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L to R Andrew Dennison, Mick Gould and Adam Watson.


Mick Gould: I do absolutely nothing different with donors or recipients, they all stay in their management groups. Although, I do hope that cows and heifers are on good management day to day. Recipient heifers get silage, sugar beet and minerals Adam Watson: Flushing is not something that you can suddenly decide to do next week, it takes planning. Unfortunately, we’ve found this out the hard way. Preparation for us begins about six weeks before the flush date with a fertility bolus for both donor and recipi- ents, as well as a course of minerals for the donor. From here the donor and recipi- ents need to be on a settled diet. After flushing/implanting we try to keep our recipients on the same diet for another six weeks, we feed them a TMR with 2kg of straw, 1kg of heifer blend, a fertility mineral and preferably harder second cut silage. Recipient management is as important as donor management and more so after the flush has taken place. Cows are creatures of habit and any changes in diet, batching, housing etc can throw them off and affect fertility. Separating donors and recipients is not something we practice due to constraints on space, but I know some herds that do and it can have a favourable impact on both the flush and recipient conception.


Have you found there is a stage of lactation that works best? Andrew Dennison: We flush cows fresh, mid lactation and stale with no difference in success rate, but our preference would be to flush mid-lactation. Mick Gould: I look at each cow individually, a cow that milks hard and loses flesh is best to be left until 200 days in milk. However, cows that look after themselves and maintain body condition can be flushed earlier in the lactation. You need to know your cows and treat them all individually. Adam Watson: When flushing a milker there is no absolute rule, every cow is different. I would avoid flushing a cow early in her lactation if she’s milking really hard. At this stage she tends to be losing weight and using most of her energy for production, rather than thinking about cycling. Any heat she does have is likely


to be a poor one. I tend to find that a cow with a long flat lactation curve flushes better than a cow with a massive production peak. The best thing to do is to get your fertility vet or your flush vet to handle the donor and get his opinion if the animal is ready, or indeed suit- able to flush. Give them as much information as you can about how the cow is doing, her production, if you’ve seen her cycling, then you can make an informed decision together. Of course, you are often under time constraints depending on when the donor calves as you may want to get her back in-calf before grazing season or get her flushed before a show, so sometimes you have to take a chance with her.


What do you think is key to having a successful flush? Andrew Dennison: A lot of luck is required for everything to come together at the right time. Mick Gould: Treating each cow individually, but some cow fami- lies flush better than others and there won’t be anything that will change that. Adam Watson: Flushing isn’t an exact science and results vary without reason. You can prepare the same way for two flushes and get very different results. We recently flushed a maiden heifer for a contract and got four eggs on the first go and 12 on the second without doing anything differently. All you can do is give the cow or heifer the best chance to make eggs, after that it’s up to her. After a bad flush I always ask myself if I made any mistakes or was there anything I could have done differently to improve how it went. If there wasn’t you just have to put it down to bad luck and move on.


Can you give any experiences/lessons learned that would help someone get started? Andrew Dennison: Make sure you have a marketable product at the end. If you are lucky it is a good way to get in to new families without major expense. Don’t get too down on the bad days or too complacent on the good ones – it all averages out. Make sure the mating is correct as a successful flush can result in many offspring. Mick Gould: Plan your flushing carefully and treat each donor as an individual. Success averages out, don’t get down heartened by poor flushes. Adam Watson: Your first flush is seldom a marker for how things are going to go. Chance plays a big part in flushing and so you can be lucky or unlucky. Don’t be put off when it goes badly, likewise if it goes well don’t presume you’ll be as lucky the next time. In the long run things tend to even themselves out. Since the introduction of fertility data, we have found that the animals that flush the best are bred from sires with high fertility figures, the same can be said for recipients holding embryos. If you’re thinking of flushing a female I think it’s useful to genomically test her first. This can take a few months, so you need to allow time for the results to come through, but this will give you an indication of her health traits and importantly give you a fertility score for her. If she comes back a big minus you need to think carefully about whether it’s worth flush- ing her in the first place. The results will also help when selecting what sire to flush her to. This is particularly useful when flushing a maiden heifer. Another useful tip is to mix your bulls when flush- ing. A few years ago we were finding we were getting unfertilised embryos in our flushes. We started to use three different sires in the flush and haven’t had an unfertilised embryo since.


THE JOURNAL AUGUST 2015 59


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