Once more, from the beginning…

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 us move 27 cows through the chute.  Suffering the effects of the flu, we couldn’t have done it without Jerry and his foreman.

There’ll be one more trip through the chute….a hormone injection to fine tune the synchronization and then the delicate, actual implant on January 26th.  It will be about a month after that before we know whether the process worked.  Success rate tends to be about 50%.

This all began almost two years ago in the first of our several trips to Devon, identifying the candidate cows and bulls on their pastures.  They were transported to clinics near Penzance and Oxford for the fertility work; the frozen embryos were air-freighted to Chicago and then trans-shipped via a clinic in Ames, Iowa to Thistle Hill Farm.

I guess we’re a cog in what is called “globalization”.  It’s a complicated project with lots of frustration along the way but worth it, we think, to preserve the original and pure English Devon, which is being tainted by commercial pressures and European Union demands for cross-breeding.  A totally pure Devon is a rare treasure.

Incidentally, the first batch of embryos were implanted a year ago in cows we leased from a farmer in North Carolina.  Nine of those calves are now “on the ground” and we’ll see them for the first time later this week.  Prepare to be flooded with our new “baby pictures”.