Conception?
October 22nd, 2015 · 2 Comments · Posted in farming
On Tuesday I gave our Jersey cow Emily the last in a series of hormone shots to get her pregnant and wouldn’t you know the needle was bent and I watched precious drops of that magic elixir spill onto the ground. Would 10 days of “synchronizing” Emily be for naught.
Eighteen hours later, our local inseminator, Joe, donned his blue arm condom and with hand about a mile up Emily’s butt declared she was in prime breeding mode. The hormones had worked: Her reproductive organs, as best Joe could tell, were fully engorged, the ovaries pointing to all-systems-go.
He then pulled a stainless tube from a pants pocket and injected the go juice toward what we hoped would be a receptive egg. The donor, Joe informed us, was a Red Angus bull named Lock and Load.
We won’t know for sure whether Emily is pregnant for some time. We could call in the vet to perform yet another sonogram, which would tell not only whether the breeding was successful but the sex of the embryo.
Cows gestate for nine months. So Emily would be giving birth sometime in July. We would normally hope for a spring calving, but at this point we’ll take just about anything we can get. Meanwhile, Emiy’s first calf–Del–continues to nurse and get bigger day by day. For the longest time he was a shy calf, but lately he’s taken to having his head scratched and under his chin.
We’re just glad to be out from under all those hormone shots.
I heard that you can send out a milk sample for a pregnancy test.
Interesting