Students learn methods to impregnate cows
By Lauren Hanvey
Staff Reporter

Although many classes at TCU have hands-on labs, one Ranch Management class goes a step further than most.

Every year, as part of the bovine reproduction class, Jim Link, director of Ranch Management and John Biggs, endowed chairman, takes the students to the Cleburne Livestock Auction to learn how to artificially inseminate cows and test them for pregnancy.

Ron Gill, professor and extension livestock specialist for Texas A&M University, helps teach the TCU Ranch Management students these skills.

“If you’re going to be in ranching, you need to know how to do (these things),” he said.

He said people who know how to do pregnancy testing and to artificially inseminate cows are more hirable in the ranching business.

Students had three days of instruction from Gill and three TCU Ranch Management teachers. Students had a chance to demonstrate their proficiency March 7 by performing the skills for evaluation by the instructors, Link said.

Josh Bray, a Ranch Management student who works on his family’s ranch in Paris, Texas, said he hopes to start doing most of the artificial insemination and pregnancy testing of his family’s cows.

He said it gets very expensive to have a professional technician do all the work. Going through this program should improve the number of successful pregnancies he is able to initiate artificially, he said.

“What you hope is that you’ll get 60 percent of them bred (with artificial insemination) and then turn (a) bull loose for the rest of them,” he said.

Gill said the most important part of the class is learning to palpate, or test the cows for pregnancy. He said having ultrasounds performed on cows costs about six times as much as doing the test by hand.

Cows are usually palpated once a year, he said. If a cow never gets pregnant, a rancher does not want to keep it because it can waste up to $400 a year, Gill said.

The benefit of artificial insemination is that a single bull with superior genetics can be used to generate hundreds more offspring than he could naturally, Link said.

“The main thing is to propagate really outstanding genetics over a large number of cows,” he said.

One bull with coveted genetics can sell for $125,000, Link said. That is because ranchers will pay up to $50 for one small straw containing semen from a superior-quality bull to artificially inseminate a single cow, he said. For this reason, usually only cows with good genetics get artificially inseminated, Link said.

“You take the good of both and make them better,” he said.

The teachers said they were pleased with this year’s student performance.

“This class has really done a great job,” said Jeff Geider, assistant director of Ranch Management and Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo professor.

l.e.hanvey@tcu.edu