Thursday, July 26, 2007

Today is dry off day, which means we stop milking the cows that are 60 days from calving so they can have a rest and get ready to calve. It also means Thursday is moving day, because the cows we dry off come from pen 5, the low-producing pen, so cows from the high producing pens move into pen 5 to replace the ones we dried off, and cows from the far dry pen (60-30 days from calving) move to the close-up dry pen (30-0 days from calving). The cows we put in far dry and close up all need to be weighed and get shots, so it makes for a pretty full morning at the very least.

In the afternoon, Wanda’s husband, Jerry, gave a talk on cow evaluation. He works for Select Sires, which is the company that provides semen to us. Part of their job is to evaluate and score cows and bulls on 17 traits so that cows can be inseminated with bulls whose traits will improve upon the traits of the cow. The 17 traits are stature, dairy character, strength, body depth, rump angle, legs-side view, foot angle, fore udder, front teat placement, front teat length, rear udder height, rear udder width, udder support, udder depth, pelvic width, legs-rear view, and rear teat placement. For some of the traits, a high score is desirable, such as for strength and dairy character, although these should be balanced. For other traits, like rump angle and fore udder, a moderate score is ideal. It was very interesting to see the power point Jerry had, with extremes and ideals of each trait, because after paying attention to all of it, I could really see the differences in cows once we went out in the barn. It’s just knowing what to look for. For instance, dairy character means the cow has sweeping, angled ribs, a long neck, and fine skin. I didn’t even notice that our cows ribs were angled (in comparison to beef cattle whose ribs are nearly perpendicular to the ground) until it was pointed out.

The image below is from the Canadian Holstein Association website and it is the closest thing I could find to the chart we looked at.

1 comment:

Barbara said...

I've heard of "pie charts" but never cow charts. . .