing a high-quality product that saves lives. Remember that when you send old Bessie to market. You might be saving lives as well. — Steve Kay
(Steve Kay is editor/publisher of Cattle Buyers Weekly, an industry newsletter published at P.O. Box 2533, Petaluma, CA, 94953; 707-765-1725. Kay’s Korner appears exclusively in WLJ.)
Remember that when you send old Bessie to market, you might be saving lives as well.
