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Northeast Iowa | We've gone strictly timed A.I. after the CIDR reoval. If anything is in heat before the appointed time, we left them alone and bred off the timed system. Most of those won't be but 12-24 hours difference from their scheduled mating, so it's tough to decide which one sired the calf if you breed them both times. Murphy's Law says picking one of the two times will have me pick the wrong one.
My previous experience was with the one-shot 5-day synch program with just prostaglandin. I'd watch the whole group for natural heats and breed anything in heat. On Day 6, anything not yet bred was given prostaglandin (Lutalyse, Estrumate, etc.) and bred on observed heat for about four or five days after that. It would shrink the breeding season down to about 11 days and only cost a couple bucks per head since you'd only give about 75-80% of the herd one dose of prostaglandin. Nice system all around, but getting large groups of cows in for breeding got to be a chore when it was rainy and the pastures were a sloppy mess. The 5-day Co-Synch with CIDR program offered much better conception rates than all the other timed mating systems, so I went with that one.
I come from a dairy background, and we were 100% A.I. the whole time until we quit milking in 1976. As a little kid, I didn't even know there were Holstein bulls until I saw one somewhere. I was about five or six and asked my dad what the deal was on that cow that she looked so rough! That was a Holstein bull, I was told.
"They MAKE those? I thought they only made steers and heifers."
That's why very few kindergarteners have an Animal Science degree.
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AI vs Bulls
