west coaster and ginger steps:
I'm sure you won't find any lab offering to test the a1-a2 status of a cow for $1. The main tester in NZ is GenomNZ, part of AgResearch. It doesn't advertise the cost of its A1-A2 tests, but I've seen quite a lot of net traffic mentioning costs of around $20 per cow, including for offshore cows. In the US, the University of California at Davis does it for about $25. That comes to quite a high cost to test a full herd, but if a farmer has got good breeding records of his cows he would be able to rule out quite a few of his stock without testing, based on details of its parents. Suppliers of bull semen provide info about its A1-A2 status. It's possible that Synlait helps its suppliers with the cost of testing - I just wouldn't know.
Most of NZ's top breeding bulls now are pure A2 because they're in the most demand. That's partly because A2 cows have a reputation for good milk output, and partly because smart farmers are reading the writing on the wall, that A2 is the way to go even though Fonterra is still refusing to endorse that view. Read Keith Woodford's blog articles on this, including the most recent at
http://www.interest.co.nz/rural-news...ite-nz-science
which will be making a lot of farmers switch to A2 if they haven't already. In addition to the cost of testing his cows, there are also other costs if a farmer wants to convert his herd quickly to all-A2. For example, he needs to dispose of cows or calves that are not A2A2 and replace them with ones that are.