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Originally Posted by bookworm_020
So the lamb is going to be mutton?:hmm: Is it realy cheaper to do it this wasy compared to the old fashioned methods?
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The general plan of a breeder is to determine what are, say, the top 1% of his breeding stock. Then, clone only those top 1% animals, and use the clones to mate and produce normal (usually via artificial insemination) sexually reporduced offspring. Those offspring are the ones that would be raised and sold at market for slaughter.
So, regardless of your feelings on clones, you would still be buying meat made "the old fashioned way".
The breeder would replace his clones from frozen embryo's taken from the original 1%. In order to avoid inbreeding depression, he would periodically outbreed some animals with a different male, and then again reselect the best breeders from that to replenish his clone stock.
The cost saving is foreseen to be in the ability to select only the very best breeders, and then focus exclusively on them via cloning. It removes a lot of the money lost due to the variable breeding success in a variable herd.
Actually, as a business model, it still remains to be proven effective. And there will be a need for breeders to be careful not to deplete whole breeds or strains of animals of too much genetic variation (although most commercial farm animals are already highly inbred, deliberately so, by selective breeding). But they also keep things genetically mixed up somewhat by normal sexual reproduction (and its inherent recombination) of the market stock, and periodically re-selecting the breeders for cloning from that.