Our First Breeding

God willing, we have a knocked up cow.  Today was three days since we gave Christina the shot that's supposed to throw her into heat.  Our poor cow has had to deal with the cow-version of clomid.

Dairy cows run on roughly an annual cycle of calving to keep the milk flowing.  They give the most milk after they calve (freshen) and then it slowly goes down.  After two months dry they calve and freshen again.  If we don't get her pregnant, her milk will slowly go down and there will be no calving to get everything started again.

The breeder guy came this morning.  He brought the semem from a bull named Plus frozen in liquid nitrogen.  It's a two handed job, one requiring a glove to the shoulder, but it was fast.

Afterward she needed another shot.  Thankfully he gave that one to her.  He walked up to her thigh, hit it twice with his fist, put the shot in, gently squeezed it and only then did Christina react.  She stepped away from the shot and onto my husband's foot.  We joked that she was punishing him for letting in that guy with the shot.

Beefy kept trying to ride Christina and getting in the way.  She stepped away from him but beefy was persistent so we tied him up out of the way.  The breeder guy said all that riding is a good sign that she's in heat today.

The breeder guy also said she has good flesh on her.  I think that means she's not skinny.  He said it's not easy to keep flesh on a dairy cow so we're doing a good job.  Whew!

In three weeks we'll watch to see if she goes into heat, although wouldn't it be ironic if she did and showed us?  Not going into heat is a good sign that a cow is pregnant, but if she goes into heat and doesn't show us, how would we know?  I think a vet can check her in two months to confirm she's pregnant, and we might do that, just to be sure.

If everything was successful today, 280 days is Nov. 1st and our time off begins Sept. 1st.  ...hmmm... that's a nice time to travel.