You put your hand WHERE!?!?!

“Why would you put your hand up a cows butt!?!”—this is a question I got a lot as a kid.   Raising registered Limousin Cattle, I grew up around artificial insemination (A.I.).  It was something I was taught about at a young age and watched and helped my father do many times.  I even went to A.I. school my Junior year of high school and started A.I.-ing the cattle at our farm.  Trying to make my friends understand exactly what it was that we did was almost as hard as explaining why we did it.  So I’m going to make this a two-part blog post.  I’ll explain what artificial insemination is in this post and then why we use it as well as its’ importance in the cattle industry in the second post.

A semen listing in a catalog

Artificial Insemination in cattle works a lot like it does in most species including humans.  The farmer or rancher makes his decisions on what bull he wants to breed his heifers or cows to and purchases the semen from one of many semen companies or from a breeder.  While not everyone has their own, it’s always a great idea to have your own semen tank to store you semen in when it arrives until you need to use it.  Semen is stored in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen at -321 degrees F.

Semen Tank

Now, A.I. isn’t something that just anyone can do.   You for sure need some training before you go and waste  that expensive semen by not knowing what you’re doing.  Semen handling is important too, you can watch a funny video below about semen handling that some students at Mississippi State University made for their Physiology of Reproduction lab and they will explain the process of getting the semen ready to use.

Now once you get ready to actually perform the task, you are going to need some supplies.  A shoulder-lenght glove, an A.I. gun loaded with the semen, lubricant, and a lack of fear of getting poop on you!

With the glove on your non-dominant hand, you put that lubricated hand into the cows’ rectum.  This allows you to feel through the rectal lining to feel the reproductive tract of the female.  Here, you feel to find the cervix of the female; I would liken it to the feel of a turkey neck.  You insert the semen gun into the vagina of the female with your dominant hand.  Your goal is to get the gun through the cervix and deposit the semen at the base of the uterine horns.  While this sounds fairly easy to describe, it’s a whole other story to try to do it.  I would show you a video, but you can’t really see anything because it all takes place inside.  The picture below may give you a better idea about what you are feeling for and what's going on.

Illustration of A.I.

This was a rough and dirty description of A.I.  but maybe the links I gave can give you some more visuals to help you better understand.   It’s really one of those things that you have to see and/or do to really understand it, but I hope this gives you a little idea about what beef cattle producers do to help bring you that beef on your plate.

Now watch for part two of this post where I talk about WHY we use Artificial Insemination.