Wow – what a successful flush today
Sep 10 2010
I am paranoid about developing very good capital stock for my Lake Farm Beef program. I want to understand the genetics not only on the bull side, but also on the cow side (where 50% of the genetics come from). I want to be proud of my cows, as much as any bull I put over them.
So the next few years will be spent on breeding replacement stock to our current Simmental cows. I want to end up with a herd that comprises the following females to crossbreed with Piedmontese:
** Pure Angus
** Angus/Hereford (Accentuating hybrid vigour)
** Angus/Hereford/Fresian (Looking to see how F2 females compare with F1 animals – ie Angus/Hereford)
** Pure Piedmontese (we will AI them with other breeds to see how differepital stocknt crossbred calves grow)
We already have some high pedigree Angus heifers.
We have a good herd of pure Piedmontese.
The next step, therefore, is to breed some good Angus/Hereford animals. With this in mind, we decided to flush a nice Hereford cow we own, with good Angus Genetics. We have used an Angus bull “Yorkshire Te Mania”. He rates very highly for marbling, and we have some Piedmontese/Angus calves from this bull. They are spectacular!
What a great surprise! We flushed the Hereford girl this morning, and ended up with 40 fertilized embryos from the one flush. This is an unbelievable figure. The ET technician has never flushed more that 30 fertile embryos from one flush before.
We actually flushed 47 embryos, with 7 with suspect quality – not good enough to freeze. They need to be implanted fresh. We only had two recipients ready to implant embryos into, so we used two of these seven embryos, and froze the 40.
Just so you don’t believe the numbers – here is a photo of the 40 embryos, before we froze them.
Wow!