More from Oxbow Farms
Don’t think I added the links to my old stories from Oxbow Farms as I said I would in my last blog before the update. It took me awhile to find the right pic and to size it right for the blog and I completely forgot so will include them now:
life moves on: split pelvis operation-
life moves on: caeserian section- a click on either of these will easily give you some entertaining looks, and information into what cattle breeding and work on Oxbow Farms was all about. i didnt re-edit the old blogs as they were early blogs , and it shows some level of progress or retardation i might have gained and lost since then.
Anyhow today I plan on taking you with me as I again take a trip down memory lane and up to the bull barn as we called it back then. Inside was a huge bull pen made out of 2 inch steel pipe welded at one and half foot intervals or close enough so a full size bull couldn’t stick his head through and it was probably 40 by 40 feet inside and the same outside , yet had a door in between we could close in bad weather. The sides of the pen went from the ground or a foot above the ground every one and half feet to the ceiling. Making the walls to where you could see the bull and interact with him but not so he could get to you.
We were never supposed to go in the pen unless someone else was there to watch and do whatever if something went wrong, like he used you for a play toy or something. He weighed 2400 lbs. find of like one of those jacked up four wheel drives with mudder tires, only on four legs. He stood over 6 feet tall and I had to look up to see over his shoulders. He was a mammoth bull with a two and half foot wide head and I was entrusted to feed him.
He was a big baby and we soon it came to the point that I actually thought he was glad to see me when I came to feed him. Some people do as they are told, and I myself look at an animal and feed an animal the best I can when feeding them, the same as I would do for myself and better. They wanted some more weight on him and so they wanted me alone to feed him as I could do a better job understanding quality of hay and feedstuffs needed. I would throw his hay into the chain rack in the corner of his pen from outside and the same with his grain. I fed daily for quite a time, while I worked there on an internship basis, and knew I would miss feeding him. He loved to have his head scratched, you had to be careful though as one bump of his head against the steel bars of the pen would break your arm if you allowed it to be pinched in there. He was so powerful a bull.
His main purpose was to be used for semen collection and it was kind of sad to hear how they went about doing this. I could only imagine after never really experiencing, but only hearing tales of how it was accomplished. They would take a bull much like this identified by his progeny and statistics to be the ideal of what the purebred industry is looking for when selecting a bull. Mainly high birth weights, calves that lived at birth and how many made it to weaning, and then calving ease. Higher birth weights translate into more money per unit of weight. Steaks are bigger etc., this all equals more retail beef for sale. If the calf weight is large at birth and if they, they being the mother cow may have more troubles at birth with complications involving caesarian and split pelvis operations to remove the calves resulting higher birth losses, then this isn’t good. You definitely want a big calf but easy to calve. Hard to find this right ratio, as calves are a result of two parents. Heredity and statistics plays an important part in selection of animals in any beef production farm, or dairy and pork as well. The same principles are applied across the board when it comes to livestock selection and genetics. It all depends on what you are looking for and that will be the ideal that most farmers shoot for. This bull also had twinning aspect to him. Too produce two calves off the same mother in beef production is like getting an animal for free and lower calf weights. This would be easier on cows calving, kind of a real win-win situation in selection characteristics, but twinning is not always heritable or so they say. But regardless, I delivered three sets of twin calves while I was there and he was a father to six in his progeny, and it was a statistic although not always used for selection did influence the top breeding bulls of his purebred status as a Simmental bull sire.
This was his niche or corner in the market of semen production. They wanted to store as much as they could in liquid nitrogen for future use. This is the way you pay for your bull. As a bull in artificial semen sire production is apt to breed thousands of cattle from the same bull, yet only about 1000 in his whole lifetime if left to natural processes. He was hardly used to breed any cattle naturally. Instead they would lead a heifer or cow in heat up in front of a jumping stall as they name it and which I have seen. It is carpeted and is like a huge saw horse and the bull and the cow would be separated but close enough for him to smell her heat. I guess that would be the equivalent of pheromones causing excitability and an erection in the bull. Well the reason a bull has a nose ring is to control him while he is in this aroused state, as two rope leads with a pole attached to this ring with one pole being held by one guy and another pole being held by the other would control this bull by holding his head back and if a bull would turn his head any way they didn’t want him to, they would yank on the rope and pull on his ring forcing the bull to snort but yield his turn.
Now we need to pause and reflect on why today’s teenagers want to wear a nose ring or rings as I have seen on some pretty girls who need nothing, but insist on portraying themselves in nose rings. Forget the health issue of keeping them clean but look at the true meaning of nose rings and see it as a form of submission to slave oneself to the tireless effort of being cool. As well our generation knows, it is an elusive trip only rewarded after years of endearment to be the one, that you finally realize you don’t have to conform to be cool. It is all a state of mind based on values of society ever changing. Oh well they will find out soon enough.
As I digress and reflect on society , and it’s correlation to fads without knowing the meaning or true intent, these handlers hold the bull and actually keep him on this huge sawhorse, while another artificial inseminator technician grabs ahold of the bulls now throbbing member unsheathed in his plastic gloved hands and shoves the about 3 foot long and up to an inch and half wide member into an artificial vagina that is warmed and lubed to a cows temperature, usually made out of a rubber tire inner tube that is folded together and has a semen collection sack which is basically a clear plastic baggy to collect his semen taped to the bottom with duct tape, while the bull who is jerking and contorting on the stand finally deposits his healthy load. Now I need to insert my joke for the day.
What is long and round and has seamen inside? A submarine of course. What did you think? Anyhow after a long day of semen collection an handling several bulls the artificial inseminator comes home to his wife and she asks.
“How was your day dear?”
And he looks at her and says. “Long and hard dear.”
She says. “Oh well , make sure you wash up for dinner dear, and by the way we are having your favorite , mountain oyster creamed stew, it will be oh so-oooo good!
That was the part of artificial insemination that kept me from getting a certification to be an artificial inseminator technician and part of the requirement of my field of specialty at ATI and eventually forced me to change or split my majors into crop production. Call me a homophobe or whatever but there was no way I was grabbing a bulls whatever, for any amount of money, let alone portioning and freezing his semen afterward.
It seemed a shame that here was this great bull and at times I just wanted to turn him loose in one the pens of cattle and just watch him go to town on the old girls. But then again even with his prowess could he ever measure up to the arms of an artificial inseminator as he does his thing. Even this bull may be let down. Being a herdsman sometimes isn’t always a good thing and is the reason I think natural is best. You need more bulls but that is ok as it seems to work best and cows and they seem to enjoy themselves more.
I would sometimes have to retrieve this big boy’s feed bowls from inside the pen. Usually as I have said before for safety reasons, we do this only when someone else was around. I called for other help and no one was going to be available till I left work, and then the next guy who replaced me would have to do it alone. I couldn’t let someone else do my job when we were shorthanded, and knew someone would be around soon, but still I couldn’t tell when that was. So I went into the pen through the steel gate, always keeping my eye on the bull. I had to go all the way over to the other side of the pen. The bull would turn and face me but never offered to advance toward me. I had trouble reattaching the feed buckets with the new clips we had, as he had torn a ring out of the feed bucket. This kind of took my attention away from the bull for a second and I turned my back away from him and looked at what I was doing. This very act went against all I was ever told about bulls and that was never turn your back on them. Just that quick I felt something underneath my butt as I started going up into the air grabbing on to the pipes as I hand over hand was trying to hang on, all the way up to the ceiling and I was ducking my head as I was over five foot high off the ground, with my legs a dangling, sitting on this bulls head. I hooked my feet into the pipes on the wall of the pen and climbed higher stooping as I did trying to get away from this bull and I was in a corner while doing this making it easier to thankfully escape his massive head-butt he had just gave me.
I was relieved I was safe but still not so much, as I was still in the pen, and what is hard for the bull to escape through, was also holding me in, so I had to do something quick and since I had no club to turn him away, and he was just standing there with his head in the air shaking it playfully. Kinda like common Big Boy it’s time to play. I did the only thing I could do, I planted a size 13 between his eyes as hard as I could I shoved my foot in his face and thumped him real hard, with kind of a hollow thud to it, and he shook his head and snorted but turned away and sulked outside like I had hurt his feelings. I felt almost sorry for him for about a second and then I was safely back out the door and gone. Only taking enough time to catch my breath and be thankful I wasn’t lying in a pile of BS stacked in the corner. Wadded up like a shitty ragdoll with some blood to accent it. A fitting tragic end to my early writing career it would be as no one knew I was in there and it could have been hours before they found me.
I never reentered the pen but instead made some long poles with hooks on one end to either drag the feed buckets to the side of the pen or hook them with extra loop I installed on the buckets to prevent ever having to enter the pen again for that reason. So many times when you are alone, and in the process of farming you encounter moments like this when you could just as easily be dead, that you truly appreciate what some of these old farmers go through daily by themselves. Whether it is turning on a tractor PTO or power take off to doing whatever, or it could be something as simple as walking in a pasture and tripping and hurting your head on a rock to realize how dangerous this job can be. There are no magic bullets or safety equipment, but instead intuition and experience plays a role in their being able to make it another day.
Really don’t know what message I may have left with you in retelling this story or anything it contains in this blog but sure covered a few areas that should make you appreciate a few things. Maybe you to would be glad as I am that farming and especially livestock farming may not be a good career choice for those with issues in controlled breeding such as me. It takes a special type of person to do that work and I know it isn’t me. My hats off to the Artificial Inseminator, and I would shake your hand but?
