The Moos Room™

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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG3 is here. Emily, Brad, myself, we are trying to recover from some Olympic drama. Emily has just explained to us everything going on in the world of figure skating, I think Brad and my heads are still spinning, so we're recovering from that. Emily is working on a lack of sleep from keeping up with all of this stuff, too. Forgive us if we're a little off our game today as we sort through all of that.
Emily: Thanks, Joe, for saying that. I'm going to be slow and not talk a lot. I appreciate that.
Joe: You're welcome. There's good reasons, though. We got to keep up with that drama. All the stuff going on, we'll know more by the time this comes out, but at the time we don't know quite what's going on yet.
Emily: This will be a nice relic when we do know more. Come back to this.
Joe: Exactly, lots going on. We've done some dairy episodes hopefully you got those listened to with Lisa Groetsch. That was an amazing guest and really thankful to her for being on. Today, we're going to switch and go to beef because we got to keep addressing the beef stuff and when we're talking about this time of year, calving has already started for a lot of people things that you got ready and what you're going to do, it's already too late to change too much. We're going to talk about the next step and really the next thing coming up is a breeding soundness exam for your bull.
Who you're going to be using, who you're counting on to make you profitable next year. We're really going to focus on that today. A little bit on what's changed in the recent years with recommendations and how that works, but reviewing why it's important, what it really consists of, and what you should be looking for as a producer when you're getting those done.
Emily: Joe, let's maybe put the obvious question right away and that is, if I'm a producer, why should I do this?
Joe: To me, it's one of the cheapest insurance policies you have for your cow-calf operation. If you're going to put your bull out there and you're going to count on him to get animals pregnant and get you calves for your calf crop next year, we all know how important it is to get as many animals pregnant as possible and get them pregnant in a timely manner. Your calf distribution or your calf window, your calving window, if we have a problem with a bull and we don't know it. We either don't get a whole lot of animals pregnant, which is a complete disaster.
Or we get them pregnant but late in the calving window or completely spread out. A lot of different things can happen with that calving distribution that makes you less profitable. Most of it is just a very cheap insurance policy to give you the best chance of having the biggest, most uniform, tight-calving distribution as possible.
Emily: It sounds like a breeding soundness exam is a really good management tool for producers to use.
Joe: Absolutely, management tool. Then that's what it is. It's a management tool to give you some peace of mind that that bull is still good and things are looking good. One of the things that we get focused on when we're talking about a bull breeding soundness exam is the semen quality. That's what everyone wants to focus on, that's what everyone wants to see but that's not the only thing that we're talking about with a breeding soundness exam because a bull can't just have good quality semen. There's other requirements to get cows pregnant.
It can't just be that. I think that's one of the things that we need to touch on is, what else is it? There's so many other things that are involved in this breeding soundness exam. It's not just looking at a microscope and looking at those sperm and seeing if they're motile and progressively motile and making sure that they're normal. There's so much more to it.
Brad: Take us through a breeding soundness exam. What do we do? If you have a producer that's got a bull or you purchase a bull somewhere, what should they do and how do we go about doing that?
Joe: One of the biggest things, and Emily is always rolling her eyes at me and has already made fun of me for this, today even.
Emily: Wait, let me guess. Is it consult with your veterinarian?
Joe: It's one step further than that. It's consult with the veterinarian that you trust.
Emily: Oh, no.
Joe: Because--
Emily: Not just any old veterinarian off the street department.
Joe: I'm going to say that very honestly, there's people that keep up with certain pieces of practices better than others and that's just because there's so much to learn and there's so much to know. Stuff is changing constantly, especially when we're talking about the recommendations revolving around some of these things. You got to find someone who knows this and they are keeping up with the most up-to-date practices and they're doing these breeding soundness exams correctly.
If you get into a situation where there's really high volume and someone who's not keeping up with what's going on in the industry, then you get into bad situations where you've got people cutting corners, looking at the wrong things or outdated things and then you get in a bad spot where that breeding soundness exam isn't worth all that much. You got to find someone you trust to do this. I would encourage people if you buy a bull, especially for any big money, if they come with a breeding soundness exam, that's great if you trust that.
It's also worth it maybe to do it again with a veterinarian you really, really trust to make sure that everything's still good. With the breeding exam itself, that's the first step. Find a veterinarian you trust. Then after that, my biggest thing that I want to see is I want to see that bull get off the trailer. I really do. If you're bringing him to a hauling facility or even if someone's coming to you to do the BSE, I want to see those bulls walk. I want to see them move around the pen and see if they can just do the basics. Are they limping or not? Can they see?
I like checking eyes to make sure they can see. Are they acting normal in all those ways? Those things are really important.
Brad: Because I think most people are thinking if you do a breeding soundness exam, it just means can they get a cow or a heifer pregnant? Most of the time we think about sperm and semen quality. However, if they can't walk and they're out on pasture, you got problems too. That's one thing that we need to at least in my mind is think about, is thinking about the other things that what a breeding soundness exam could be.
Joe: I don't want to put that bull through the stress of being collected and looking at semen if I already know that he's limping. If he's limping, he fails. I'm going to fail him no matter what. He's not a satisfactory breeder if he's limping. If I can see that he's blind in one eye, he fails. He's not a satisfactory breeder either. That stuff is something that I look at right away. I also want to look at condition too, because I think most people know that I hate fat bulls. It's one of my biggest pet peeves.
If I can see all that before I even get to the shoot, there's a lot of times that I'll fail bulls before I even collect them. I won't collect them because they failed already. There's no reason to collect them. Let's fix, if we can, whatever's wrong and then come back and collect them when that bull has a fair chance at passing the exam.
Brad: When we think about a breeding exam, obviously we're thinking about semen quality and sperm counts on a bull. What should we be looking for? What should a producer expect when you collect a bull? What is good? What is not good? What do we think about?
Joe: It's different than looking for this bull will get cows pregnant or this bull will not get cows pregnant. That's a pretty simple distinction. I can find all the bulls that are 100% infertile. That's an easy find. What we're really trying to do with this breeding soundness exam is weed out the bulls that are sub-fertile, so they're not quite fertile as they should be. That's what we're looking for. When a bull fails, a breeding soundness exam, especially when it comes to the sperm quality, they might actually be able to get cows pregnant.
They might, but that's not what we're trying to cut off. We're not trying to do that. We're trying to find the best bulls and make sure that we're moving the industry forward. We're trying to cut out the bulls that are going to be below certain standards that we have set for performance when it comes to reproductive efficiency. What we're really looking for is to say, "All right, when this bull passes this exam, I want to be able to say that they can breed 60% of the cows that they're put on in the first 21-day cycle."
That's what I'm looking for. Then if I leave them out there out to 40 days, 60 days, 90 days, they're going to get 90% of the cows pregnant. That's what I'm looking for. What I'm trying to cut out is that that animal that's going to get 30% of the cows pregnant in that 1st 21-day cycle, those are the bulls I'm trying to cut out. Yes, they might get them pregnant, but not in good enough production numbers to make someone successful.
Brad: Well, I'm not the beef guy. You're the veterinarian. You know everything. This is your shameless plug.
Joe: I don't know everything.
Brad: Joe doesn't know everything. He doesn't know everything. You think about it, can we see differences between young bulls and old bulls? If we keep a bull around more than one year, should we be doing a exam every year? Or is it just we did it once and it's good? Because I can imagine that some people are keeping bulls around more than once and what do we expect there?
Joe: Yes, that's a really important point, Brad. Young bulls and old bulls perform differently when we put them on cows. We can get into that in a separate episode as far as stocking density and how many cows you're going to put on what age bull. Really there's specific criteria when it comes to some of the physical characteristics of these bulls depending on age, the big one being scrotal circumference. Scrotal circumference is important for two major things. One, it has a relationship with how much volume of sperm there is, which in the more volume, the better, obviously, for getting cows pregnant.
Then it also has a relationship to the age of puberty of that animal's offspring. There's a correlation between the bigger the scrotal circumference, the earlier the daughters from that animal will get to puberty. That's one of the things that we're looking for. Then it's a big difference between the different ages and there's charts that show us exactly where animals should be, and if they're not there, they actually failed the exam. Yes, there's differences in ages, and this is something you should be doing every year. There's all sorts of weird stuff that bulls get up to.
They ride each other. They ride cows during the breeding season, but they also ride each other when it's not breeding season if they're housed together, and all sorts of weird stuff can happen and injuries can happen there too. One of the things we're doing in a breeding soundness exam is yes, evaluating feet, legs, eyes, doing a physical exam basically, but then we're going one step further and saying, "All right, I want to visualize the penis itself and make sure there's no abnormalities or deformities with that," or old injuries that have scarred down in weird ways.
I'm going to actually look at the testicles and palpate them to make sure that I don't feel anything weird. Frostbite's a huge deal in Minnesota, and if that happens over winter and you don't catch that until after breeding season, that bull's not going to really do well for you if he has frost-bitten testicles from over winter, and it's just not going to go well. Those are the kind of things we're looking for in addition to looking at sperm quality and those are the things that you have to get done at a breeding soundness exam.
Brad: At what age should we be doing breeding soundness exams for the first time on a bull? Some people-- an experience I had, people like to use bulls maybe earlier than what they should or what's the benchmark? What should we be considering?
Joe: Well, it's a tough deal. You want to get them done before you use them. That's obviously the point of the breeding soundness exam. The idea is that you have to get it done with enough time to retest if you need to. For me, when I think about it, when are we really using yearling bulls? If they're yearlings, they're 11, 12, 13, 14 months old when we actually use them. Personally, I don't like to count on yearling bulls to do much, but a lot of people do and that's fine, but spermatogenesis takes 60 days. That's two months ahead of when you use them is really when you want to do this exam or about then.
If we take that backwards, the youngest that I would do would be a 9, 10, 11-month-old bull. When we get younger than that, especially even when we get down to nine months, it's very difficult to evaluate that bull and be fair. A better way to look at that is how big are they compared to mature size. We can also use scrotal circumference to guess at when puberty started and there's measures for that, but I think that that's the youngest I would do. I really don't like doing less than 10 months if I can help it, but you got to have time.
If you're going to use them, it's got to be before you use them.
Brad: We've all heard those experiences from farmers, and I think the big thing is just to get your bull examined or tested because we've all heard those, and maybe you've been on those farms, Joe, where you go out there and it's like you got 30 heifers to check and there's one pregnant, and then the farmer goes, "Well, I don't know what happened." It's like, "Oh, well, did you test the bull?" Even from a dairy perspective, I know dairy farmers that have had breeding bulls for heifers and nobody's pregnant, and they didn't do an exam or check the semen quality or sperm counts.
It's unfortunate that that happens, but I think we hear of it all too often, at least in my opinion. You should get it tested before you use it, even if you buy it from somebody else. Maybe they had it tested. Ask for that kind of information. What's your take on all this?
Joe: It's the same. Especially for dairy, I've tested plenty of dairy bulls and you need to, because again, when we talk about this reproductive cycle or high fertility cycle, if you throw that off by not getting animals pregnant in a timely fashion, it throws off-- We're talking not just, "Oh, that one heifer is maybe off a month compared to where she would've been otherwise." We're talking a bunch of heifers are off by a month or two. Then that just filters on to when they're in their first lactation and then in their second lactation and when do they get pregnant and are they over-conditioned by the time they get pregnant the first time?
All of that filters in. It's not just, "Okay, they didn't get pregnant quite when I wanted them to." It affects years potentially down the road. If you look at it that way, the small amount of money you're going to pay to get that bull tested is definitely worth the insurance. It's insurance. That's what you're doing with this. It's not 100% guaranteed. I'll definitely say that things happen and the BSE doesn't test everything.
Emily: All right. Joe, you've really emphasized that a breeding soundness exam covers more than just semen quality, but we would be doing a disservice to our listeners if we didn't talk a little bit about that and really what we need to be looking for and what we need to know. I'm curious too about the technology needed to do some of this.
Joe: There's a bunch of different ways to collect bulls. Most commonly we use an electro-ejaculator, which is a probe that goes in the rectum and actually stimulates the prostate with electricity and causes ejaculation. That's the most common way to do it. It's probably the safest and the fastest way to do it instead of having that bull try to jump a cow and being there with an artificial vagina or anything like that. I think that's the best way to do it, in my opinion, because it's safest for everyone around the bull, especially when you don't know them or are familiar with the bull and the bull's not familiar with you.
After that, we've got our sample collected. Well, we need a good microscope. That's really key. A lot of times we're using a stain as well to help us see the sperm. Most of the time we're diluting that sample just a little bit so that we can see individual sperm because that's the important piece and that's the big thing that's changed. We're not looking at gross motility anymore. We're not looking at high-magnification motility anymore. What we used to do is look at this slide on a pretty high magnification and you could see this big swirl or this cloud that was going around, and we would evaluate motility that way.
It's not really accurate because of how much it can change with the concentration of the sperm and other things like that. We don't really look at that anymore, and it's been taken off of the breeding soundness exam forms and evaluations that are available. We don't do that anymore, and what we look at is individual progressive motility with sperm. What we're looking for is at least 30% of the sperm in the sample need to be progressively modal. They have to be moving forward in a pretty much straight line or in a progressive manner, rather than doing circles or always turning to the left or anything like that.
We need them to go straight. They need to be able to swim, that's number one. Then after that, the other big change is that we're looking at individual morphology, and we've changed how we classify different abnormalities. They used to be classified as primary and secondary, which was a little misleading because it didn't really refer to which ones were more serious or not or anything like that. Now all we look at is, is it a head a mid-piece, or a tail abnormality? We look at the percentage of those abnormalities.
Overall, we need the sample to have at least 70% normal sperm to pass. Then we need to look at the individual abnormalities that are there. We can't have more than 20% of those abnormalities be head and mid-piece abnormalities. That's all stuff for your veterinarian to know, but it's a big change because the words and the way your veterinarian might talk about breeding soundness exam might be different than in the past as they get caught up on all these new recommendations. They're going to be using maybe different terms, looking at a little different things.
What hasn't changed is that we still need 30% of the sample at least to be progressively modal and we need at least 70% of the cells in that sample to be normal. There's some other changes as well, and they're just for veterinarian to know. We're considering something's not abnormalities anymore. Distal droplets are not abnormalities. Then when the tail sometimes will be a little off-center on the head of the sperm, we're not considering that abnormal either anymore. Just something to know, just in case your veterinarian mentions it.
Brad: In the long run, you should do it because you just never know. Of course, I'll take the opposite side and I think you should AI everything because you're giving up genetic progress, but that's a whole-- We can talk about that in a new podcast episode.
Joe: On the beef side rather, we need a cleanup bull either way, right? Most of the time, you're not going to just AI, right? You're going to clean up. You got to test your cleanup bull too.
Brad: True.
Joe: Most guys of AI have a bull around anyway. You're still stuck with this. You're still stuck seeing your veterinarian even though Bradley's trying to make it so you don't have to.
Brad: I'm not trying to make that. I think about it from genetic progress. Unless you know what that bull is doing or I understand it, I understand it. We can debate that one on a new episode.
Joe: I think so.
Brad: The difference between genetics of bulls and AI.
Joe: Yes, because I think we do have different opinions on that. We might have to get into that one day. One thing that I need to mention before we really wrap this up is that there's things that the breeding soundness exam does not do and one of the biggest things that a breeding soundness exam does not do is evaluate libido. That bull needs to have the want to jump cows. He has to get out in that pasture and do his job. I can't evaluate that in the shoot. That's on the owner of the bull, to make sure you go out and you make sure that bull's doing his job.
You also have to keep an eye on him because bulls do stupid stuff, they fight, they get in bad spots, they try to jump cows in really weird positions and they fall or a lot of times they can break or bruise their penises. When we're looking at that kind of thing, you've got to keep an eye on that bull to make sure he's doing his job and he actually has the want to do his job and that he doesn't get hurt during breeding season. It doesn't end once you get that pass. You have to go home and make sure he does his job.
Emily: Yes. It's like we say with a lot of things, this is an exam that does not replace other management strategies, including observation. We say that about so many different things especially on the dairy side but it's really applicable here as well.
Joe: Absolutely. The exam is good for that day and anything can happen to that bull after he leaves the shoot, he can get hurt, he can come up lame, he can get sick and spike a fever and that can mess with his fertility for a while. You still have to keep an eye on these guys and make sure that nothing happens. This is just add an insurance to say, okay, everything looks good, everything under the hood is fine. We've got no previous injuries from the year before. We don't have any testicular atrophy because of age or anything like that or sickness or health issues.
That kind of stuff is why you're doing this but it doesn't guarantee that all your animals are going to be pregnant, doesn't guarantee that the next day that bull isn't going to go out, fight with another bull and come up lame. Again, it's not the end-all to have them pass this exam. Got to keep an eye on them, there's still a lot of things that can happen but it is insurance. All right. I think we've talked about enough. There's a lot more conversations to have with this. There's probably some rebuttals sitting out there.
Brad and I still have to debate AI versus proven bulls that mate with natural service, all of that, but I think we're going to call it there today. Em, can you wrap us up, please?
Emily: I would love to. As Joe said, if you have questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals, those can be e-mailed to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M @umn.edu. You can also find us on Twitter @UMNmoosroom and @UMNFarmSafety. You can also call our voicemail, which I am currently looking up the number to and can't find. Bear with me for a second.
Joe: 612-624-3610.
Emily: As I said, bye.
Joe: Bye.
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I'm not having that cow jump bulls and show me that he has the libido to go out and breed [crosstalk] them breed.
Emily: Joe, Joe. Did I mishear him, Brad, or did he say that backwards?
Joe: What?
Emily: You said you want that cow to be jumping on the bulls.
Joe: Oh, did I?
Emily: Yes.
Brad: I think so.
Emily: Did he say that, Brad?
Joe: Did I say it backwards?
Emily: Yes.
Joe: Oh, that's good. That's for the outtake reel then. I said it backwards, really.
Emily: Yes. If I get out there, that cow's not jumping on bulls. I was like--
Joe: You got a problem with your cow. [laughs]
Emily: You got all sorts of problems if you have one cow and a pen full of bulls.
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