**1. Introduction**

Demand for livestock products are increasing throughout the world, due to the shifting of con‐ sumption patterns toward livestock products and increase in human population. For example, meat and dairy consumption over the last decade increased at a rate of 3–5% annually in Asian countries [1]. To fulfill the increasing demand for animal products, there is a need to increase animal production by improved reproductive technologies. One of the reproductive

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

technologies that have tremendously contributed to the genetic improvement and develop‐ ment of animal production especially, in the dairy cattle industry is artificial insemination (AI).

AI is a process of depositing sperm manually into a female reproductive tract (usually, uterus, or cervix) for the purpose of achieving viable pregnancy through *in vivo* fertilization using a method other than natural mating. The first documented history of successful use of AI back‐ dates to 1780 by L. Spallanzani who experimented in a bitch that subsequently gave birth to three pups. Later in about 1900, research on AI continued in farm animals and subsequently E.I. Ivanoff who initially studied in horses became the first to successfully inseminate cattle and sheep [2]. Since then, AI has undergone tremendous advances in techniques and applica‐ tions in a wide variety of species of animals and human.

AI provides a lot of advantages over natural breeding. It maximizes the lifespan reproductive potential of a given male as a single semen ejaculate can be diluted and used to inseminate sev‐ eral females. Other prominent advantages of using AI in farm animals include improvement of genetics through more accurate evaluation of breeder males and greater use of superior germplasm, control of sexually transmitted diseases, improved record keeping, and it avoids the cost and necessity of keeping breeder males in the farm. Although the need to detect females on estrus is one of the prominent disadvantages of AI considered, with the develop‐ ment and advances in other assisted reproductive techniques (ART) such as estrus synchro‐ nization and timed AI as well as heat detection aids, this disadvantage of AI is dwindling.

AI can be performed using either fresh or cryopreserved (frozen‐thawed) semen. Although the use of fresh semen in AI results in a higher success rate than using cryopreserved semen, it requires keeping males for semen collection in nearby place and immediate shipment of the semen for insemination; otherwise, the semen quality will quickly deteriorate. However,

**Figure 1.** Proper placement of insemination gun to deposit semen in the body of the uterus [61].

cryopreservation provides the opportunity to store the semen for a longer period of time as well as an easy global shipment of superior germplasm to be used for AI. According to Turner [3], it has been documented that AI was estimated to be used on over 110 million breeding cattle (including buffaloes) globally by the turn of the twenty‐first century, with the largest number of AIs (50 million) being carried out in the Far East (mainly China, India and Pakistan). There were 1600 cattle semen banks globally and the cattle industry produced over 260 million doses of bull semen from a relatively small number of 41,000 bulls at 648 collection centers world‐ wide. There was an international trade in bull semen (most of it Holstein), with over 19 mil‐ lion doses recorded as exported globally. The proportion of all cattle inseminations that were carried out by AI rather than by natural mating accounted for about 61% in Europe and about 25% in North America and the Far East. These reflect the significant contribution of semen cryo‐ preservation to the global application of AI in cattle for genetic merit as well as the impact of the quality of postcryopreserved semen that could have on the successful outcome of AI (**Figure 1**).
