The Standard states that all participating AI centres must demonstrate compliance to 10 major areas including collection, transport, dilution, storage and data recording, to mention just a few.

An additional part of the BPEX Standard also includes sampling semen at random from not only JSR customer farms, but also any other farms supplied by a BPEX approved AI centre. The farmer would be approached and asked to donate a sample of which a BPEX representative would collect and transport in a temperature-controlled storage box to an independent testing laboratory.

The sample would be tested on the date of expiry for motility, semen concentration and bacterial contamination and a report would be produced as seen in Table 1.

At the JSR studs, every collection is tested for motility - which should be at a minimum of 70 per cent on the day of collection, concentration – a minimum of 2.3 billion sperm per dose, and a full morphology check with results being a maximum of 30 per cent abnormalities. The BPEX standard stipulates a morphology check is required on every fourth collection. However, JSR far exceed this requirement by testing every dose supplied to customers.

Further testing takes place on a monthly basis internally in the JSR lab and the findings are reported back to BPEX for them to monitor and record the results.

Every sire line pool is double-checked after dilution by the SP100 Nucleo Counter, which measures the number of sperm per dose of semen, to ensure the semen is at the correct level of concentration. A sample of diluted semen for every batch supplied to a customer is kept at the AI centre and is checked to monitor that the motility is at 60 per cent or above on the date of expiry.