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November 19, 2018

Breeding Policy: Hybrid cows, bulls and Record Keeping

Importance of hybrid cows and the associated Records 

Healthy cows is the key for a successful dairy farming business.   Animals with good progeny also need special care and attention.  For this we already learnt about dairy farm with loose housing and silage making in the articles here and here.

All these modern techniques are useful only if we rear quality breeds in our dairy farm.   Cows having inherent low milk production capacity and having low disease resistance, won’t give good results even with all other things being good.

Thus, having quality crossbreed cow in our dairy farm is desirable.

Now, where do you find such quality cows ?

Guaranteed high quality cow on sale in market ?  No, it is a rare event.

Even if somebody guarantees high quality cows, or you purchase the cows from known dairy farms only, still they would be pretty expensive.    And even after such a investment, your profit or high milk production is not assured.   Your farm is still prone to same constraints.

It is thus, always better to produce it in our own farm rather than buying them in market.   It is definitely possible to produce quality cows in your own farm.  We’ll teach you how.

To produce quality cows, the traditional methods of mating bull and insemination are not useful.  We need to use artificial insemination methods with high-quality Bull straws.

What is artificial insemination

Sperms from high quality bulls are stored in liquid nitrogen at ultra-low temperature for many years. Trained Veterinarians then use these straw of bull semen of high quality to release sperms in the uterus of the cow to make the cow pregnant.  This process is called as artificial insemination.

With this we can get semen of high quality Bulls.  Cows born this way are found to produce as much as 6000 liters of milk per milk cycle.

Care to be taken in artificial insemination

Artificial insemination is not new to India.  Most dairy farmers know about it.   Many of them are already using artificial insemination since years.   Still, we have not been able to reap the actual benefits.

Why is it so? Why we are not able to make profits by using modern methods such as artificial insemination ?

One of the major reason is same bull semen for multiple generations of a cow.   Ignorant dairy farmers have let veterinarians use the same semen straw for impregnating mother, her daughter and her grand daughter.  The famous bull, Tejas is a great example.

This leads to inbreeding.   Resultant cow is often borne with genetic deformities.

We must therefore, ensure that different bull semen is used for successive generations of the cow.

But how can the ordinary dairy farmer ensure this?  How will he remember which cow was impregnated with which semen straw ?  It looks very difficult to keep track of.

There is a simple way to do it.

You have to tag your cow.

Record Book and Tagging

You should tag all your cows with unique numbers.   For example, Sadashiv has given 11,12,13,14 serial numbers to all his four cows.

Similar serial numbers should be given to all the calves for example- if three  of the cows produce three calves, they should be numbered 15, 16, 17 and so on.

If artificial insemination is carried out, Sadashiv should write the tag number of the cow.

 

Similarly, there is also unique number on the semen straw.  The same should be recorded at the time of artificial insemination.

For example, on 5th November the cow with serial number 14 was inseminated with sperms form bull with serial number 1005.   All these details should be noted in our documentation diary.

Sadashiv should write in his small notebook the tag number of the cow. and semen straw number of the bull along with date of artificial insemination.

Record should be kept of Artificial insemination date, date of birth of calves,  cow tag no, semen straw number, pregnancy detection date etc.

Note that, if the cow number 14 produces calf number 18.  Then, while inseminating heifer number 18, we should never use semen straw  of bull 1005.  If this is allowed to happen, the next generation will be prone to diseases and might produce much less milk.

Dairy farmers in India adopted insemination with advanced methodologies but they failed to note down the name or serial number of the Bull they had used with a particular cow.

In absence of this information and carelessness of stakeholders,  subsequent generations of cows were of low quality genes and low power.  These animals fell sick more often resulting in losses.

Apparently high quality cows then produced very low milk yield.  The farmers which diligently kept records reaped huge benefits from artificial insemination as successive generations of cows produced more milk than the previous.

In artificial insemination, the most important part is keeping note of which semen straw are being used.

Let us once again go through the steps for artificial insemination

  1. Tag your cow
  2. The semen straw from which you are using for artificial insemination, will have details about the Bull. Note the date, tag no of cow and the semen number of bull.
  3. Once you use bull for a particular cow don’t use the same bull’s straw for any of the next generation of this cow
  4. For every new generation use semen straw from a different bull
  5. If a bull is born from one cow don’t use his semen for next generation of the same cow

If milk producer starts using all these techniques precisely, the next generation of cows will definitely produce 10 % to 20% additional milk volume compared to the previous generations.

 

 

One Comment on “Breeding Policy: Hybrid cows, bulls and Record Keeping

S. Nagaraj
April 21, 2020 at 3:21 am

Thank you, All are useful message.

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