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Faunsdale, AL | On the one cow you buy..........The average transferrable embryos per flush used to be around 6 or 7 across the industry. Of course that includes all breeds, so with beef cattle, you could probably do better than that average, dairy, maybe a little worse. HOWEVER... that average is made up of a lot of 0's, and a spectrum of 1's, 2's etc on up to a very few HOMERUN flushes. I think the record flush I ever participated in was 42 total with something like 35 being good quality. This was a Polled Hereford cow with a history of huge flushes all supervised by the same very experienced veterinarian. Point of the story is to illustrate what your results and costs per calf would be if your cow kept rolling snake eyes vs if you hit the jackpot! This is not to dissuade you from going this route, just to point out the possibilities.
Then you get into whether you have the management skills and facilities to get this done on your own farm or would need to just send the donor(s) to a facility where the flushes and treansfers would be done and you would pay for and receive pregnant recipients after some specified point during pregnancy. Of the two, it would certainly be cheaper if you could use your own cattle herd and farm for this process, but this usually compromises the success of the ET program to some degree. The ET center has only one objective, get as many recipeints pregnant or embryo's frozen as possible. They do not worry about economical beef production or milk production while doing this. Most farms are unlikely to be able to invest the human, land or cow "capital" in the project that the ET center will. Of course this comes at a cost to be balanced against the lesser cost of doing the work on farm.
Finally, you need to find someone to do the ET work that can get it done successfully and economically.
It's possible that you would be better off to purchase embryos collected and frozen by reputable organizations and have them implanted in your herd or purchase recipients carrying pregnancies (of the desired sex even). | |
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Embryo Transfer
