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Faunsdale, AL | Keep on posting Jim. I enjoy seeing your pictures. Most folks on here aren't going to take the time to make and post photos about what they're doing, so it keeps the board interesting and active when someone or a few folks go to the trouble. I have seen that kind of outburst run a guy off of other online forums, and it was a bad thing long term.
There are boards that are close to being just a blog for the few regulars that post on there and their responses to others' posts seemed to be pretty much intended to keep things that way, but I have never felt that way about yours.
It's amazing how many bulls' breeding career is shortened by injury or death. So freezing semen makes sense and the time to do it is when they're young. If you wait until you've used the bull a couple of years and have nice calves coming, you may find his semen quality has gone down etc. You can also have trouble with semen quality on young bulls coming off feed/sale, but not so often.
On the other hand, semen tanks the world over are full of semen on bulls that are so out of date, no one will ever use it. In a small herd, where you're using the bull for natural service, unless something happens to him, you won't likely have any use for the semen because at some point a good part of the herd will be his calves.
With dairy bulls it takes a lot longer to know if you want more semen on one, and by that time, the likelyhood that something will be wrong with him is even greater. Just went through this last year on a 5 year old. We had frozen semen on him as a yearling and used him both natural service and AI for a year or so. When a good crop of his daughters came along, I decided we could use a whole lot more semen on him, before he got any older.
We had the dickens of a time getting any frozen. Part of that was the folks at our stud. I couldn't convince them to just freeze what the bull was producing and do the best job they could with it. Caught one of the tecs in a good mood and she froze 35 or 40 units and shipped it to me, but wouldn't do any more. They kept collecting him and checking, we brought him home for 6 months and took him back for more of the same etc. So it took a year and finally they decided to "clean up" his semen before freezing and finally froze the whole order. Long story short, the cleaned up semen gets just the same conception as the cruddy stuff that was frozen initially and about as good as any other semen we used. It just looks a lot better, so they felt better about it I guess. Good thing is we finally got the semen frozen and are getting calves.
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new bull jumpin at genex
