God Bless that granddaughter of yours. She is nothing better than animals for these kids when they are growing up. I put my daughter on a horse when she was three. She is now the Equine Specialist for the State of New Jersey. We will not discuss my son. He was allergic to horses so he played tennis and now he is a Criminal Trial Attorney.
He would have been a lot happier in the country I am sure!!!!
I never bred cows. I have been around them and milked etc. but I was too young and not able to hang around them during school. Horses were my thing. How long do you have to catch the heifer when she comes in? It must be difficult scheduling the inseminator? Very interesting.
When I first went to the breeding farm we did not have enough guys to help inseminate. So I learned from the very beginning and helped do it all. I was hired as office manager but they knew my horse background and took advantage of it.
The mare of course in the standardbred breedings never even sees the stallion. He is teased with another mare used for that purpose only. (a cheap mare. the mares being AI'd are so expensive they could get hurt and that is a no no). When the stallion is ready to ejaculate he is washed and cleaned and put on a "phantom mare" made out of leather and wood, he mounts her, we collect the semen in a leather sleeve just the temperature of a vagina of a mare, and he completes his task and we immediately take the sleeve with the semen into the completely sterile lab and check it for a sperm count and prepare it for the mares we are going to use it on. When that is all done, the house vet does the AI. In addition, the semen is also used for people who bring their mares to the farm to be bred and we used to ship some. That is why we did the sperm count to see how many mares we could get out of one collection. Unfortunately the horse breeding business in NJ is going down the drain due to the lack of money the State has. It could mean that the farm I worked at, which is the biggest, will no doubt close. I just spoke to the Marketing Director of the farm today about the future of the horse industry and he told me things were very serious.
We have very few dairy farms here anymore. Just heartbreaking.
I hope I did not bore you with the above, since I think most people have no idea the time, effort and money that goes into breeding these wonderful animals. Cows included. Correct timing and scheduling is so important that most people never think about the costs etc. It is no wonder the small farmers are all going into other farming or giving up all together.
Just one more thing of no interest to anyone but a farmer. I taught my daughter the facts of life by taking her to watch a cow drop a calf. More memories.
