Thursday, June 6, 2013

Meet Gomer




This is Gomer. Yesterday I talked a little about our marker bull  well this is him.We bought him at the sale barn just for this job, we will keep him until fall then he will go into the freezer. The thing on his head is a chin ball marker it has green paint in it. and the thing around his front is a skirt. When a cow comes into heat Gomer will try to ride her, and in the process will get green paint all over her so this way we know she is ready to be bred. The skirt keeps him from breding her. ( I know take all the fun away lol). He is quite the ladies man, yesterday he was in with the neighbors cows trying to court them.

 
We will keep him in with the cows for a month, time for all the cows to cycle and be bred. Afterwards we will turn a clean up bull out with the cows to breed what was missed. We can take the dates that we AIed and calculate when the calves will be born in the spring. In The fall when we wean the calves off the mama cows we will preg. check to make sure we have no open cows ( not pregnant) and if they are open we will sell them. No since in feeding a cow that isn't going to throw a calve in the spring. A lot of people will just turn a few bulls out with the cows to breed but the way we do it we have a little more control over when we calve and we know who the sire is for each calf. We can also bred milk stock to my milk cow, and hopfully one of these days she will give me a heifer instead of all the little bulls she has thrown the last few years. So any way this is how we breed our cows.

2 comments:

  1. thanks for all the info. I so enjoy reading all of things you are doing this time of year.

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  2. Very Interesting. We always had to take our goats to the sire. It was a stressful process, getting them in , bred and back home. Then waiting to see if they caught. We had one doe who didn't want to leave the buck...it took four people and about an hour to get her in the trailer. Goats are far more fragile than cows, you can't really "encourage" them like you can with cows. They take it badly. Anyway, it looks like you've been busy! I hope you have a good weekend!

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