Key Takeaways
- Define Your Goals – Start with a clear vision for your breeding program. Donor selection should align with the type of cattle you want to produce and complement bull selection.
- Prioritize Donor Health – Address health and lameness issues early. Healthy, comfortable cows are more likely to succeed in IVF programs.
- Find the Right Body Condition – Avoid extremes. Donors should be well-nourished to handle the demands of reproduction but not over-conditioned.
- Use Reproductive Indicators – Track follicle counts and cycling patterns to choose donors at the optimal time for embryo production.
- Follow the Data – Performance history, pedigree records, breeding values and cow family history offer valuable insight. Reproductive traits are heritable—let data guide your decisions.
Choosing the right donors can make or break your IVF program. It’s one of those decisions that sets the tone for everything that follows—and getting it right from the start saves you time, money, and frustration down the road.
The “right” donors will look different from operation to operation, but there are key principles that help guide smart donor selection.
Here’s what Vytelle has learned from working with more than 7,500 producers and over 40,000 individual donors worldwide.
1. Start with clear goals for your breeding program
One of the biggest mistakes we see is producers choosing donors without a clear direction for their program. A cow might be an excellent donor candidate for one operation but completely wrong for another.
Think about what you want out of your IVF program:
- What kind of animals are you trying to produce?
- Are you a seedstock producer looking to make more production bulls? Trying to build more elite females? Both?
- What are your customers looking for?
Those answers help you choose the specific donors most suited to your genetic goals.
“You can go just as fast in the wrong direction as the right direction in the embryo world, so it’s important to have a plan and know what your goal with that donor is,” says Joe Mancino, Vytelle’s Director of Regulatory and Reproductive Services.
2. Address lameness issues before they become problems
If you’ve got a cow that’s been limping or has trouble standing well in the chute, manage those issues sooner rather than later.
Choosing donors that are healthy, comfortable, and able to move around easily is critical—both for program success and animal well-being. Cow comfort might be hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it.
“Relate it to humans: you don’t perform your best when you’re under the weather,” Mancino explains. “If a cow is hurting and can’t get around, or you can see in the chute they’re not comfortable, addressing those things before they get out of hand is important.”
3. Hit the sweet spot with body condition
Donors need to handle the physical and metabolic demands of reproduction, so they need adequate nutrition. But you don’t want to overdo it either—excessive body condition scores can work against you.
Finding that middle ground for your cows gives you more donor options to choose from and sets them up for success.
4. Pay attention to cycling patterns
Despite best laid plans, sometimes biology and your schedule don’t sync up. But, there are tools to help estimate when a cow might be a more successful donor. If you can measure antral follicle count, that’s valuable information for choosing the right donors at the right time.
“Who’s actively still cycling? What is that population of follicles on her ovary?” Mancino asks. “Pick the cows that have a lot of follicles so you can maximize the number of embryos you’re going to make.”
5. Let performance data guide your decisions
Genetics don’t lie. In the cattle IVF world, if a dam was highly reproductive, chances are her female offspring will be too.
“The good thing about reproduction is it’s heritable,” Mancino notes. “If you know you have good donors that are performing, typically that will track in that cow family. Paying attention to daughters of cows is huge from an embryo production standpoint.”
Performance data helps you stick within high-producing families while steering away from lines whose performance has fallen. It can also flag areas for investigation—maybe those cows need a different nutrition plan or management approach.
“If you have four generations of cows that knock it out of the park, then all of a sudden they start tapering off, what else is going on?” Mancino says.
6. Make strategic pairings
To maximize your donors’ potential, pair them with the right bulls. If a cow has a history of birthweight problems, don’t breed her with a bull who has similar genetic tendencies. Think through the mating to avoid compounding issues by maximizing strengths and addressing weaknesses.
Ready to put these principles to work?
Once you choose your donors, the IVF process they experience matters. With Vytelle ADVANCE™, donors go through an all-natural, hormone-free in vitro fertilization technique that eliminates the complexity of traditional protocols.
Our 2024 Global Pregnancy Summary shows how Vytelle ADVANCE has helped producers expand their genetic progress worldwide.
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