Replies

Well, on smaller operations (say, less than 50 head), you can do that. And in times past, many cattlemen did just that — just toss the bulls in with the cows, then collect up what they wanted to ship as time went on.

But now there’s a premium for uniformity. Part of that uniformity is getting a complete truckload of either steers or heifer calves, within a few pounds of each other. To get that, you need all the cows to drop their calves within, oh, about two weeks (plus one week, minus one week) of each other.

So you start by synchronizing the estrus (heat) of the cows. You run them through the chute (usually twice), once to inject them to cause them to drop their current cycle, once more to sync their next cycle.

If you’re a typical smaller ranch operation, now you have 250 to 400 head of cows ready to breed within a window of about 72 to 96 hours.

I don’t care if you’ve got the swingin’ stud to end all studs, he can’t breed up more than about 30 to 40 cows in a couple weeks. Now you’re faced with a situation where you need a whole bunch of bulls to cover possibly dozens of cows in a single *day*.

This would result in a wreck.

So you put heat indicators on the cows, and the cows that show heat you run through the chute (again) and you AI them.

The important upsides to the AI process now are:

1. The safety angle, covered above. There’s no faster way to get killed than get mixed in with a bull who is fixin’ to get laid. If you dare try to direct where his schwanzenstucker is going to go (ie, “You idiot, I want you to knock up *that* cow over there, not this one!”) you’ve got some big problems.

2. You can’t get your bull’s semen production up to a level to service all your cows (250 to 400). I don’t care if he’s sporting basketballs between his legs, ain’t gonna happen.

But... if you are milking him for semen all year long, and putting his semen on ice (liquid nitrogen, actually) for that one time in the year when you’re going to breed everthing in sight... well now, you can make your one bull’s semen go completely through the herd.

The issue here is genetics - if you wanted to use natural breeding on a lot of synch’ed cows, you’d have to have about one bull for ever 10 cows. That’s 25 to 40 bulls. And the rest of the year, those bulls are just eating up your feed, making a mess of your fences and generally being a pest. They’re expensive deadweights on your books, because they don’t make calves, and making calves is what the cow-calf business is all about.

3. OK, so what if you want to try some new genetics? You can order the semen you want, with the characteristics you want, and pay only 10’s to 100’s of dollars. A champion bull might run you $5K to $10K. A champion bull can also turn himself into very expensive hamburger by, uh... how do I put this delicately to a girl?

You’ve seen a bull’s schwanzenstucker, I’m sure. Well, in bulls (as in men) it is possible through, uh, over-eagerness and clumsy approaches to the “problem space” to fold that thing in half. When this happens, the bull is as good as done. Break that thing in half and his whole reason for being on your ranch is done and gone... and now you’re lucky if a $5K bull fetches $0.30/lb at the sale barn.

AI and mail-order genetics solves all this problem. If the semen goes bad, the most you’re out is possibly a couple hundred bucks for some high-priced semen, not thousands on the bull.

4. There is now sexed semen. (do a quick web search for “sexed semen” — you’ll see what I mean).

If you’ve checked out cattle prices, you know that uniformity sells. If you wanted the highest possible price for calves off a ranch, you want:

- black hides (ie, black angus)
- uniform weight (which you handle by uniform birth timing)
- uniform genetics (which you can have if you have one bull for the whole lot of calves)
- and steers only.

Well, sexed semen lets you deliver only males, which gets you the price premium. Natural breeding will give you about 50/50, just as you’d expect.