Russian farmers importing Virginia Holstein bulls to help dairy industry

In recent years, with at least pockets of affluence in Russia, consumers have started to demand more and higher-quality dairy and beef products, Osipenko said.

Since the early 2000s, Virginia agriculture officials have traveled to Russia to try to get into the market. Embassy diplomats, federal agriculture officials, veterinarians and farmers all got tapped to help overcome challenges, from cutting through Russian red tape to locating a stateside port set up to ship live animals. The first shipment of Virginia bulls had to be trucked to Maine, where the port still has the necessary ramps and holding pens. Haymore hopes live-animal exports will pick up enough that the Port of Richmond, perhaps with help from private industry, will see fit to reinstall that sort of infrastructure.

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Russian and American officials had to work out a detailed protocol for shipping the animals, including tests for numerous diseases (two of them venereal). In October, Osipenko assembled a herd of about 75 bulls from farms in Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland, then sent them to Millwood Farm in Orange, Va. for a months-long quarantine.

Doug Harris, who owns Millwood, has other cattle and goats on his 200-acre spread, but the Russian-bound bulls have been kept in separate pens. Anyone entering the pens must wash their boots with a disinfectant issued by the Agriculture Department. Even the tires of tractors hauling bales of hay are sprayed.

Along with keeping the bulls healthy, Harris’s job has been to fatten them up — but not too much. Turns out fat doesn’t do much for the bovine love life. (It lowers semen quality.)

The first 29 bulls were shipped to the Black Sea port city of Novorossiysk at the end of December and arrived in early January. The climate there is fairly similar to Virginia’s, said Comyn, so the animals should have little trouble adjusting.

Shipping vials of genetic material is much easier than sending tons of living, breathing cargo that requires water, food, veterinary care and specially ventilated containers for a voyage that can take 20 days or more. But long term, live bulls can be the more economical way to go.

Top-quality fertilized Holstein eggs can fetch as much as $5,000, Comyn said. A young bull with good genetics can be had for as little as $1,100, a relative bargain even if shipping doubles or triples the cost.

“If he’s tan, rested and ready,” Comyn said, “he can breed 10 [cows] a day.”