Mating season: the birds, bees, cows and their needs

OPINION: Apparently, every morning for the past three weeks I’ve been handling ‘‘All Blacks’’’ semen. But I assure you, it’s not what you think.

It’s mating time on the farm. Taranaki’s 1,700 dairy farms have been transformed from bustling maternity wards into daily conga lines of horny ladies.

Farmers dedicate a lot of time to detecting cows on heat. Missed heats can cost significant amounts of money.

Some of the signs are easy to spot. The most obvious one is cows riding other cows.

Cows on heat hang out in Sexually Active Groups, or SAGs. SAGs are not to be confused with WAGs, which are the wives and girlfriends of high-profile professional athletes.

Cows in SAGS like to make a nuisance of themselves. They strut around the paddock in single file, usually while the rest of the herd is snoozing. They spend hours riding, nudging, sniffing and slobbering each other.

In the milking shed, a cow often won’t be in her usual spot if she’s on heat. My favourite pet cow #277 catapults herself to the front of the herd. She usually lingers at the back. Last week, the normally silent #217, spent the entire milking bellowing out to her mates. By the time she came past me I could see she had rub marks and was on heat.

There’s a long list of aides a farmer can use to tell if a cow is on heat. Everything from paint, to an adhesive card similar to an Instant Kiwi scratchy. Some even use electronic devices which start flashing when activated.

You have probably spotted many of them as you zap past herds of dairy cows grazing in roadside paddocks. Most cows have a strip of brightly-coloured paint above their tails. We use blue and green. Other farms prefer red or yellow.

Cows who have had a strong heat and been ridden hard will have no paint left on them.

Every day trained technicians zig-zag in an out of driveways on farms across Taranaki, artificially inseminating thousands of dairy cows.

Many use semen supplied by an elite team of bulls, which were recently described by the Sunday Star Times as the ‘‘All Blacks of bovine insemination’’. They’re bred by dairy farmers across New Zealand.

I love flicking through the glossy booklets sent out by semen companies. They’re packed with photos of the bulls and usually their mothers and a couple of their daughters. The cows all have clean, shiny coats and perfect udders. Many of them live on dairy farms scattered across Taranaki, places like Stratford, Opunake, Inglewood and Waitara.

Breeding figures for the dairy industry are staggering.

Between September and Christmas, about five-million straws of bull semen will be processed and dispatched by the Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC).

On the peak day in spring,

120,000 semen straws are dispatched nationally, according to the NZFarmer.co.nz. The co-op also exports one million frozen straws worldwide.

LIC told me one bull ejaculate can be processed into 5,000 to 7,000 straws of fresh semen for insemination.

That number is 10 times less if the semen is processed to be frozen in liquid nitrogen. I challenge you to remember that fact and bring it up with colleagues around the water cooler or vending machine at work.

Top AB technicians inseminate up to 10,000 cows a year, or 200-300 a day.

Last month LIC’s rival, CRV Ambreed, profiled one of its technicians 79-year-old Don Shaw, who lives in the Waikato. Over the past 62 years he’s inseminated an estimated 250,000 cows.

Collectively, CRV Ambreed’s technicians inseminate around

500,000 cows a year. Ensuring dairy farmers have access to the best and latest genetics is a major business.

One of the LIC’s top bulls, Sierra, was recently referred to as a ‘‘super dad’’. Prior to the start of the season he had 1,700 daughters in milking herds across New Zealand. A further 12,000 calved for the first time this spring.

LIC predicts another 100,000 will enter herds over the next few years.

But like everything, bulls come and go.

Many older dairy farmers will remember Athol Famous Prefect. He was one of the most utilised sires in the 1980’s. About 750,000 inseminations were completed using his semen, according to the NZ Holstein Friesian Association. He was the dad of one of my childhood pets, Precious.

Artificial breeding is a crucial part of New Zealand’s multi-billion dollar dairy industry. One of my goals is to become an AB technician. Hopefully I’d still be going at 79 like Don Shaw.