Fertility issues doomed Queen Arrow’s chance of winning a blue ribbon at the Jefferson County Fair.
Queen Arrow, Teenage Daughter’s 4-H project, is a two-year-old Red Angus cow. The Queen has failed to produce a calf despite a lengthy cohabitation with a bull and numerous rounds of artificial insemination. The judge at the Jefferson County Fair Beef and Dairy Show made it clear the Queen’s inability to have calves is very, very bad.
At first the judge made nice, positive comments. As Teenage Daughter paraded the Queen around the show barn, he complimented the cow’s straight back, her feminine head and her nice rib cage. Then came the dreaded word: HOWEVER, followed by his opinion (formed after 20 years in the cattle business) that Queen Arrow should have given birth by now. A two year old cow with no calf is “pretty useless”, he concluded. In other words, the Queen’s next appearance should be on a hamburger bun.
“Maybe she would have gotten pregnant if we had used more expensive bull semen,” I suggested to my husband as Queen Arrow left the show ring.
I know about bull semen because I had to buy some once. My daughter was ten and it was time for her 4-H cow, a Hereford heifer named Starburst, to experience motherhood. My husband had a last minute crisis on the farm so I had to drive to our local sperm bank, North American Breeders in Berryville, Virginia.
This family run operation stores over 1 million doses of bull semen in tanks of liquid nitrogen. Clients bring bulls to Berryville where the semen is collected (I really do not want to know how) and stored for distribution around the world. In 2003, the company collected over 400,000 sperm samples. The price of a single dose ranges from $10 to $200. The better a bull’s pedigree, the higher the price.
My husband’s instructions to me were very clear: don’t pay over 20 bucks.
My daughter and I purchased a dose (each dose is stored in a straw) and returned to the farm. Our vet met us and instructed me to heat some water to a temperature of 96 degrees to thaw the frozen contents of the straw. “Don’t let the water get too hot in the microwave,” he warned,” or you will kill the sperm.” I am pretty sure that is the last time I will hear the terms “microwave” and “sperm” used in the same sentence.
Unfortunately, Starburst did not get pregnant. Every time I burn popcorn in the microwave I think of that cow and how I probably made the water too hot and killed off all the sperm.
For whatever reasons, all of Teenage Daughter’s cows have had reproduction problems, whether it be getting pregnant, staying pregnant or giving birth to healthy calves. The judge at the Jefferson County Fair would probably categorize all of them “pretty useless”.
He is right from purely an economic sense. But the cows have been productive in other ways. They have helped Teenage Daughter win a State 4-H speaking contest (her topic was Polled Herefords) and a ribbon at the State Science Fair for a project on whether human pregnancy testing kits work on cows (they don’t). Teenager Daughter wants to be a vet and I know it’s because of her experience raising cows.
Even I have learned a productive lesson from our parade of barren cows:
Spend more than $20 for bull sperm and know your microwave’s temperature settings before you re-heat it.