We just made a quick down-and-back trip to North Carolina to check on the embryo cows we are raising there.  Clearly they’re thriving on the eastern Carolina grass. And is it just my imagination or are the Angus standing back as this princess crosses the pasture.  She’s a line-bred Rotokawa 688 daughter, one of 10 similar calves that we are now raising in our own line-breeding experiment.  So far, so good.  In a little over a year we’ll have to decide whether to continue concentrating the genetics in these animals or quit while we’re ahead.

Veterinary technician Jane Narrimore begins readying Thistle Hill cows for the transplant of fertilized eggs from England.  We’ve been working with two American partners and a half dozen British breeders to find the purest Devon genetics available…mate those cows and bulls…freeze the embryos and bring them to the United States. Some of those embryos will be implanted here in Virginia; the remainder in South Carolina.  The first step is to synchronize our cows cycling so that the implant occurs precisely at the time that particular embryo was flushed from the English cow: at the age of 8 days! Watching Jane is Jerry Hall, who came over from Delaplane to help…