---

Ever since male demancipation in 2039, stud farms have been faced with the eternal problem of what to do with their elderly stock of men once they go beyond their useful studding period.

Calls for humane culling have always met with cries of horror from the liberals and pressure groups, and for most stud farms, caring for elderly stock represents one of the overheads they just have to live with.

The problem has been exacerbated in recent years, as more women stick to normal sex, turning their backs upon what is increasingly regarded as bestial-like intercourse with males. The high profitability of stud farms in the early days led to a large number of entrants into the market, but as trade has fallen, over-supply has brought down the price of even the most highly-regarded studs.

"Twenty years ago, there was a market for men aged under 50 from a wide age-range of women," said leading stud farmer Bea Temhard. "Today, a man has to be incredibly fit to continue drawing customers when he's approaching 30. Genetic engineering has improved the early development and size of male genitals beyond comparison, but the downside is many men quite literally do not have the stamina to keep it up once they've passed the age of 25. Even our 110 year-old clientele often demand 25 year olds, and younger clients simply would not consider any stud over 20 to be acceptable.

"We took the decision to add an artificial womb to our studs who'd passed their sell-by date," Bea continued. "Whilst adding the womb itself was fairly straightforward, the trick was in persuading the stud's body to accept it as such, and start behaving properly when a foetus was introduced. Our research was very costly, and initial pregnancies had a high fatality rate, but we've brought that right down to less than 10%. We normally do the operation when the stud is aged about 26, and most studs can produce one baby a year from then on.

"Few women nowadays want to go through the pain, risk, discomfort and inconvenience of an own pregnancy, and with the recent increase in issue of Government Reproduction Licenses, many women are turning to us to grow their babies for them. A woman can choose to produce a clone of herself using just her own genes for the baby, she can mix her own genes with those of any number of partners, and a few women even choose the old-fashioned way of using a stud's sperm to fertilise the egg. Clearly, in the latter case, we ensure that no traces of the stud's undesirable genes are present in the baby.

"When we initially started the project, we knew that supplying natural breast milk would be important for the ongoing health of the new baby, and we set up a milking parlour based upon best practice with dairy cattle. In fact one of the minor problems we had in the early days was in getting the stud's breasts to produce milk. But once we'd ironed that out, the system worked fantastically well, so that parents continued to feed breast milk to their children well after they'd stopped being babies.

"It wasn't long before other customers caught onto the healthy and nutritious diet that breast milk provided, and we started to sell it through health stores. Now, you can buy it as plain milk, flavoured milk, several types of cheese, or a wide variety of yoghurts. Quite simply, we cannot keep up with demand. We're using all the knowledge gained from the dairy business to increase yield, and most of our stud cows now have breasts the size of large pumpkins. It's an amusing thought that fifty years ago - and it shows the depravity of man at that time - many men would have been dreaming of breasts that size - now they've got them! With the reducing profitability of studding for its own sake, we're intending to transfer most of our stock to milk yield, combined with baby growth as needed.

"It's interesting that when we first started this project, we saw the increased fatality rate through pregnancy-related illnesses as a benefit, helping us to clear unwanted stock which we couldn't lawfully cull. You probably know that since responsibility for male health was passed to the Ministry of Agriculture shortly after demancipation, male life expectancy has gradually decreased to around 60 years, whereas a woman's currently stands at 115 years. But with the growth in our milk business, we now can't afford to lose stock and for the first time ever, we are campaigning for MinAg to increase funding into male illnesses, obviously including pregnancy-related problems. In the meantime, we are taking our best milkers off pregnancy duty in order to prolong their lives."

An FT survey of stud farms in the South East revealed that 15% are already in the stud Cash Cow business, whilst another 75% were seriously considering it. Whatever your thoughts about using these beasts for sex, there's no doubt they produce extremely tasty milk. And if you're that way inclined, The Sun newspaper now regularly features pictures of huge-breasted studs on Page 3.