kenn1320 said:
Sam do you do this on your own farm, or hired to do this on several in the area? Seems its very seasonal, or do you do something else besides the pregnancy testing? Are you also doing the insemination or do they rely on a bull(s) for that? Does that job pay by the hour or by the cow? I saw the guys on jack ass put on the long glove and take the plunge. The jack ass part was when he took off the glove and slapped the other guy across the face with it. :shock: :lol:
I do this only on the farm that I am a partner of. The majority of dairy farms in North America are nonseasonal, meaning cows are calving year around and milk production stays the same throughout the year. For me, this means cows need to get pregnant year around. We have 1900 cows and approximately the same number of youngstock, so punching puckers is a full time job for me.
Monday is preg check day~6 hours of rooting around in cow rectums with an ultrasound. My wife is my assistant and she gives appropriate treatments such as vaccinations and records each cow's diagnosis.
Tuesday and Wednesday are ET days (embryo transfer). I flush (using a Foley catheter and special tubing and filters) 7 day old fertilized embryos from cows with superior genetics and then transfer the embryos individually into recipients (surrogates). Putting an embryo into a recipient is very similar to artificial insemination; one arm in the rectum and a 23" stainless steel transfer gun in the uterus. I usually flush 4 donors on both days and average 7.52 embryos per flush.
Thursday is synchronized breeding day. 70-80 cows that are all hormonally synchronized are in estrus this day of the week, every week. By this point, I'm usually suffering from bu%%hole burnout and let my wife artificially inseminate all those cows while I walk around looking for any other cows that need breeding. We do keep a bull in a boxstall for cows having trouble getting pregnant, but 99% of the breedings are artificial one way or the other.
Any free time on the farm is used for record keeping and general farm management. Every other Friday I have off along with the opposite weekend, so basically 1.5 days off per week on average. We have over 30 full time employees, so I don't work nearly as hard as I used to, maybe 60-65 hours a week as opposed to 80+ when it was my dad, my uncle, and myself as the primary labor force for the 200 cow farm I grew up on.
Sorry for the thread hijack. If this should be broken off into it's own thread, maybe a mod can assist?