Nutrition, synchronization, and management of beef embryo transfer recipients

Abstract

A commercially viable cattle embryo transfer industry was established during the early 1970s. Initially, techniques for transferring cattle embryos were exclusively surgical. However, by the early 1980s, most embryos were transferred nonsurgically. For an embryo transfer program to be effective, numerous factors need to be in place to ensure success. Nutrition, estrous cycle control, and recipient management are all responsible for the success or failure in fertility for a given herd. Utilization of body condition scores is a practical method to determine nutritional status of the recipient herd. Prepartum nutrition is critical to ensure that cows calve in adequate body condition to reinitiate postpartum estrous cycles early enough to respond to synchronization protocols. Estrus synchronization for embryo transfer after detected estrus or for fixed-time embryo transfer without estrus detection are effective methods to increase the number of calves produced by embryo transfer. In addition, resynchronization of nonpregnant recipients effectively ensures that a high percentage of recipients will return to estrus during a 72 h interval and are eligible for subsequent embryo transfers. Numerous additional factors need to be assessed to ensure that the recipient herd achieves its reproductive potential. These factors include assessing the merits of nulliparous, primiparous, or multiparous cows, ensuring that facilities allow for minimal stress, and that the herd health program is well-defined and followed. Numerous short- and long-term factors contribute to recipients conceiving to a transferred embryo, maintaining the embryo/fetus to term, delivering the calf without assistance and raising and weaning a healthy calf.