The best to way introduce Michael Rea is to recount his time spent in Russia implementing the most advanced reproductive technologies at the time. Around 2011, Darrell Stevenson, Montana Angus breeder and founder of ORIgen Beef, was looking for someone to move to Russia to start an embryo transfer (ET) program, and he was recommended a young man he had never met, Michael Rea.
The program was to be started in Shestakovo, Voronezhskaya Oblast, Russia, at a startup cattle operation—the second largest in Russia—which comprised a 2,000-head Angus cow seedstock unit and 4,000 commercial cows. Ten days after Stevenson contacted him, Rea, with an expedited passport and visa in hand, met Stevenson for the first time at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City for the flight to Russia. Once there, the job turned out to be a lot bigger than just doing ET work.
Revamping Russian management
With only a 40% calf crop weaned, the Russian operation needed to be totally retooled, which Rea undertook with a passion, work ethic and vision that Stevenson said is rare to find. Rea changed to a later calving season, implemented a health program, improved the feed quality, cross fenced the pastures, built working chutes—in all, undertook an overall makeover of the general management of the operation.
Success followed. He also managed to build an in vitro fertilization (IVF) facility in 100 days, sourcing materials from three continents. By 2014, they were transferring 2,000 embryos a year, with a great market in the country of Kazakhstan, where registered heifers fetched $3,000 per head.
Stevenson said there are few people who would have taken on that job, let alone succeeded the way Rea did: “Michael showed unique courage and resilience to take on the challenge in Russia. Mind you, he could not speak or read the language. Most would have folded, but not Michael, which is a unique virtue,” Stevenson praised.
“He has a big personality, a work ethic second to none, and as sound a judgement as you will find. He earned my total trust and is someone I know will always have my back. I consider Michael my forever right-hand man, and over time we have become best friends.” By the same token, Rea credited Stevenson, in addition to Rea’s father, as the best mentor he could have.
High-altitude roots
Rea grew up in Colorado on the Front Range between Denver and Fort Collins. He earned degrees from Colorado State University in agriculture business and animal science, but his real education was by doing.
Rea explained, “My dad gave me a lot of opportunities to learn. He is a veterinarian and embryologist who ran an ET business complete with a donor facility on the ranch. We also had about 45 Gelbvieh cows that were mainly built around my showing at junior shows.”
He continued, “My father first started me off by me doing the AI work on my cows, and by college, I was doing the ET work on them. It was a real pocketbook lesson, as success meant more income and failure less income. Along the way, he also taught me to do the microscope work grading embryos, paperwork, freezing embryos—basically, all aspects of ET.”
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After college, Rea went to work for a large Nebraska Gelbvieh operation. “It was really an eye-opening experience going from a 45-cow herd to an extensive 400- to 500-cow operation,” he said. “I was only there for about a year, but I can’t express how much I learned in that time. It was like starting over in terms how to manage a ranch.” That is when Stevenson called, and Rea was off to Russia.
Progressing endeavors
Stevenson and Rea grew the Russian program into 60,000 acres broken down into three units with 7,500 cows before Stevenson divested in the project. When the Russian project wound down for Rea around 2016, Stevenson called him again to work at ORIgen outside Billings, MT. Primarily a bull stud, the company made the business decision to enter the ET business. Rea by this time was really an expert in ET work. He said, “The biggest thing a person needs to get good at this is practice—the more you do, the better you get—and I got more experience in Russia than some people do in their lifetime.”
Things went well at ORIgen, but they found themselves at a bit of a competitive disadvantage not being able to reverse sort semen. This is the process of sexing semen that had previously been collected and frozen. In 2019, Rea decided the time was right to strike out on his own.
“The first year was pretty tight,” Rea reflected, “But the business grew quickly, so I now never have a day off.”
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The base of the business is a 5,000-head dairy facility, most of which are recipients, where he implants embryos two to three times a week. The rest of his client base is beef customers in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, with his biggest customers being Stevenson and Vermilion Ranch. Along with Hereford and Red Angus herds, the majority of his beef clients are producing bulls to serve commercial herds. However, he also has some club calf clients too. They calve later than his commercially oriented customers, so they fill a hole during a slow time.
“I have been lucky in that I have never had to advertise and have grown my business strictly by word of mouth,” Rea said.
Future advancements, undertakings
If you want to get Rea excited, ask him about the future. “I really like genetics and collecting data,” he said. “We collect all kinds of data right now, and I can see us developing things like an index for recipients.
“There is also a wide range of conception rates between sires that we are also collecting data on,” he continued. “With machine learning and artificial intelligence, the information we can learn from this data on the donors, recipients and sires will continue to grow.”
A technology that he is really enthusiastic about is EmVision created by the company EmGenisys founded by Dr. Cara Wells. Although the use of ET and IVF has been increasing by approximately 17% per year over the last several years, Wells reports that pregnancy rates have remained largely unchanged for the last 40 years.
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However, EmVision is a cost-effective application for a cell phone that works with embryologists’ existing microscopes. It measures movement data of the embryos, taking 1,800 frames in 30 seconds. Rea says that coupled with technology like Starlink that gives you internet access from anywhere, the images can quickly be analyzed for cellular activity and metabolic function.
Rea continued, “We know that 10% of embryos will never make pregnancies. Just eliminating those alone will significantly increase our pregnancy rates, but this technology will take us beyond that, as it gives us noninvasive objective data on which embryos are most likely to result in a pregnancy. It also has the advantage of giving us answers at the speed of commerce.”
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Rea’s business has grown to the point that he is hoping to add another person. He would eventually like to have a family and some land, so if he has children, they can grow up with the same opportunities he had to be around animals. However, he added with a chuckle, “But to do that you have to have enough time to go on a date.”
