Sexed embryos Uruguay

[regolith]

Lorenzo, could you clear up that point for us please...

Did you have the identification and history of your donor cows?
It's true that some very good cows get culled for reasons that don't indicate poorer genetics or infertility. But by and large, slaughter cows go for a reason :-(

 

[Brandonm22]

Lorenzo, could you clear up that point for us please...

Did you have the identification and history of your donor cows?
It's true that some very good cows get culled for reasons that don't indicate poorer genetics or infertility. But by and large, slaughter cows go for a reason :-(

I am not quite certain what Lorenzo's thinking about this is; but all large commercial dairies will burn up the cows eventually. IF you could follow the cows with the highest milk production, the best reproductive history, and the better than average longevity then preserve those genetics on the kill floor you could make rapid selection progress.

 

[Brandonm22]

Good question I had wondered about that myself. I have also read in an AB magazine that using sexed semen for ET work is not recommended & that the sexed semen should only be used on heifers.

That is true because the sexed semen is not as viable (due to the sexing process) as the unsexed semen and Lorenzo's ~"mediocre" conception rate is largely due to using sexed semen; but in this game a bull calf has no value whatsoever. He doesn't want a live bull calf and would rather the recip come up open where he can use her again than lose a year on half his recips carrying calves he can't market.

 

[Jeanne - Simme Valley]

Congrats Lorenzo - what a feat! great pics.
As L said, it takes at least 4 straws of sexed semen to flush a cow. No, it is not recommended to use sexed semen for flushing.
Lorenzo, are you saying you can take 1 straw of sexed semen & inseminate 100 eggs?? That's awesome. Do you ultrasound preg check & sex the embryo pregnancy & abort any males?
Enjoy your trip?
By the way folks, he explained his whole process of IVF in a previous thread.

 

[KMacGinley]

Where did Lorenzo say they were infertile cows?

I did a bit of reading on ET many, many years ago and at that stage it was routine to use abbatoir ovaries for practice - I have no idea how they actually extracted usable eggs, since usually they mature individually during the estrus cycle. There was also a practice of harvesting eggs from baby heifers via laparoscopy, which I would presume were also immature (the calves being pre-pubertal) - the aim being to reduce the generation interval and hence maximise genetic gain.

Those are beautiful heifers Lorenzo - congrats. I wonder if they'll mostly turn black when they grow up...

He didn't, someone else, being critical did. I don't think that they care what the background is of the holstein donors, they are producing crossbreds for petes sake, on a large scale to get a big grassfed dairy up and running. They need bodies. Not high quality pedigreed cows, that is why they are crossing the jersey to the holstein to make a more efficient dairy animal on grass.

 

[Loch Valley Fold]

To get 900 calves using sexed semen for the embryos I'm impressed Well done

"They need bodies. Not high quality pedigreed cows, that is why they are crossing the jersey to the holstein to make a more efficient dairy animal on grass.

Hybrid vigour & crossing Jersey with Holstein you get the best of both breeds packed into 1 animal

 

[regolith]

This one? viewtopic.php?f=5&t=52843&hilit=ivf

Interesting stuff - tells me Lorenzo knows a bit about good breeding, don't know about the companies he's possibly taking advice from... (I'd hazard a guess it's the same one where I buy my semen).

Crossbred cows are top quality - no, they can't be pedigreed at this stage, but you do get a medium-size frame with high fat and protein percentages, good feet, hybrid vigour...
And they come in black.

 

[regolith]

IF you could follow the cows with the highest milk production, the best reproductive history, and the better than average longevity then preserve those genetics on the kill floor you could make rapid selection progress.

All of that information - plus whatever health treatments I've entered into the database - is held by that same breeding company (LIC) for all of my cows. It's not a mandatory thing, but many NZ dairy cows have their entire ancestry (presuming they've all been identified correctly at birth and no mixed-up straws), production and reproduction information at the fingertips of the company who test and supply most of the AI bulls.
So picking the best is an easy matter. We don't always agree on which cows are the best though...

 

[brandonm_13]

I just can't comprehend why a dairy bull calf is only worth shooting at birth. Seems to me there is a bigger problem than trying to get all females. At the very least, it should be roth the meat it provides, and there is a need for new dairy bulls. How do you know that you are not killing a superior animal?

 

[Brandonm22]

I just can't comprehend why a dairy bull calf is only worth shooting at birth. Seems to me there is a bigger problem than trying to get all females. At the very least, it should be roth the meat it provides, and there is a need for new dairy bulls. How do you know that you are not killing a superior animal?

First of all, it is a crossbred calf so we know he won't fit into the breeding program suggested here of crossing two pure breeds to get a commercial crossbreed female. Secondly there are probably a 1000 dairy cows to each AI dairy bull so there is no shortage of dairy bulls for breeding. Third this is Uruguay, where historically beef prices are LOWER than in the rest of the world. It is highly unlikely that you can sell that day old dairy calf for what it cost to keep that recipient cow in good flesh for a year because the cost of growing out dairy calf is probably more than he will be worth when grown out. At our chicken hatcheries just about every leghorn (a laying chicken breed) rooster is killed upon hatching because you can't economically grow out longhorn rooster. Like a dairy bull.....not enough meat. Lorenzo used sexed semen and accepted a lower conception rate so he would not have to kill or give away a bunch of useless bull calves and to cut the cost of his project almost in half.

 

[brandonm_13]

Well, my point is that while there are plenty dairy bulls, you can be killing a superior animal. I understand that it is crossbred, but there are breeds today that started out as "good crossbreeds". Even so, meat it worth something, even if it is worth less there than here. And I have raised a few dairy steers/bull calves. They produce enough meat to keep them alive. I do applaud trying to find a way to avoid killing calves, but the flaw is that there is value in what is being killed. While this may avoid the problem, avoiding a problem is never as good as fixing it.

It's the same as the leghorn breed, we've given up so much body size for egg production that spent hens and roosters are worthless. The two ways I would solve that problem would be to breed the bird for more meat while sacrificing some of the egg potential. I would also choose to incubate eggs that are more prone to being hens (smaller and rounder as opposed to larger and more pointed.) The Rhode Island Red breed is a good example of that, although they are now being bred to be more like the Leghorn, but with a brown-shelled egg. This fools the consumers into thinking they are getting "farm" eggs, when they are only getting a brown-shelled egg, with the same nutritional factors as a leghorn egg.

 

[Brandonm22]

This is still economics. Lorenzo wants ~800++ dairy heifers. Factoring in that he will still get some bulls with the sexed semen, some of the heifers will die, some of the heifers won't be keeper quality he has 900 pregnant recipients. To get the same results without sexing the semen, he would need ~1700 recipients. I honestly do not know enough about Uruguay economics to even guess about a budget there; but if this were the U.S. and your cost of keeping a recip for a year is ~$500. Dairy heifers sell for $1000++. You make $500 off every heifer. Newborn dairy bulls sell (if at all) for ~$100. You lose $400 off every bull born. Weaned 500 lb dairy steers sell for ~80 cent a lb ($400) minus the cost of raising him to that age. You probably still lose $250 or more. 800 more bulls being born would cost this project $200,000 to $320,000. It is really hard playing with the numbers to make the case that Lorenzo has not saved his customers a big chunk of money by implanting mostly heifer embryos.

 

[brandonm_13]

Well, first off, I"m not knocking Lorenzo. I hope no one thinks that. I applaud what he's doing.

But what I'm saying is that Dairy cows are supposed to produce milk. If they are profitable doing that, then even a $100 bottle bull calf adds to the profit of the milk, just not as much as the heifer calf would. Plus, if you get too many heifer calves in a market, the price drops, so then bull and heifer calves are worthless. By having fewer heifer calves, you keep the price per calf up into the profitable range.

The price for keeping dairy heifers is relative. I don't have any, but my father-in-law raises some and I know his costs are much less than $500 per year. I have however raised bottle bull calves, and my profit margin has averaged right at $100 per calf. Taking into account extra expenses that I have not had but others might( I already took into account the average death loss.), you can still make a profit over $50 per calf I would think.

(And like you, I'm speaking U.S. economics. Don't know anything about Uruguay.)

 

[Brandonm22]

The costs to keep a brood cow is highly variable from ranch to ranch. $500 a cow is a number that is being thrown around a lot recently; but another way to figure that is what would a beef calf be worth if you just bred the recip to a good beef bull? A ~550 lb calf at ~$91 cents a lb is about $500, so whatever it actually costs you to raise a calf, you need to get more than $500 to be worth the hassle and the lowered conception rate. The recips are Herefords in Lorenzo's scenario. They don't have any milk income. They and Lorenzo are just being used to produce this new dairy herd.

 

[Lorenzo]

Well, I have been following everyone's comments. I was going to leave it like that, the thing is, honestly, I am little bit afraid of not giving a good answer for evryone. English is not my language so i don't understood MANY of the comments, sometimes it was even difficult to understand if someone was beating me or not :lol:

All I can say is that KMacGinley and Brandonm22 have understood perfectly what I was doing. You can't understand this business or this given business, to be more specific, without knowing what was hapening in those days here in my country.

Imagen this scenario, suddenly producing milk was a GREAT business more than ever in our country. But not only here, also in our giant neighbour Brazil. So suddenly everyone wants dairy femals, Brazil started to import lots of animals alive for their dairy farms, everyone went crazy, prices went up quickly, also a very big international dairy company started to buy every single dairy cow around, as KMacginley said, there was a big demand for grassy conditions cross breed cows to start running several high scale dairy farms.

At the same time, Uruguay has LOTS of herefords (7 million heads), so you can find very cheap receips for giving birth dairy cows which there were not many around. So we become in a kind of females factory that gives this big company the possibility of assure (sp?) themselves a huge amount of females for their dairy farms to be used in a couple of years.

It was a (how to say it in english...) when many things putt together and something make sense, but in a specific moment not for allways, do you understand what i am trying to say ???

At the end of the day was a LOT of work that gaves us a LOT of expertise, we learnt a LOT. Finally we will not be doing too much money for the time and effort we put, but not everything is measured in money, it was something that we don't know if we will be able to achieve it, as i said, there was not many similar experiences in the world of producing this huge amount of femals at the same time in a same farm. So we believe that anyway is was worthwile.

Today is not more a good business, what was a good thing one year ago, today is completely impossible, numbers will not close. The prices of milk drop 50% in a couple of months and the dairy cows prices also went down.

There were good and not so good cows from where we took the oocytes, but in general we have very good dairy genetics. Many cows were sent to slaughter houses because of problems in their udders (sp?) or other things that nothing has to do with good productivity.

Indeed we were producing 100 embryos per sexed straw. Every day we went to the slaughter house we brought a lot of ovaries (sp?) from them we aspirated the oocytes, we madurate them during 24 hours before inseminating them.

Well I got tired of writing in english, is not easy to me.

What i don't understood is why some people beat me :???:

If anyone there said this was not really a good test, pushing the limits of producing high volume females, and that the pregnacies rate were not good using sexed embryos, well, let me tell you that they don't know what they are talking about or my english is much worse than what I think it is and nobody understood a word of what I am saying :lol:

Hope this very basic explanation helps you to understand a little bit more...

Thanks

L

 

[Brandonm22]

If anyone there said this was not really a good test, pushing the limits of producing high volume females, and that the pregnacies rate were not good using sexed embryos, well, let me tell you that they don't know what they are talking about

I am not a reproductive scientist, but I do try to read a lot. Today we got our latest issue of the 'Alabama Cattleman's Magazine'. On the back cover, Southern Cattle Company in Florida announced that they and their embryologists were starting an embryology center and they bragged that their pregnancy rate was 62%. A very good success rate. That is for conventional embryo transfer flushing highly well cared for donor cows and regular semen. Genex recommends against using sexed semen in embryo transfer because of the failure rate due to the damage done to the semen during the sexing process. Given that your donors were worn out dairy cows (literally on the kill floor) and that you were using their ovaries AND sexed semen a 40% pregnancy rate seems really strong to me.

 

[Lorenzo]

Yes, and REMEMBER we are talking about IVF embryos, In Vitro Fertilization embryos.
60% of pregnacy with flushed embryos is inside what is considered good. The IVF embryos are not so strong as the flushed embryos (MOET).

Well, it's 6:45 am here so I must leave, I am going to see if my cows are smiling after the last rains :cowboy:

Good luck everyone.

L

 

[regolith]

That's fascinating, Lorenzo.

Our prices have dropped too, milk and cows. Must be worldwide. 50% though? We've dropped nearly 30% and that's bad enough.
I'd noticed Brazil was a new and increasing exporter of dairy products.