How soon can you flush a cow after calving?

• Donor cows of beef breeds must be at least 60 days post-partum before the program starts or 70-100 days into lactation for dairy cows.
• Cows with a history of calving problems or abortions need to be checked and ultrasound tested to dismiss the possibility of uterine infections and to determine the best time for flushing.

Can you flush heifers?

• Yes, but a few things need to be considered before flushing heifers:
  • In general heifers are more unpredictable and produce fewer embryos than mature cows.  Depending on the breed, you may get 3-4 embryos from a heifer compared to 6-7 embryos from a mature cow, this can also be due, in part, to the smaller dosages of super stimulatory drugs used when setting up heifers.
  • Heifers cannot be flushed many times, if they are kept open for too long they usually become overly fat making it more difficult to get them in calf later.
  • Despite their good showing careers, beef heifers have not proven breeding ability. On the other hand, for dairy breeds there is not much guess work to do with all the breeding values and production data that producers have available on hand.
  • Heifers are more sensitive to the super stimulatory drugs; although, conservative dosages of FSH are used in heifers, there is always a risk of over stimulation and unsuccessful flushing, on rare occasions, affecting the reproductive functionality in these animals.

• There are some advantages to using cows as recipients, most of the time we know the reproductive performance and ability to milk in order to raise an ET calf.  Cows are better suited when transferring embryos of breeds with relatively large calves or embryos with an estimated high EPD’s for birth weight.
• Cows that have been used successfully as a recipients tend to repeat this in the following year, we encourage retaining and re-using these kinds of animals.

• NO, plan ahead for your vaccination program. You should NEVER vaccinate recipients within 30 days of the date they will receive an embryo. Caution should be taken when vaccinating calves nursing recipients and/or recipients before and after an embryo has been implanted, particularly with modified live vaccines for VBD and IBR.
• Avoid pour-on medications 2 to 3 weeks before the implanting date, get the animals tagged before the implant day, this speeds up the work and recipients are under lower stress.

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