Students from Pepperell High School got an up close look at the process of bovine embryo flushing and implantation, thanks to a multi-group project aimed at providing students with a unique educational experience.

The project, a cooperative effort between Berry College, the University of Georgia, Pepperell’s Future Farmers of America, Floyd County Young Farmers and the Bagwell Farm, began last month with the insemination of two of Berry’s award-winning Jersey cows.

Edwin Robertson of Harold Gate, Tenn., made the trip to Berry to flush the embryos from those cows so the embryos could be implanted in surrogate cows.

“I thought it sounded like a fabulous opportunity to do something we can’t do in the classroom,” said Carey Harris, the Pepperell agriculture and Floyd County Young Farmers teacher who organized the project.

The Jersey embryos were later implanted in Black Angus cows the Young Farmers purchased from UGA. The pregnant cows will later be moved to Bagwell Farms, where the Pepperell FFA students will care for them until they give birth after about nine months and 10 days.

Once the Jersey calves are born they’ll be moved to Berry, where the Pepperell students, with help from Berry’s diary farm, will bottle feed and care for the calves. At the end of the project next August, the surrogates will be sold in order to pay UGA.

Pepperell’s FFA president Jordan Worthey, a junior, said he feels fortunate to have the chance to work with Berry’s dairy program, which he said is one of the best in the world. Worthey said his family owns 800 cows, but he had never participated in the embryo transferring process.

“It’s a good project for learning animal science outside the book or classroom,” he said.

The reason for moving the embryos to surrogate mothers, said Berry’s dairy supervisor Ben Wilson, is genetic engineering.

“We’re fortunate to have great cows to do this with,” said Wilson, explaining that the process allows farmers to birth many more offspring from a top cow than nature would normally allow.

Take Berry’s Pitino Marvelous. Wilson called Marvelous a “hall of fame cow,” saying that the 10-year-old had produced 150,000 pounds (about 17,650 gallons) of milk during her milking career. Through the embryo flushing process, she has since produced “well over a dozen” offspring, he said.

In addition to getting more calves from a successful cow, the process also allows farmers determine the sex of the embryos and therefore choose to implant the milk-providing females, though this project won’t be using that technique.

Students also got to take a look at the embryos under a microscope, with Robertson explaining which ones were healthy and which ones were not. Harris said he was hoping enough quality embryos would be flushed to impregnate the 15 cows that will act as surrogates, but Berry has frozen embryos as well that will be used to bridge the gap. Ultimately, only 12 cows were biologically ready to accept the embryos.

The next step will come later this month when students visit the cows and perform a pregnancy check via blood sample. At the 60-day mark, ultrasounds will help determine the sex of the developing claves. If everything goes as planned, the calves will be born next summer.