Transgenic procedures are among the most powerful tools for studying biology. However, use of transgenic techniques for studying farm animal species has been rather limited; many of these experiments might best be described as exploratory or anecdotal. This is due partly to the low success rates and huge expense of such work, partly to inbred lines and long generation intervals, and partly to not testing appropriate hypotheses. For reasons of expense, concerns for safety, and inadequate understanding of basic biology, uses of transgenes in production animal agriculture are likely to be minimal for many years to come. However, a major use will be to produce valuable pharmaceuticals; use of animal tissues and organs for transplantation to people will not be far behind. These nonagricultural applications of transgenic farm animals will provide a windfall of information that will make applications of this technology to production agriculture more feasible, as will accumulation of information from the human genome project and similar endeavors. The ability to modify the genome of fetal fibroblasts in vitro and transplant these nuclei into oocytes to produce animals of the modified genotype will greatly increase the power of transgenic approaches in agricultural animals. Appropriately framed hypotheses plus newer transgenic approaches will provide important information that will be useful for both transgenic and nontransgenic applications to animal agriculture. A high priority is to continue the expeditious sharing of information that has made agricultural research so useful.