As you may have read, we have a small herd of cows here at our farm. Most of them are previous 4H projects that we have kept on and bred and kept most of our baby girls. When we had a couple of them we would send them to another farmer to be bred for a couple months and retrieved them before winter snow hit. We now, however, had more than a handful to breed. My son's 4H heifer went to a neighbor for special breeding this year, so that left me with 6 of my own.
Artificial insemination, as we tried last year, is very time consuming requiring lots of watching and scheduling from me and multiple trips by the vet. It was very reasonably priced for 3 cows last year, but when we only had 1 calf this year he became one pricey calf! This year we happened on a bull that was on his way to the salebarn that would cost me a pretty penny, but we could take him to the salebarn and get most of our money back by fall. That was the whole plan, anyway.
This black bull was a purebred Angus that had a descent temperament. I have always been a little nervous to have a bull around! But, he did well at staying away from us for the most part and we steered clear of him.
The vet came to preg-check cows after the bull had been here almost 3 months and we no longer saw him breeding any of them for few weeks. We had 4 confirmed pregnant, 1 probably that jumped the gate before she was checked and 1 possibly that we did not check. We also had one negative heifer that had been with him for just over 2 months that we took to the sale barn with him. That was a lot better breeding ratio that the AI last year!
We sold the bull and only lost $300 on him, which is a small overall cost of breeding possibly 6 cows. I was hoping for a little more, but one never knows what the salebarn may bring.
Next year, we are planning to get a bull again as it is overall much easier and much greater breeding ratio. The only downfall is the huge expense to get one and renting one around here is over twice as much as he actually ended up costing us.
