Bull Stuff!

So as many of you know we don't have any bulls on our farm.  All cows are bred by artificial insemination, using semen harvested from bulls.  By doing so, we control the genetics of our herd to a certain degree.  You see, if a cow has a good udder and good feet, but perhaps her milk production is less than our average, we can breed her to a bull that has proven to provide daughters that have good milk production.  Conversely, if we have cow that milks like a rock star, but looks like she has a hard time on her feet and legs, we can choose a semen from a bull that will help her daughter improve that trait.

A straw of semen can range from $15 to $100.  That's a pretty big range, however when you consider the lower cost bulls are "not proven" and the higher cost bulls perhaps provide some pretty strong daughters, it makes sense.  Bulls are ranked on 30+ traits - everything from udder, feet, legs, milk production, somatic cell count, ease of calving...the list is huge!

The week of March 19th, we had a bit of "bull stuff" going on - even though we have no bulls on the farm.  We were contacted by Select Sires - the company we buy our semen from - to ask if we would allow them to come and take a picture of three of our cows.  These are daughters of young sires that they were trying to prove in hopes that these bulls would make it into the 2012 bull book.  So these three girls were given a good hair cut on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning they got a bath.  Then later in the day about 6 people showed up to get them all in the right position to be pictured for future marketing.  Here are the three girls they were interested in:

I admit these are some pretty nice looking cows, but the level of particularity that these guys taking pictures had was phenomenal.  You see the cows legs each had to be placed a certain way, and if the cow moved even just one inch, they had to move her back into place.  The last girl was particularly challenging - as soon as they had her in place and the folks helping moved out of the way, she would shift before the picture could be taken and then they'd have to start over.  Then things got funny.  You see Dale Sabo, of Select Sires, placed this drape over his head and crawled around on the ground making bellering sounds to distract the cow...which while it looked ridiculous - it worked.  The cow stood perfectly still when she saw this:

Finally, it's interesting to note that we now have technology in place to use semen from a bull that is 90% certain to produce a heifer calf.  Semen can be sorted based on sex of the off spring.  This is often used by dairies interested in growing to allow them to fill barns using their own cows rather than purchasing from the outside.  Another example of the technology that makes our industry so interesting!