Family Farm Friday #47: Bull Semen and Bonding The Results Show

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” ~Winston Churchill

Show of hands, how many of you remember my post called "Bull Semen and Bonding" from last spring? Well, this was one of my post popular blogs to date (thank you catchy title!) so I wanted to give you an exciting update. That's right folks, we have results of our semen selection in the form of baby calves! (If only Ryan Seacrest could host this results show....)

For ranchers, having babies born is the most exciting time of the year. (If you missed my blog all about baby livestock, click here). After months of figuring and thinking and planning about which bull to use, it's awesome to see the outcome. Because I want everyone who reads my blog to get a sense of how this feels, I thought I would share that excitement with you guys today! Here we go.

So, as you remember from the Bull Semen and Bonding post, my family spent a lot of time pouring over bull semen catalogues trying to decide which bulls we would breed to which cows. And you may remember from this post that, in the end, we bred our AI (artifical insemination) cows to four different bulls: Indian Outlaw, Ali 2 (both of those were Dad's choice), Nationwide (Little Brother's pick) and Bojo (my selection). Just a quick FYI--we actually only AI about 10 cows, and the other 60 or so are bred by bulls that we own.

Calf Number 1

Our first baby is out of cow #124. We are pretty excited about this little bull calf.

This calf is out of a bull called Ali 2. This bull is known for having high quality calves, with a low birthweight (which means easy calving for the cows).

Now, to show you how complicated all of this can get, we always consider the bull who is the father of the cow (the baby calf's grandfather basically) when thinking about what bull to breed to. So, for example, 124 is out a bull called Total Solution.

So we take that into consideration when deciding which bull we want to AI her to each year. It's quite the complicated family tree that gets going on!

Calf Number 2

The second baby is this little heifer calf. She's cute, right?

Her daddy is Indian Outlaw.

My dad was intrigued by this bull, even though we almost always AI to black bulls, so he had to give him a try (remember how this ruined his Father's Day present??) This year we just bred him to a commercial black cow (meaning no great genetics, and no AI in her bloodline) and it worked out pretty well, so we are excited to try him on a couple of red heifers that we have next year.

Calf Number 3

Calf number 3 is out of Nationwide. (Sadly I don't have a picture of him....apparently he's not online!) This is our first year to try this bull, so we are excited to see how this little fella turns out! So far, we really like what we see.

The Missing Calf

You'll notice that I don't have a Bojo calf to show you. Well, I guess you might as well share in the disappointment of ranching too, because my cow, Bonus, didn't breed by AI apparently. The good news is that she is bred and will be having a calf soon, but it won't be out of Bojo. Instead, it will be out of our "clean up bull" who we put in with the cows after they are AI'ed just in case they didn't take. It would be like expecting a baby from Matthew McConaughey and getting one from Charlie Sheen. (Okay, it's not that bad, sorry for the insult, RedMan, but the Blonde Oklahoma Girl helped me come up with that it it was freaking funny!) Sometimes, that's how the chips fall. There's always next year!

Hopefully you found this interesting and feel like you have a better idea of the decision making process that goes into breeding cows. In a couple of months, I'll be looking for bulls to breed The Bettys to.....maybe I'll suggest a few and take a blog vote! Thoughts on that?