Ultrasound for Cows?? Yup!

Every Tuesday at Soaring Eagle is herd health day.  Each week our vet, Dr. Jeff Bleck of Dairy Doctors in Plymouth, WI stops by about 8 am.  He's usually on the farm for about 2 hours and most of his time is spent checking cows to determine if they are pregnant.  Here is a video and explanation of how that works:

So about 35 days after the cow is inseminated, she is checked for the first time to determine if she is pregnant or not.  During this time we can tell if she is having twins which happens in about 4% of cow pregnancies.  Then 30 days later we check her for a second time.  At this second check, Jeff is actually able to tell us if its a heifer calf or a bull calf.  He also checks all our cows before breeding them for the first time to make sure they are in good condition for breeding.  If a cow has a difficult time transitioning to a milk cow, we may wait a bit longer before beginning a breeding program on her.  In the video below, Jeff is checking more cows and we show you what he sees on the eye piece that he's wearing:

On this particular day we checked 30 cows, of which, 24 were confirmed pregnant.  We have a deal with Jeff that if we hit 75% on any given week, he buys us lunch.  Up until this day, that's only happened once!  Since 24 of 30 is 80% it looks like we'll be going for lunch again soon!  Now he wants to raise the goal for us however, but I guess that called continuous improvement!!