December 3rd and 4th was spent doing the cattle shuffle to get everyone in the right place for the work to come. Each year we used a couple of our young bulls on our heifers. We believe strongly that if we aren’t willing to use a young bull based on his EPD’s then we shouldn’t be selling them. In past years we haven’t artificially inseminated any of our heifers however this year we are going to AI a small group to test a new timed breeding protocol (new to us anyway.) We put seven young heifers into the pen behind the barn with a cidr going in on December 8th. The young bulls went in with the balance of the heifers on December 4th a group of nine in with Gizmo Midland 808 0066 430 Registration #16358619 another group of ten in with Gizmo New Day 816 658 8005 Registration #16333727. After the seven are AI’d we will put three of them in with the 808 bull and four in with the 816 bull for clean up.
At the farm we split out a group of twelve registered cows that calved later in the season (not their fault the bull that was in with them broke a leg) and a group of ten recips that calved late for use this year in with Coleman EXT 6149 registration #15730734.
We then put twenty five cows into a pasture to be used as recipients in our embryo transfer program. We will have these cows set up to receive embryos on January 6, 2010. Dr. Harley Schneider of Precise Genetics sends us the schedule of when and what drugs to used then will be at the farm on the date the cows are to receive their embryo. This year we will not be flushing any of our cows we will be utilizing eggs that we already have in the tank, from previous flushes. We have been working with Dr. Schneider for many years and have found him and his staff to be awesome! After these cows are implanted we will put another young bull in with them for clean up Gizmo RT 735 577 464 registration #16029577. This young bull does not have real powerful numbers but we feel that he will make cows that we want to retain in our herd.
The last pasture is our cows to be artificially inseminated a total of thirty six head will be set up in this group. We breed using a timed AI protocol to we will breed this group of cows on the 23rd of December. We will be using the following AI sires for this season:
Coleman Midland 430 #14797532
BC Matrix 4132 #14159119
Sinclair Rito Legacy 3R9 #14378386
Sinclair Extra 4X13 #14774030
Sitz Alliance 6595 #12310707
Boyd New Day 8005 #13050780
HA Image Maker 0415 #13739532
Sinclair Excellency 5X25 #1496982
The Coleman EXT 6149 bull will be utilized for clean up on this group of cows. Last year we AI’d 25 head with 23 settling if we can get anywhere near that kind of result again this year we will count ourselves blessed!
Needless to say the next few weeks will be busy ones. We work very hard each year making these breeding decisions, knowing that a decision made will impact our program for many years to come. Anyone in the cattle business understands that bad decisions can be devastating for a program.
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