NATCHEZ — Fertility clinics may be a big business for those hoping to become parents-to-be, but it’s also a growing sub-industry in agriculture.

Natchez veterinarian Thomas Borum, whose fertility work is mostly with transferring cattle embryos, said the processes used have made some big advances, including going from surgical to non-surgical means.

With cattle, Borum begins with a hormonal treatment to make the cow ovulate 20 to 50 eggs, Borum said.

This process is known as super-ovulation, he said.

Once the cow ovulates, she is artificially inseminated, Borum said.

Then it is only a matter of waiting.

Seven days later — by the time the then-fertilized embryos have made their way into the uterus — the veterinarian inserts a catheter into the cow’s uterus and flushes it with special solutions, Borum said.

The solutions are then passed through a filter, and the filter is washed into a petri dish, which is placed under a microscope, he said.

“You just look for the embryos,” he said. “There could be 20 or 50, and there could be none.”

Once the embryos are identified, they are graded.

Only grade one and two embryos are frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen for transport, Borum said.

“We only ship those grades because we want to make sure the customers get the product they’re paying for,” he said.

The embryo transfer game is a worldwide market, Borum said.

One of Borum’s embryo transfer jobs began with collecting embryos in Texas.

The embryos were then shipped to Australia, where they were implanted into surrogate mothers, he said.

Once the offspring were born and raised to a certain point, they were shipped to Japan where they were sold, he said.

Agricultural genetic work doesn’t stop with cattle, Borum said.

Work is being done right now with swine to engineer them to produce as many offspring as possible that carry the desired genotype — or genetic traits — wanted, he said.

“It’s one thing to have a cow — which would usually only have one calf a year — produce multiple offspring, but it’s really interesting to see people using genetics (experimentation) in animals that normally produce whole litters and producing high quality animals,” he said.