Oct

26

A Good Omen

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I was driving home on Friday and mulling over the future. More specifically, I was worrying over how the heck I’m going to get started in the cattle world after I graduate. Land seems to be particularly expensive in the area around home. Given the fact I’ll be working for my dad, I have to stay within a reasonable radius of the office location.

Besides that, I love the area I grew up in and I WANT to live there.

I don’t so much love that most farm land seems to be going for just under $8,000/acre.

So there I was, wondering how the heck I was going to pull this off when I looked over and saw this:

Is that a good omen or what?

I just hope it isn’t implying that black cattle are the way to go, because I’m not listening to that part.

Tell me about a time in your life when you received the right sign at the right time.

Oct

22

Hindsight is 20/20

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We all remember this entry, right? Where some anonymous trickster took a pro-Hereford statement of Doc’s out of context and put it on a poster? Yes, we remember.

I walked into my animal nutrition class the other day a minute late and was just getting settled into my seat as Doc discussed the upcoming test.

“This one’s known to be tough,” he said. No doubt referring to the myriad of chemical processes and relationship we need to know. “People have a really hard time with it. So I was going to take it easy on you, but then I saw THIS on my door,” and he whipped out the poster. He continued on to explain how terrible the test was going to be, and how organic chemistry, a notoriously painful class, would seem like a walk in the park in comparison.

Doc’s motto of “I don’t get mad, I get even,” suddenly popped into my head, along with the fact that he never followed through on his threats after Operation: Shetland Valentine.

Perhaps I should have waited until after the test to make the poster.

So now I’m studying for this exam, and wishing for useful things like Glycolysis for Dummies. But hey, I did just learn after my entire college career that it is actually the Krebs Cycle and not the Kreps Cycle as I’d always believed. This test is going to go well, I can feel it!

Oct

13

Who?!

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WHO would do this?

WHO would latch onto this quote the moment it left Doc’s lips?

WHO would take it out of context and painstakingly scrawl it onto a large piece of poster board?

WHO would attach said poster to Doc’s door the night before Tuesday, when he has no classes, in hopes of him coming in late and lots of students seeing it right on his door?

I don’t know. It is impossible to tell.

I don’t think we’ll ever know who did it.

I don’t think we should even try to figure it out.

Apr

30

I Love Spring

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, horses, university farm | 1 Comment

Ahhh, spring. My favorite season.

Everything is so nice and new and green, and if you know me, you know how much I love the color green.

On top of that, there are all sorts of cute fuzzy baby animals around!



How could you not love spring?

Apr

27

Guess Who, part 1

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Who is this noble bovine beast…


Getting so close in order to pose with such grace?

Why, it’s none other than…


32. AHH!

Apr

23

You Thought it was Safe

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, school, university farm | 1 Comment

I bet you read my last post and noticed that I mentioned in passing the fact that my bovine repro class palpated cattle again. You probably breathed a sigh of relief, happy to see that I wouldn’t be going into detail like that one time.

No such luck! I was just saving up that post in order to present to you…
PALPATIONPALOOZA 2.0

It’s “2.0″ because it is a later version, complete with improvements, of the first one.

PART I: The Bulls
I want to mention, before I get into all this palpating talk, that the bulls don’t exactly get off scot-free. Sure, they’ve got a pretty good job. They’re fed well all throughout the year so that they can be in top condition in order to breed cows about 90 days out of the year. The rest of the time they spend hanging out, relaxing, eating. It sounds good, but there are downsides.

Earlier this month we took four of the young bulls to the vet to get a breeding soundness exam (BSE). This is accomplished through the use of an electro-ejaculator, which is pretty much summed up in this paragraph I found from here:

An electro-ejaculator probe is inserted into the rectum of a restrained bovine bull. Electrical current is passed from electrodes located on the probe primarily to the nerves controlling erection and ejaculation. As little as possible, current is passed to the nerves registering pain. Electrical stimulation of these nerves results in ejaculation. Voids or pockets in the probe receive any fecal matter which might otherwise insulate the electrodes from the intestine wall. The ejaculated semen is collected for analysis or artificial insemination.

This method isn’t usually used to collect bulls for breeding purposes. Since the bladder is right under the ampullary gland, you can get urine in your sample as a result of the electricity, which will obviously render it useless.

All of the bulls passed their BSE just fine, which means they’re ready to go to their new homes.

PART II: Preg Checking
Another day in class, we ran the fall calvers through the chute to see who was pregnant. This was basically revisiting Palpationpalooza 1.0. This is the group of cows that tend to have repro problems, so we had quite a few open cows in the mix.

Some people got fancy and, instead of just finding the cervix while palpating, started detecting the pregnancy and deciding if it was a late 1st trimester pregnancy (bull bred) or an early 2nd trimester pregnancy (AI). You see, after you AI your herd, you turn them out in the pasture with the clean-up bull. Any cows that didn’t get pregnant from the AI will come into heat in 28 days and be bred by the bull (that’s the plan, anyway). That way, they’re all pregnant and you’ll have a pretty uniform calf crop.

Some people were ever getting really fancy and deciding which side (horn of the uterus) the pregnancy was in. I was not nearly so fancy, instead relying on educated guesses when asked whether the cows I palpated were pregnant or open. I got them all right, by the way, but that was more luck than anything.

PART III: Synchronization
Heat detection is the number one reason AI isn’t utilized more. I should probably mention that by “heat” I mean “estrus” and that AI is Artificial Insemination and not Artificial Intelligence. Sometimes as an aggie you think things are common sense, and then your sister goes to your vet’s Christmas party with you and asks a nice old farmer who just said he had a herd of Angus cattle whether he has beef or dairy cows.

Anyhoo, heat detection is a problem. It takes time to go out and observe the cows and see if they’re displaying any signs of being in heat. And you really want everything to be uniform (calves born around the same time, a herd of cows that can be bred and turned out together instead of having to separate individuals, etc). It’s a pain and a waste of time to have 2 cows come into heat one day and AI them, 2 the next day, 3 the day after that, 1 after that and so on and so on until you get through your entire herd. It’d be a lot more convenient to just have them all come into heat at or around the same day.

And so exists synchronization. There are lots of different protocols from which different people choose, and I desperately/shoddily memorized them the morning of our last test, only to have forgotten them. Luckily, I’ve got a sheet that spell them all out.

We’re using the Select Synch + CIDR protocol, I think. I’m not completely sure, it that seems to be it. Today we ran the cows that we were going to AI through the chute. We put a CIDR, which is a piece of hard rubber that releases progesterone, in their cervix. We gave each one a shot of GnRH (Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone) and put a sticker on their butt (so that we can see if she’s standing to be mounted by other cows) and sent them on their merry way.

Next Wednesday we’ll take out the CIDR and give her a shot of Prostaglandin in the form of Lutalyse. For the next 6 days, we’ll watch and AI when she’s in heat.

In the case that we’re not using Select Synch + CIDR, we might be using CO-Synch + CIDR, which means we’d do the same thing except, instead of waiting for that 6 days, we’d AI within 54-66 hours and give her a shot of GnRH at the same time. Honestly, I was watching the calves in order to see 802, so I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention.

Part IV: Practicing AI
In class, we’ve spent a couple days getting used to the AI procedure. This involves getting the semen straws out of the large metal tank in which they’re stored, which is tricky. Very tricky. It’s probably not even all that tricky, except that they’re stored with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -294 degrees Fahrenheit, so as soon as they hit the air they start thawing and dying and wasting money and sabotaging your grade in the class. Also, the straws are stored on various little metal thingies (that’s the technical term), which you have to hold with our fingers while our fingers are going, “Ouch. Drop it. Ouch. COLD. Drop it. Ouuuuch!”

I would get into the various procedures we use for thawing, readying the gun, etc, but I’ve already written a novel.

Apr

21

Time to Invest in New Shoes

Filed Under aggie stuff, cattle, school, university farm | 1 Comment

There was an incident at the University Farm the other day. 32, one of the cows, attacked a couple of farm workers when they were out in the pasture. She’d just calved and the workers were out checking the calf when she butted one of them several feet through the air. Then she turned and got another worker down on the ground and worked him over for a while as the other people were trying to run through the mud to get to them.

It was decided instantly that 32 would be on the truck ASAP and her baby would be bottle fed. At a teaching institution, there’s just no sense in taking the risk by keeping animals that have attitudes like that.

Our Bovine Repro class was out at the farm preg checking the fall calvers the other day. One of my classmates and a pre-vet student, Hillary, was wearing gym shoes while most of the rest of us were clad in knee-high rubber boots.

“I’ve never seen a vet wearing shoes like that,” said another of my classmates suspiciously as Hillary stepped up to palpate a cow. This type of talk is common in our ag department since approximately 99% of our interactions with each other involve verbal harassment.

“Just wait,” said Doc. “They hear about cows like 32 and they’ll start showing up in track shoes.”

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