Let’s Talk Recips
Welcome to the Barnett Beef Pregnancy Sale December 2nd, which is a Thursday. What I want to tell you about today is the recips.
As you know, we've got 40 elite, sexed embryo pregnancies. And I just want to give you some detail and unpack that a little bit.
How we go about doing this is an IVF program. We synchronize, our recipients, after we have collected a very large number of embryos. Got them in the freezer, got them all ready to go. We do some fresh as well, to make sure we've got the best advantage when it comes to pregnancies and we put them into our recipient cows.
It's important to understand what these recipient cows are. They're animals that have been gathered together by a good friend of ours, and his job or his business has been for the last decade or so, fattening animals for the supermarket trade. And so he buys them in, keeps some for about a hundred days and then turns them out at particular specification at a rate of a truckload per week.
And so we have been working with Scott, as you can see here (that’s Scott in the middle) , and he allows us to put embryos into selected females and we retain the pregnancies, the pregnant ones and the others, head off to their normal destination.
It's really important to have good facilities when you're doing these things and Scott is a class act. He's got great facilities. He's got great pastures. He's got a very consistent feed regime, which he needs to have in order to supply a very tight specification, of 40 or so on a semi every week off to the supermarket.
As it happens, the recipients that we've been using from his program, in late October averaged their weight at around 550kgs. So we're anticipating in a January delivery, they would be over 600kgs, quite comfortably and in very good, healthy order, They're all been well vaccinated, uh, with all the normals and, and we will refresh that, between Christmas and New Year.
We had the good fortune of having the GDL guys come and visit us recently. That’s Harvey there on the left and Pete second on the left and our friend Mick in the middle and Scott on the right. Great to have them down from Queensland to understand and see what we're doing. They can really drill down. You can have good chats with them and ask them what they think of the program, and how the animals stack up.
We want to make sure there's no smoke and mirrors on this, and that it's all very clear as to what we're doing.
So this shot and the next shot are the recipients at our Westbury farm, looking rather smart.
They're upstanding, healthy, good animals, consuming a couple of bales of silage a day on nice, fresh green pasture.
Here they are relaxing in the sun, on the very picturesque property, which is Westbury.
We finalise the sexing of the embryos, the week before the sale.
So make sure that you hop onto our website and we'll be posting on that an update as to which animals have heifers, which animals have bulls inside them, and what those matings are.
We look forward to your participation in that sale. It opens on Wednesday; the 1st of December closes the 2nd of December at noon.
The week before certainly hop on, get the full bottle on which pregnancies; which ones are heifers and which ones are bulls and, um, and we'll all have a bit of fun.
Thank you.
Mark Barnett
