Cows, AI & CAFOs…
Posted by Farmgirl Y on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011
Here is Popcicle’s big bull calf, Pepper. We unfortunately didn’t get to see him being born as he was coming out backwards (we think). After freaking out and going inside to call the vet, by the time we came back out he was already on the ground with his mama licking him clean. Seriously, this guy is huge. He was at least the same size as Penelope, who had 3 weeks head start on him.
And I couldn’t resist taking a picture of both the calves on their mamas at the same time…
Cow breeding via AI is kind of strange to a person who’s never had to deal with this sort of thing before. When we had goats in Oregon, we took our lady goat on a “date” to visit with a friendly buck. But since we wanted to breed our girls to a Dutch Belted sire, we had to have our ladies “serviced” by a technician. Figuring out heat cycles (Popcicle bellowed all night long, Lily was a little harder to detect), selecting a sire (going through sire catalogs can be a bit humorous…studs, stats and udders!) and then calling the AI hotline (which is somewhat akin to sending out the bat signal) all took some time to get used to. Lily was serviced first, and the AI tech that came apologized for being late and told us that he’d been working at one of the mega farms aka CAFO up north. It was a 2000 cow dairy and he and another tech had 82 cows to do that day. The barn was 900 feet long and had computerized gates that were malfunctioning that day, so he and the other tech had to hand-sort the cows scheduled to be done. “It was a nightmare,” he told us.
Popcicle came into her cycle two days later, and the other AI tech came. He saw that she was in standing heat (which means that they will stand for a bull) and said that you just don’t see cows like that anymore…all the CAFOs use hormone shots to get their cows to cycle on schedule. He tapped the metal hoop support on our greenhouse and said getting into those cows is kind of like going through one of those pipes, not very easy at all. He continued, saying that back in the day a farmer would be jumping up and down in excitement to see a cow like ours but now it’s all shots, then sighed.
Yet more reasons to support small moreganic/local farms!
(Just waiting for the weird search terms that people will be using to find this post…)
Filed in Animal | 2 responses so far
Aubinon 21 Jan 2011 at 6:36 pm 1Good luck, I hope they both take. We just had our Jersey bred to a Normande bull by AI, fingers crossed. Lucky you, to have an AI hotline – there’s one guy who will come to our area and it took forever to find him (yes, this is CA, land of a gazillion cows, but we’re in no-man’s-land in this county when it comes to cow AI).
Youngieeon 23 Jan 2011 at 12:32 pm 2The AI hotline is really funny…you call and a computer generated voice says, “Thank you for calling _company name_. Your call has been recorded…” and then the tech for your area either calls you back or just comes out.
I think they both took, as I have not seen any cycles yet and they should have had three by now.