wbvs58
Well-known member
I have just finished breeding my cows again. I am very happy with how things went. There was only one cow that I gave up on, a 1st calver that was being a bit of a "female dog". I did 36 cows and 9 heifers. I use cidrs for 8 days with PG and a bit of help with oestrodiol which you folk don't get to use. I got a good response with 50% on heat at 48 hrs and the remainder over the next 36 hours. I heat detect and inseminate when they are well and truly standing. I do them in batches of 10 with 3 days between batches. This eases the load on me and on the cleanup bulls. I am shooting to get them all calving in July, if I get 60% from my inseminations I'll be happy and the bull deals with the rest.
It is a lot of work sorting out the groups of cows along with their calves then treating them, heat detections before I even get to the inseminations, all mostly by myself. This year things couldn't have been better, the weather fine and the cows were just easy to do. The gun just seemed to find its way to the cervix itself and it was over in a few seconds which makes it easy on me. There were no ginormous cervixs to deal with probably because my calving was tight, 80% in July and they had time to cycle a time or two before I got to them. It is always a worry each year with my hands getting weaker whether I am going to be up to it but all good this year.
My calving this year was great too. I lost two calves with mature cows early on, one was a breech that I didn't get to early enough and the other the mother was standing over her dead newborn when I found her in the morning. The first cow to calve had twin heifers and one got separated from her and I was bottle feeding it so I was able to graft it to the one that had the breech birth. The other cow got sold. I had another set of twin heifers and a heifer had a pair of twin bull calves and all are doing well. The last two sets of twins I have them in a small paddock close to the house and I am supplementing the cows with a bit of grain. I have 36 cows and 38 calves so hard to do better than that.
Ken
It is a lot of work sorting out the groups of cows along with their calves then treating them, heat detections before I even get to the inseminations, all mostly by myself. This year things couldn't have been better, the weather fine and the cows were just easy to do. The gun just seemed to find its way to the cervix itself and it was over in a few seconds which makes it easy on me. There were no ginormous cervixs to deal with probably because my calving was tight, 80% in July and they had time to cycle a time or two before I got to them. It is always a worry each year with my hands getting weaker whether I am going to be up to it but all good this year.
My calving this year was great too. I lost two calves with mature cows early on, one was a breech that I didn't get to early enough and the other the mother was standing over her dead newborn when I found her in the morning. The first cow to calve had twin heifers and one got separated from her and I was bottle feeding it so I was able to graft it to the one that had the breech birth. The other cow got sold. I had another set of twin heifers and a heifer had a pair of twin bull calves and all are doing well. The last two sets of twins I have them in a small paddock close to the house and I am supplementing the cows with a bit of grain. I have 36 cows and 38 calves so hard to do better than that.
Ken