Clone farming has arrived

The black and white calf may look unremarkable.

But Dundee Paradise is evidence that clone farming - designed to deliver supersize cows producing an astonishing 70 pints of milk a day - has arrived in Britain.

Her birth last month exposed glaring gaps in the Government's system for policing livestock farming.

It raises the prospect of milk and meat from the offspring of clones reaching the shops without proper safety checks.

Though not a clone herself, Dundee Paradise is the daughter of a clone. Her mother was created in the U.S. using cells from the ear of a champion dairy Holstein.

Dundee Paradise herself began life in an IVF lab. She was flown to the UK in a batch of five frozen embryos, implanted in a surrogate mother and successfully delivered at a Midlands farm on December 2.

Both the food and farming ministry Defra and the Food Standards Agency admitted last night that they had known nothing about the calf's birth, or even the arrival of the batch of embryos last year.