Stallion – Semen Freezing
While training your stallion, we can also carry out a test-freeze on the semen to determine how the semen survives the rigorous freeze-thaw process. We employ a number of different freezing methods that can be trialed to optimize the quality of your stallion’s frozen-thawed semen. Matamata Veterinary Services freezes semen at a concentration of 400 million sperm per ml, thus ensuring that more than 300 million motile sperm are provided in each insemination dose of 6 – 8 straws (depending on post thaw motility). Due to the reduced fertility of frozen thawed semen, we recommend that you allow 3 doses of semen per mare that you are freezing, for example if you require semen for 10 mares, we recommend that 30 doses (or 240 straws) are frozen. Of course, if the mare conceives on the first cycle using frozen semen you have 2 doses remaining for use in other mares. The number of doses that we are able to freeze per ejaculate varies greatly between stallions, but we are usually able to freeze 15 – 40 straws per ejaculate depending on its volume and concentration. We aim to collect stallions for freezing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to optimize the amount of semen collected and to keep semen collection fees down.
Motility is one of many parameters available for assessing semen quality; however motility does not necessarily correlate to fertility, and because of this we highly recommend that a fertility test be carried out on frozen semen prior to the semen being sold commercially.
If you are planning on “walking in” your stallion to our centre to be collected for mares during the breeding season (and don’t require the semen to meet export standards), we are able to freeze semen as we go. This makes the process more economical for you, as the collection charges are paid for by the mare owner, leaving you with only the per straw freeze price. When collecting for a chilled semen shipment, we generally only need 5-10ml of semen, leaving the remainder of the ejaculate to be frozen. We would still recommend that you have a test freeze carried out on your stallion during the training procedure if you choose to accumulate frozen semen this way.
