It's Rosie's Turn Now

One (perhaps) strange thing about owning family cows is that we keep track of their reproductive cycles.  Obviously, if you keep milk cows, the object is to keep them in milk.  The only way to do that is to ensure they keep giving birth to calves.  A cow's cycle is roughly every three weeks - from 18 to 24 days.  We keep our eyes open for activity.  What activity, you ask?  Well, when a cow goes in heat, the little bulls begin to follow behind them.  The other cows will actually jump up on the backs of the cow in heat.  It gets kind of crazy.

We watch when this occurs for each cow and mark down the date on a calendar.  Then we begin making plans to get our cows together with a registered Jersey bull.  Sometimes we re-breed with some of our own bull calves, but we try to introduce new genetics to our little herd.  We like to have them bred with a registered Jersey bull as a registered Jersey heifer will bring a higher asking price upon time to sell her.

We have a neighbor down the street that has a nice, big Jersey bull.  He charges a $100 stud fee.  I contacted the neighbor and arranged for us to bring Rosie to his house today.  She should cycle by Wednesday or Thursday of this week.  After evening chores, we loaded her into the trailer.

But it isn't just her we're bringing.  We're bringing Aussie, her bull calf with her.  His job will be to keep her nursed down so we don't have to milk her this week.  If we didn't send him with her, we'd have to drive down every day to milk Rosie out.  This is not the safest thing as we don't know the bull and he may not take to kindly with us having access to "his woman" during her time there.  So we got them both loaded into the trailer.  Rosie is good at getting into the trailer as she's had experience from livestock shows.  Aussie has not, but a bucket of sweet feed is a good motivator if you put it up in the trailer just out of reach.  Pretty soon, both were loaded up and we traveled north for about 4 miles.

We unloaded them into the neighbor's pasture after a short drive.  The animals went through a brief session of introductions and seemed to be getting along well.  The bull is big and grey.  He's in the center of the photo below.

In a few days, once the bull has done his job, our friend will call us and we'll drive back over and pick up Rosie and Aussie.  We'll bring her back home and mark the calendar for roughly 3 weeks and we'll watch her closely.  If she doesn't go back into heat, we'll assume she'd bred and will look forward for a baby calf in May 2020.