Godmother to a Lot of Cows

By Carol Flaherty

08/16/00 BOZEMAN, Mont. - Flushing cattle, loading embryos, transfer guns – Jodi Clark uses a different vocabulary than most young women.

            It's the language of cattle breeding by embryo transfer, which Clark terms "one of the up and coming technologies in the cattle industry." In this system, the best cow in the herd can have 20 or 50 or 150 calves, instead of just one, because her fertilized embryos are collected and transplanted into other cows – surrogate motherhood, cow-style.

            "I really enjoy the reproductive aspect of the industry, so it's beneficial for me to learn about embryo transfer," says Clark, a Montana State University - Bozeman senior this fall majoring in Animal Science.

            Clark plans to use her command of that language, and on-the-job skills, to get a permanent job after she graduates from MSU. That should be with the spring 2001 class, unless a hoped-for internship in Australia this fall slows the process down.

            Clark started working at Reyher Embryonics southwest of Belgrade during the summer of 1999. Her full-time summer job continued part-time through the school year and then full time again this summer.

            "I would say I'm a better student because I have to work," says Clark. "I have to put in a certain number of hours a week as well as get things done for classes. It forces me to be more time-management-oriented."

            Clark needs that, since she has sometimes taken well over what would be considered a full load of classes.

            Since her summer job is related to what she wants to do later, she says she often is using information she's studied, or studying about something she has done.

            "When you repeat things, you start to really know it. I would apply the things I was learning in the classroom to my job, or they would start teaching me things in class that I had already learned on the job. Then I would have a jump start."

            Given her current experiences, she says she thinks she might want to do something like embryo transfer as a career. On the other hand, an internship in Australia could start her in a new direction.

            "I don't care what I'm doing (in Australia) as long as it is within the beef cattle industry," says Clark.

            Her current job is to help Jeanne and Mark Reyher breed what a producer judges is the best cow or cows in a herd, gather the fertilized embryos, freeze them, then transplant them into host-mother-cows. The work is sometimes done at Reyher Embryonics, but there is also a lot of travel to producers' ranches.

            The technology has gotten a lot faster and much more reliable than in years past, says Jeanne Reyher. Reyher was an MSU Animal Science student years ago, until an embryo transfer internship in Saskatchewan turned into a permanent job before she graduated. Eventually, her experience led to the beginning of Reyher Embryonics. Mark was a business major at West Texas State University.

            "To me it's incredible the variations in the breed," says Clark, who grew up around commercial cattle near Dell, which is about 23 miles from the Idaho border in Beaverhead County.

            "I had thought of things from the commercial herd point of view: I thought that when there were traits you wanted, you picked the best breed. But here, you pick the best cow within the breed and you transplant her eggs in many cows. We have donor cows from all over the state as well as from other parts of the country."

            Which means that Jodi Clark is sort of an "honorary godmother" to a whole lot of cows.

Send questions or comments to Carol Flaherty, MSU Communications Services, Bozeman, MT 59717: carolf@montana.edu.

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