05/15/2026
Tuesday we pulled CIDRs on our registered herd. Like we mentioned before, we use the 5-day CO-Synch+CIDR which means that Tuesday was a long day!
We pulled CIDRs and gave the first shot of prostaglandin and then 8 hours later gave the second shot of prostaglandin.
When we pull CIDRs and give the 1st shot we also spray paint our cows. Pretty weird right? The lady that rang Bruce up when we bought the spray paint thought we were weird too when his response to her question about having a fun project was that we would be painting cows.
But here is why we paint our cows, on AI day we use 7-10 different sires. If we didn't sort our cows, we would have to write down each cows tag number in the order that they came into the alley, then find which sire they got bred to, then thaw that semen, and make sure the right cow got the right semen when she came into the AI barn. This creates a lot of room for error, and means everyone has to be on their A game.
By painting our cows we are able to quickly sort our cows into their different sire groups . So if she had blue paint, then she gets bred to Bull A and all the blue cows go into 1 pen, if she had green paint then she gets bred to Bull B and all the green cows go into and different pen and so on and so forth. We are then able to bring a whole pen of blue cows that all get bred to the same sire into the working facilities and we know there are X amount of them and thus we are able to thaw semen and AI cows much quicker which allows us to stay within the 4 hour breeding window we have with the protocol we use.
Now we still do some double checking by reading the cows tag number off when she comes into the barn and checking her off a list, but that goes pretty quick.
Would you ever spray paint your cows? What systems do you use to stay within your breed window when you AI to several different sires?
