No, not an x-rated film guys ...
For those who wanted to know more from the broodmare topic in Racing...
A flushing programme for cattle is an exercise in increasing your (almost always) top pedigree animals by means of generating many more embryos from one good female than she would otherwise produce naturally.
It's almost identical to the human IVF programme..
In our case, we've pedigree Begian Blues, so we'll get a group of maybe three of four females all programmed to have matching oestrus (fertility) cycles, which are engineered by using prids to get them bulling (coming into season) at exactly the same time and by also injecting them with Folltropin, which encourages multiple ovulation.
At the same time your pedigrees are scheduled to come bulling, you have a batch of recipient females - almost always cross-bred heifers (mum likely to be a dairy black and white, dad a beef animal of some sort) also matching their oestrus cycle.
As the pedigrees come into season, they are AI'd with pedigree bull semen and a week later, along comes a special vet/technician usually employed by one of the big cattle semen companies (Genus in our case but could be Cogent or specialist vet practices such as Paragon). They literally 'flush' out the hopefully now fertilised eggs using special equipment and examine the seven day eggs microscopically to see if they have been feritilised and to assess what grade they are - A - C. A grade eggs can be frozen for implantation at a later date or implanted 'fresh' that same day. B & C grades can be implanted there and then but there's less chance of a successful pregnancy.
So, if all's gone well and your pedigree has flushed somegrade A eggs, you also should have several recipients (or surrogate mums if you will) all ready and waiting to be examined for suitability and, if the Vet, he say 'Yes', the technician then implants one of the pedigree embryos into the recip.
Still with me ? There will be an exam later....
The success rate of successful implants is about 50% and on Tuesday, we had our big day when the latest batch of recips were scanned to see how many successful pregnancies we had on board. This was our best ever result, as we've five out of eight in calf ! It's not a cheap process but if it goes well, then it's a lot cheaper than buying in or just having one calf per good cow.
Not all cows will flush eggs, of course. Out of the four we flushed in December, one cow produced 8 embryos, all grade A, one cow only produced one (which luckily has taken) and the other two came up barren. We also buy in frozen embryos from other breeders and, as in this case, as we had eight recips and didn't want to have a load of identically bred offspring, we used three frozen embryos as well.
Our first flushing attempt three years ago resulted in one out of four pregnant, the second flush last year coincided with that incredibly hot July and we only had three out of nine successes, but each time we're learning a lot more and we are fanatical about how they're housed and fed leading up to being flushed/implanted and it's making a big difference.
Next programme starts in April....
For those who wanted to know more from the broodmare topic in Racing...
A flushing programme for cattle is an exercise in increasing your (almost always) top pedigree animals by means of generating many more embryos from one good female than she would otherwise produce naturally.
It's almost identical to the human IVF programme..
In our case, we've pedigree Begian Blues, so we'll get a group of maybe three of four females all programmed to have matching oestrus (fertility) cycles, which are engineered by using prids to get them bulling (coming into season) at exactly the same time and by also injecting them with Folltropin, which encourages multiple ovulation.
At the same time your pedigrees are scheduled to come bulling, you have a batch of recipient females - almost always cross-bred heifers (mum likely to be a dairy black and white, dad a beef animal of some sort) also matching their oestrus cycle.
As the pedigrees come into season, they are AI'd with pedigree bull semen and a week later, along comes a special vet/technician usually employed by one of the big cattle semen companies (Genus in our case but could be Cogent or specialist vet practices such as Paragon). They literally 'flush' out the hopefully now fertilised eggs using special equipment and examine the seven day eggs microscopically to see if they have been feritilised and to assess what grade they are - A - C. A grade eggs can be frozen for implantation at a later date or implanted 'fresh' that same day. B & C grades can be implanted there and then but there's less chance of a successful pregnancy.
So, if all's gone well and your pedigree has flushed somegrade A eggs, you also should have several recipients (or surrogate mums if you will) all ready and waiting to be examined for suitability and, if the Vet, he say 'Yes', the technician then implants one of the pedigree embryos into the recip.
Still with me ? There will be an exam later....
The success rate of successful implants is about 50% and on Tuesday, we had our big day when the latest batch of recips were scanned to see how many successful pregnancies we had on board. This was our best ever result, as we've five out of eight in calf ! It's not a cheap process but if it goes well, then it's a lot cheaper than buying in or just having one calf per good cow.
Not all cows will flush eggs, of course. Out of the four we flushed in December, one cow produced 8 embryos, all grade A, one cow only produced one (which luckily has taken) and the other two came up barren. We also buy in frozen embryos from other breeders and, as in this case, as we had eight recips and didn't want to have a load of identically bred offspring, we used three frozen embryos as well.
Our first flushing attempt three years ago resulted in one out of four pregnant, the second flush last year coincided with that incredibly hot July and we only had three out of nine successes, but each time we're learning a lot more and we are fanatical about how they're housed and fed leading up to being flushed/implanted and it's making a big difference.
Next programme starts in April....
I also loved the late Kliban and his weird, rather sinister cats!
