Taming of the bulls-inseminators eliminated need for feisty bulls on farms, making work safer

Advent of inseminators eliminated need for feisty bulls on farms, making work safer

Have you ever found yourself running for your life with a large, angry bull chasing you? That fence you cleared with room to spare would have qualified you for the Olympic hurdles.

We had a Jersey bull on our farm when I was young. For safety, Dad usually kept him in the barn except when a cow was in heat. Then he let the bull out in the barnyard long enough to service the cow.

Bulls killed my grandfather's brother and another relative. They posed a lethal danger to every farmer and anyone who ventured into their territory.

Fortunately, not many bulls are found roaming the cow pastures these days. That removed one of many dangers farmers face. We can thank artificial insemination for that. The first A.I. cooperative was organized in the United States in 1938. In 1941, Tri-State Breeders Cooperative began in Westby. It's now called Accelerated Genetics. Even though it was within a couple of miles of our farm, it was several years before Dad began using them. He had them breed a few cows at first but kept the bull just in case the new artificial method didn't work. I imagine many farmers wondered if such a radical procedure would actually work.

To have artificial insemination, you need an inseminator, or "Bull Man" as I called them. Maybe because it was easier to say than inseminator when I was young. The Bull Man I remember is Keith Tainter, who's now retired and lives in Westby. I recently had a chance to talk with Keith when I brought my notepad and joined the coffee gang one afternoon at Central Express in Westby.

Keith started with Tri-State Breeders in 1948, when artificial insemination was still in its infancy. His ag teacher at Westby High School wrote a letter of recommendation to the general manager. Keith took a two-week course at UW-Madison. Then he rode with an inseminator for one month to learn the ropes. He took over Albon Sordahl's route when he became manager.

In those early days they used liquid semen because there was no way of preserving it. At the end of the day, any leftover semen was disposed of. They did carry two-day-old semen for some bulls if the farmer wanted to take a chance on it still being fertile. That changed with the advent of frozen semen. On May 29, 1953, the first calf born in the United States using frozen semen occurred and was named "Frosty."

In those early days they charged $5 to breed a cow and no charge for repeats. Keith said 72 percent of the cows took the first time. However, one time he went back for the same cow 17 times. Each time was free.

He covered a large territory that went west to the Missisippi River and to Richland Center in the southeast. He'd travel up to 475 miles in a day and put on 60,000 miles a year. He bred as many as 65 cows in a day and more than 100,000 cows during his years with Tri-State. Inseminators worked seven days a week in those days. Saturday evening calls were bred on Sunday morning, and they would get Sunday afternoon off. They also got five holidays a year off. Next time you complain about working a 40-hour week, think of inseminators and farmers. One time Keith needed a day off, and another inseminator, "Buster" Moon, covered Keith's route plus his own. Buster bred 105 cows that day.

In 1950, Keith was drafted and the manager thought he could get him deferred because he was needed by the farmers to service their cows. But Keith said, "I was ready for a vacation."

After his two-year "vacation" in the Army, in which he was with the 379th Evac Hospital, he returned to Tri-State.

I asked him about any unique experiences he had during his many years as an inseminator.

One time he went to the Nels Roiland farm. Norman Roiland said the cow was a real kicker, so he put Keith in a wooden silage cart and wheeled him up behind the cow. Keith bred the cow from the safety of the cart while the cow kicked at the cart.

Another time when they still used glass pipettes, he ended up in the gutter. He put the pipette containing the semen crossways in his mouth while he got ready to insert it in the cow. I won't go into the graphic, scientific explanation in a family paper, but every farm family knows what I mean. The cow jerked sideways, flipping Keith into the gutter and the glass broke in his mouth. He said it was much safer when they went to plastic pipettes that didn't break.

Another challenge in the early days was the condition of the side roads in the spring. He'd try to make as many calls as possible in the morning while the roads were still frozen. The big March snowstorm of 1959 was about the only time he couldn't get out of town to service his farmers.

He finally retired in 1982, after 34 years as an inseminator. I'll always remember Keith Tainter as our "Bull Man." He was an important part of the history of our farm and all the farms he serviced. He made life much safer for all those farmers by bringing the bull's semen to the farm and eliminating the need to keep those dangerous bulls around.

I ended up on the other side of a barn when I was a kid when I waltzed behind a cow when my grandpa was putting the milker on one of her udders.......he told me to NEVER WALK BEHIND A COW.........point well taken and remembered well to this day

The same thing is true of horses. Walking down an aisle of Belgian draft horses in 'head in' stalls can be very intimidating. Fortunately the big brutes are pretty mild mannered.

A cow did kick my grandmother, breaking her arm. Her grandchildren helped out in rotations of 2 at a time for about 6 weeks. I was in the last rotation. I have a lot of found memories from that week. Having a broken arm didn't slow grandma down all that much. She still slaughtered chickens, although we had to snare them. Since some folks have weak stomachs, I'll not go into too much detail on her technique, expect to say that no axe was involved, but galoshes and a flat rock were. :)

Well, on smaller operations (say, less than 50 head), you can do that. And in times past, many cattlemen did just that — just toss the bulls in with the cows, then collect up what they wanted to ship as time went on.

But now there’s a premium for uniformity. Part of that uniformity is getting a complete truckload of either steers or heifer calves, within a few pounds of each other. To get that, you need all the cows to drop their calves within, oh, about two weeks (plus one week, minus one week) of each other.

So you start by synchronizing the estrus (heat) of the cows. You run them through the chute (usually twice), once to inject them to cause them to drop their current cycle, once more to sync their next cycle.

If you’re a typical smaller ranch operation, now you have 250 to 400 head of cows ready to breed within a window of about 72 to 96 hours.

I don’t care if you’ve got the swingin’ stud to end all studs, he can’t breed up more than about 30 to 40 cows in a couple weeks. Now you’re faced with a situation where you need a whole bunch of bulls to cover possibly dozens of cows in a single *day*.

This would result in a wreck.

So you put heat indicators on the cows, and the cows that show heat you run through the chute (again) and you AI them.

The important upsides to the AI process now are:

1. The safety angle, covered above. There’s no faster way to get killed than get mixed in with a bull who is fixin’ to get laid. If you dare try to direct where his schwanzenstucker is going to go (ie, “You idiot, I want you to knock up *that* cow over there, not this one!”) you’ve got some big problems.

2. You can’t get your bull’s semen production up to a level to service all your cows (250 to 400). I don’t care if he’s sporting basketballs between his legs, ain’t gonna happen.

But... if you are milking him for semen all year long, and putting his semen on ice (liquid nitrogen, actually) for that one time in the year when you’re going to breed everthing in sight... well now, you can make your one bull’s semen go completely through the herd.

The issue here is genetics - if you wanted to use natural breeding on a lot of synch’ed cows, you’d have to have about one bull for ever 10 cows. That’s 25 to 40 bulls. And the rest of the year, those bulls are just eating up your feed, making a mess of your fences and generally being a pest. They’re expensive deadweights on your books, because they don’t make calves, and making calves is what the cow-calf business is all about.

3. OK, so what if you want to try some new genetics? You can order the semen you want, with the characteristics you want, and pay only 10’s to 100’s of dollars. A champion bull might run you $5K to $10K. A champion bull can also turn himself into very expensive hamburger by, uh... how do I put this delicately to a girl?

You’ve seen a bull’s schwanzenstucker, I’m sure. Well, in bulls (as in men) it is possible through, uh, over-eagerness and clumsy approaches to the “problem space” to fold that thing in half. When this happens, the bull is as good as done. Break that thing in half and his whole reason for being on your ranch is done and gone... and now you’re lucky if a $5K bull fetches $0.30/lb at the sale barn.

AI and mail-order genetics solves all this problem. If the semen goes bad, the most you’re out is possibly a couple hundred bucks for some high-priced semen, not thousands on the bull.

4. There is now sexed semen. (do a quick web search for “sexed semen” — you’ll see what I mean).

If you’ve checked out cattle prices, you know that uniformity sells. If you wanted the highest possible price for calves off a ranch, you want:

- black hides (ie, black angus)
- uniform weight (which you handle by uniform birth timing)
- uniform genetics (which you can have if you have one bull for the whole lot of calves)
- and steers only.

Well, sexed semen lets you deliver only males, which gets you the price premium. Natural breeding will give you about 50/50, just as you’d expect.

So, did you hear about the rancher with the prized bull? He was making big money servicing other’s cows...’til it went cross eyed.

Try as he may, he could not find a solution to the problem, ‘til one day a travelin’ salesman showed up.

He told that salesman, he would by everything that guy sold, if he could uncross that bull’s eyes.

So the salesman gets a length of pipe, small diameter, you know, and puts it up the bull’s...ahem, under his tail, puffs a huge blast of air...and the bull’s eyes are straightened out.

Well that rancher was happy and made the salesman happy, too.

Several months later....same thing happened to the bull. So the rancher gets a length of pipe and tries the prior solution.

After an hour of huffing and puffing, he is winded, whipped. So he calls for one of his hands to try for awhile.

Well that guy pulls out the pipe and puts the other end in.

The rancher asks “Why, did you do that?” The hand says...

“You don’t thin I’m going to blow on the same end you did, do you?”

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