AI’ing cattle

We have been busy lately with AI’ing cattle so I thought that it would be fun to kind of tell you what we have been doing.

AI’ing is also known as Artifical Insemination. We are taking semen that has been collected from a bull at a different location, frozen and then shipped to us. We then make sure that the cow is in the right stage to take the semen, thaw it and administrator it to the correct place.

We do this so that we can have a more consistent, higher quality set of calves that are predominately out of the same sire and calves out of a better sire then what we would be able to afford through bull power. We set up over 85 cows to breed for fall calving and AI’ed them to two bulls if we were to just turn them out with a bull it would take a lot of bull power this way we can get by with only a handful of clean up bulls and use a higher quality.

To set the cattle up we run them all through two times putting in Cidrs and pulling them to get their hormones synchronized and then we watch them to find out which ones come into to heat and then in 12 hours we bred them and then turn them back out.

So we have been spending a lot of time horse back, gathering, sorting, and watching cows. It’s been pretty cold and it’s been a lot of days of early mornings and a late nights. It seems like in ranching you finish with one huge project like working calves or calving just to head into another busy season.

They say that their are no short cuts to anything worth doing and AI’ing certainly would not be a short cut it would be a lot easier to find a cheap bull and put on the cows and hope for the best but that wouldn’t take us to where we want to be. So it’s late nights and early mornings in the cold for a few more days well until it’s time for the next season. It’s a good thing that we enjoy this life, have some good mounts we enjoy riding and working off and hey, we don’t have to go to a 9-5 job.