nothing says, " hay baby", like a plastic straw.

When I say a lot of BS

 Miss my cows sometimes , others not so much but at least i did my best to treat them well as compared to some .

       I guess I need to qualify that statement or title as in the last blog as I referred to the bull instead of the blog story or stories as all are 100 per cent true to the best of my recollection and that is usually pretty good. This actually happened, as well today I want to go into another facet of artificial insemination for cows that I don’t think I covered, as well problems with trying to breed cattle and some of the things I have seen and observed while watching others perform artificial insemination, kind of a squeaky subject so to speak and if you are not completely comfortable with it, or wish to carry on and understand just what it takes to put food on your table then just quit reading. No big deal I appreciate you reading to this point.

    If you are still reading at this point then as I said I will cover artificial insemination of cows.

     First comes heat detection, and heat detection was one of my main jobs as I had on  the midnight calf watch meaning I worked the afternoon shift and early morning hours at the farm as it was a 24 hr. a day operation involving feeding the cattle, and in heat detection. The hours between 6 and 10 am are the main hours you will see a cow in heat during the days. We would sit out in the feedlot where we could look out over the whole herd of 250 cows on those 6 acres and we would watch for hours on end with a pair of binoculars for cows showing any signs of heat whatsoever. Then each cow is fitted with an ear tag and that number is recorded so that we know, and can check to see her breeding history at a glance. You could see if a cow was jumping another or if the bum steer was doing his job and had enough testosterone pumped into him and was feeling a little frisky, and then he would be jumping and leaving his paint marks on the back of the cow in heat. You don’t want the cow that is jumping but instead the cow standing there allowing another to jump. This could happen in any open cow meaning if she was unbred.

     In one pen, we segregate young heifers from the herd and determine their menstrual cycle and record it for future use. Once you know her cycle this will remain the same up until she is bred. So anytime you saw a cow in heat it was important to always tag that information in a breeding book.  The next pen was cows nursing calves and the same with third pen, etc., and all pens held 5- -100 head of cows depending on various factors in their gestation schedule or if they were being medically treated for sores etc.. The last pen was cows that should be pregnant but we were not sure, or may have been open due to loss of calf. The last pen of cows with calves’ pens are the ones we watched the most, if they were not bred by a certain time and the bukll couldn’t breed them they were culled or butchered. The heifers were still too young to breed so it was more just watching them for their cycle information.

     Day in ,day out ,grab a cup of coffee and a pair of binoculars and lean on a fence, or sit on a warm cow like Ofry, her number was 03 on her tag in her ear so I just made her name Ofry  as I called her. She was a brown Swiss mixed cow with Simmental and was a kind cow.( At this point I need to insert a joke as this one heavy set chick told me for whatever reason and I feel it may have been used on her and it went like this. She said. ‘I had a kind face’ And I said. ‘Oh yeah,’ now playing into her scheme she said. ‘Yeah the kind that looks like a cow’. I always wondered where she had heard that.)  Ofry would lie in the feedlot digesting and would let me come over and sit on her while I watched the other cows. She would once in a while look around but for the most part ignored me. I would sit there in the early morning around the break of day and begin to take a look and see what we needed to do next.  Every morning I would spend 3-4 hrs. a day just watching cows for anything, herd health was important as anything and especially so when they are under confinement. You need to clean manure and keep things clean as well you had to have special birthing areas and a way to handle cows so as not to upset them. Keeping a cow calm is important in the artificial insemination game as I call it. You try to align all your variables into breeding an excellent calf the first time. You have to keep the cow calm. You have to select the right sire or bull, and this is based on his progeny and characteristics of being ideal, you secure the semen ahead of time and when the cow is observed being in heat, you have to act quickly and efficiently to move the cow to a breeding chute just wide enough for the AI guy and you have to have a means of holding the cow’s head. Now holding her head and keeping her calm was my job as I would whisper sweet nothings in her ear while the AI guy did his magic.

      I would observe the cow in heat and then I would have to bring her and a 100 other cows into a feeding area with a series of gates that would allow us to thin the herd down quickly depending on their density at one spot. Most of the time you would do this by yourself opening and closing gates until you have maybe 5or ten cows in a group, then I would head then into a barn and crowd them in a chute maybe forty foot long. The cows kinda get used to being worked if you do it enough. But sometimes you get a crazy cow that just absolutely refuses to play the game. And that is where trouble starts, and this is a story for another time.

     Finally you get it down to the one cow you need to breed, and you run her into the head gate where you capture her head between bars and you put her in a rope harness you can tie to the side of the breeding chute. The head gate was a neat contraption as it had sides that would press in and hold a cow for say purpose of doing medical work like stitching her up , some are designed to lay on their side so a veterinarian could do just about anything you could imagine once she was immobilized by an injection . It would be impossible to handle this many cows and care for their health without this one necessary accessory to the farm. Otherwise people will get hurt and many have, trying to do without. Some large vets will take one with them to the farms that don’t have one just to be able to handle the large animals and not get hurt. Now a vet may be an artificial insemination technician or you can attend schooling for such and receive accreditation, and some herdsmen do their own artificial insemination without certification. But for the most part all your AI work should be accomplished by the A.I. guy or girl as the case may be. He or she is on call 7 days a week 24 hrs. / Day. This doesn’t mean you are always first on their list and depending on how many farms they visit and how many cows or bulls he or she has to do semen collection with, you may be waiting awhile.  For the most part this is a male dominated job, for some reason women have problems doing this type of work I guess the majority of the work is breeding and working on the female or cow and it is messy to say the least. It may be hard to disassociate oneself from the task. On the other side I have a problem dealing with the male requirements of collecting semen. I guess it depends on the job, but for the most part they require you to do both to be certified.

      Not getting the A.I. guy real quick allows you to catch the cow while she is in standing heat and you can breed her up to 24 hrs. later, and still she can get pregnant. Another facet to A.I. work is timing as the timing has to be right. To early and it is no good , after 24 hours it is no good , as the egg has already imbedded itself in the uterine walls and is rendered sterile. The uterine walls are starting to slough off cells and dissolve the egg. So a cow like a human has to be caught when the egg is produced from the ovary and as it starts to travel through the fallopian tubes to the womb. At this point the odds are stacked against you  if the cow is excited, then it is all for naught, as the cow will usually not catch or get pregnant ,so keeping her calm and  not scaring her to bad, and trying to be gentle as one can in the breeding procedure is important.

     Let’s just say for instance we are  lucky enough to weed her out of 250 other cows and she has been successfully haltered and then led into another breeding stall that is not to wide and can have one wall to press against here to keep her from turning around  or kicking as easily the A.I. guy and you have her halter tied to the stall to hold her head without hurting her then the A.I. guy shows up with his white suit( really never understood why they or the vet would ever wear white as it is inevitable, that sooner or later shit is going to happen and it usually hits the coveralls, the shirt inside and the fan in the other room every once in awhile . I would have thought green would be cheaper and more fitting, but who am i?) It is usually white coveralls and he is carrying his stainless steel vacuum tank that holds the semen stored in liquid nitrogen that takes the temperature down to minus 365 degrees or something like that. Any spill on your skin could freeze your entire finger solid in an instant and a smack could break it off.  He has all the stuff needs to breed the cow and tries to place it within reach. He reaches into his tool box and produces a long plastic glove that fits all the way up to his shoulder and he gets the lubricant and antiseptic out, washing the gloved arm and disinfecting, then applying a lubricant to the entire glove up past his elbow as you never know how far you have to go in. I would stand and talk to the cow and whisper her words of comfort like hold on their bossy, his hands aren’t that big, and the AI guy would begin to clean the anus out by scooping out the fecal matter by inserting his hand up her anus, and kind of dragging the crap out with it as he goes. This usually dropped over the vulva and when he could comfortably feel her cervical rings through manipulation of her intestinal walls as he would kind of cup them between his fingers and feel, then he was ready to insert the straw . None of this you can see and most is done by feel. At this time the cow has arched her back as Mr. big hands, has forcibly violated her insides and she is kinda having a fit, she thinks. I imagine it is an experience and I really don’t think if I was woman I would like it but then again I am not a woman and can’t judge. Butt for sure I think the real way would have been better, and still it goes on from here yet.

      He pulls a vial of semen out, or has it out already and has been warmed as the frozen semen is in a  plastic straw and the job of bringing the individual little guys back to life by unthawing them between your hands is usually done ahead of time until they are close to body temperature. Then a  sterile squeeze bulb is attached to the plastic straw with the semen inside and is placed so that when the A.I. technician has his arm positioned in her anus and has ahold of the cervical rings he can  insert the straw through her Vulva lips that have been cleaned of any fecal matter and is inserted through the cervical rings and his hand can feel the straw as it is inserted through those rings assuring he is in the womb, and that is why he needs to enter the anus and manipulate it in a way that way that the technician can assure that the semen is deposited properly, so the little guys can do their job and begin swimming. Now if the A.I. technician has trouble an inadvertently knocks the squeeze bulb off the straw and he has the straw placed as it should be, he can always blow on the straw. He just needs to make sure he doesn’t suck. Very important. But then that may bring up the question of oh forget it. I will drop that one as it is too nasty to think about. Anyhow once the semen has been deposited and once the halter is loosened the cow just kind of stands there and looks at you like is that all. And we tell her yes and head her back out to the feed bunk and get her fattened up and ready to birth.

     Now they do this same thing at feedlots full of crap and disease all over the America in an effort to provide the beef we eat on our table. Growth hormones are shot into culled young calves and testicles are removed as well as an estrogen blocking drugs which controls the fertility of culled heifers is added to the meat to keep the cow’s gaining at maximum grain to beef ratios to get that meat to the freezer case as cheaply as possible. Some feedlots have thousands of cattle on feed in similar conditions, cattle that have never been on grass before and spend their whole life in feedlots totally dependent on humans to feed them. Could you imagine 839000 head of cattle on feed? It says just that amount is in the largest feedlot in the world  in this one research paper. It is the JBS Three Rivers Holding Company in Greely Colorado. They say this is a one-time holding capacity of this one facility by itself.  I think when I was going to college at ATI in 1974 this one facility then had over 400000, head of cattle on feed.

     This one facility may only take care of one half the daily need for Mc Donalds alone , in what it needs in beef. This beef is fed where it craps and the crap builds up in the pens till they take a dozer or a loader and push it into a pile and load it out in dump trucks. Sometimes the owners will leave it in the pen and let the cows lay on it and play on it. The cows are raised in the open pens, sometimes with no shelter whatsoever and feed is usually placed in feed bunks where a truck drives down a lane and automatically ejects a quantity of fed designed to make them grow. Feed is never usually a problem with beef cows, and when fed good produces the pounds of meat that consumers like to see with the marbling of fat. Usually in feedlots like this there is little for a cow or steer to do besides eat and gain weight. The owners of the feedlot don’t want them doing too much as they want them to gain weight however they do it. It takes a lot of feed to take care of this many cattle and vast farms of nothing but corn a silage is produced. This and then also they bring in rail cars of grain with GMO corn and soybeans from the Midwest and grind it with a variety of other grains and create custom blends based on the development of the various groups of cattle. Young feeders may get one ration while a pen of young heifers may get another with an estrogen blocking drug added.

    Sick or slow gaining cattle may be put in one pen and medicated water, and feed added with antibiotics to help those ailing get better. Water may have nutrients added to make it better for the cattle. Salt is a staple in gaining cattle weight. As a cow eats salt, becomes thirsty and drinks water, and after drinking a gallon or two can easily add 8- 16 lbs. to the carcass when weighed, as that is the weight of the water. They may not retain that much but the salt will constantly make them take in water. Electrolytes are another thing to add to water as it helps boost their metabolism. On a place like this dry lot operation it would not be unusual to have all types of management staff and a general manager to handle all that is necessary in the day to day operations. It may not hurt to have a team of attorneys on call also to help stop shit before it gets started.

     Odor problems, and dealing with the waste and EPA regulations on water quality, and avoiding a major disease outbreak when cattle or anything is confined in a facility like this. Mad cow disease would wipe this place out in a day. A veterinarian is on staff undoubtedly, and has a major role in care of the cattle. As well I imagine your own personal financial representative aware of coming market problems. Say for instance a major change in the price of retail beef. You would need a number cruncher to put costs to product produced to determine if it is better to hold your cattle for 50 days till the price improves, or you may be locked by a contract and need to know your profitability before committing yourself to another contract. When to ship and when to hold are all questions the modern corporate farmer has to deal with. The size of the facility in Greely with over 800,000 head of cattle surely has its own meat packing facility and cold storage. This would help it maintain quality and allow some flexibility in marketing. This sure isn’t the mom and pop operation everyone thinks it is. These people are serious and have probably never had a pitchfork in their hand and never rode a horse but still wear the hat to help them fit in. It’s a crazy world we live in. this is what farming is going to be in the future if we are to feed an additional 2 billion people.