 And I'm a livestock agent with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Today I'm here to talk about a general vaccination protocol for beef replacement heifers. You may wonder why I'm standing next to an empty squee shoot. There's a reason for that. If you're going to talk about a vaccination protocol, the time to do that is not when you have cows up in the catchpin. You're ready to work that day. Everybody's a little stressed out. You want to really go over that and have that in place before you have those animals up in the catchpin. So that's kind of the reason for this empty shoot today. What we're going to give you is just a general overview of a good quality vaccination program. This in no way should supersede what you would get from your vet. You should work closely with your vet to make sure that the vaccination protocol works for you, will work for your farm and your animals. Make sure you have a really good close working relationship with your vet so that you can get those protocols in place and they can help you get the vaccine that you need. To get started, you really want to start and bring those calves up at about three months. At that time, you're going to do a claustridial. These are usually a seven or eight way. That'll include a black leg and a tetanus. Also at that three month age, you want to go ahead and do an injectable dewormer. The injectable dewormers, and I'll pretty much only tell you to use injectable dewormer today, they're going to really give you the best and highest control of those internal parasites. So you don't have to worry about those throughout that heifer's life. Also, after you do those initial vaccines at three months, you want to come back about 30 days after that and go ahead and booster that same claustridial black leg tetanus injectable dewormer. So you get the two rounds of all of those vaccines in those calves. The next time you're going to bring them up is about weaning time. At this time, you're going to use a modified live for IBR, VVD, BRSP with a lepto included in that. You're also going to go ahead and do an injectable dewormer at that time. In kind of the same way you did with the claustridials with the tetanus, you're going to come back about 30 days after that initial time at weaning and go ahead and booster those again with that same modified live vaccine and an injectable dewormer. Then you're kind of going to be they're going to be out on their own until about one month prior to breeding. That one month is pretty important. You don't want to be less than a month around breeding because that really can interfere with your fertility with reactions to vaccines and things like that. So you kind of want to use that hard and fast rule of a month. You don't want to be less than that month before breeding. At that time, you're going to go ahead and use a killed vaccine for IBR, VVD and BRSP. You want to use a killed vaccine at this time. So you've gotten two rounds, two good rounds of a modified live in those heifers, which gives you the broadest and highest level of immunity. So when you're getting closer to breeding, you want to use a killed vaccine so that you don't have trouble with conception or maybe slipping a calf around that time. You're also going to go ahead and do another injectable dewormer at that time. That will really give you a good starting point on those heifers. Kind of set you up for the best reproductive success. Also, something really important to remember is to read the label. And on that label, it's going to tell you specific things about storage of these vaccines. A lot of them require to be refrigerated. So you don't really want to take the old refrigerator from your house that stopped working and move that out to your barn and have that be your barn storage for your vaccine because those vaccines will have the specific storage and temperature on them to keep them to where you're going to get the best use out of that vaccine. So you could potentially be storing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of vaccine. You want to make sure that you keep that product good and ready to use on those heifers. That goes beyond just their good refrigerator. So when you get to the side of the shoot, you want to make sure that you're using a good cooler that actually has ice packs in it so that you can keep that vaccine cool while you're working through those cows. You also want to make sure that you put those vaccines back in the cooler between calves because sometimes you can have one kind of bought back when it's coming up the lane and you could have several minutes between calves. So making sure that you just keep it in that cooler during those times will kind of ensure more success of that vaccine.