Cattle breeding company, Mastergen, has launched the first genuine e-commerce website for ordering dairy and beef semen. Early users of the site will qualify for a 10% discount off their entire order.

The Mastergen.com website allows the user to order semen at any time of day or night and to pay using a credit or debit card. Other innovative features include the option to identify sires suitable for use on Shottle, Goldwyn or Oman daughters; lists of polled sires; red or red carrier sires; BB kappa casein sires and A2 milk transmitters.

Many of these features are unique to the Mastergen website and all have been designed to make sire selection quicker and easier for the farmer.

“Although dairy and beef producers have been able to order online through a variety of breeding companies for some time, they usually either make their selections online and receive a monthly invoice or choose their bulls online and phone their rep to order,” explains Alison Dunphy, Mastergen MD.  

“The Mastergen website is therefore the first to offer genuine e-commerce, and to allow live credit and debit card payments,” she says. “This is designed to cut administration for farmers who will have no paperwork to deal with.”

The first customer who ordered from the Mastergen site when it was launched in April was Tom Yuill who milks 250 Holsteins at West Newton Farm in Strathaven.

Mr Yuill says: “It was definitely very easy and simple – like ordering from Amazon. If you see something you like when you are in the house at night you can order it there and then, and you don’t need to think about it when you are busy during the day.”

Mrs Dunphy continued: “We are a young breeding company – only launched last year – so we are particularly delighted to be leading the way when it comes to selling genetics through e-commerce.

“We all know that farmers are very busy people and online ordering is the easiest possible way for them to acquire their genetics.

“We are also building our business on a low overhead model and this is yet another method of reducing overhead costs,” she says. “As a result, we are keeping semen prices down without sacrificing quality and we are delighted to be achieving this through the easiest ordering system in the cattle genetics industry.”

The introductory offer for first-time users of the website is available for a limited period when using the ‘Cow-chers’ issued by Mastergen. The current ‘Cow-cher’ code is ONLINE10 which takes an additional 10% off the entire order price, including from bulls already on offer.