 I'm Don Brown. This is Dr. Craig Zimmerly. We're from kind of in Worcester area. He's from Wayne County, I believe, and I'm from Peshawkin County. And just for the official information, this is an FNC 13901. Correct? Yes, and that's a project. And that is a project. So you can look them up. So you can look that up and you can go on the web page. Okay. Basically I would expect why everybody who are here is because you're breeding, or have a flock of sheep and you're breeding sheep. And that is why we got involved in this process of trying to say, you know, the farmer can do this himself. You don't have to have a technician maybe down the road someday to do this. You can do it yourself. And that's, I was raised in the equine industry and when I moved to Ohio in 75, the equine industry was just done starting to breed artificially horses and mares. All right? And it's been done for years in the cattle and the hog industry. In the sheep industry, it's been done, but not on a regular basis here in this country. And so what I'm saying in my mind is what we're doing today, and starting through this research plan, is we're trying to say 20 years from now, you'd be able to, you'd be able to, you'd be able to breed your own sheep artificially. And it should be a common thing to do if there was anything to work out 20 years from now. So this is just the research of trying to say, let's get started, let's see how far we go with it and what we can do with it. And the project started with a lady by the name of Cathy Dill, who had cut the moose through Ohio as the Todd sheep her sheep. You know what I'm saying? That's the official sheep of what he's name, but that's her breed. And she was trying to get genetics out of Arkansas, but they were put around. So you can't bring up the rams from Arkansas. And so that led to the discussion one afternoon, one evening, Dr. Bill Shula from Ohio State and Dr. Natter from Virginia Tech were sitting at the table with us, and we decided all of a sudden maybe this thing could roll around and start working correctly. So anyways, we got involved and Cathy helped write a grant and stuck my name on it, and I appreciate that very much. And so anyways, we went and it's developed a little bit. And we've had some, we've gone through this over here and we've had some good parts, bad parts, and we're just trying to inform to what we've done and where we're going with it. So, right? It's up to you. Okay. You know, you have to have it. It's for the recording. Okay. So as Don talked about, you know the reason for doing this trial and everything. So we'll just get started here and kind of go through and talk a little bit about the highlights of what we did for the whole trial and everything. So why would you want to artificially assimilate sheep? There's four main topics or areas that come to my mind. One is we can make faster genetic improvement. So if we are using our own flock of sheep for improvement, we use a new ram each year that we produce, we're kind of limited on the traits that we can select for. And also we're limited in not being able to use the best rams that are available. So with artificial assimilation, we can accomplish that. Like Don spoke about biosecurity purposes, you know, if you find a great ram that meets your specific traits that you're looking for but comes from a flock that has OPP, foot rot, you name it, I'm going to be a little bit hesitant to bring that ram up to use. So with artificial assimilation, biosecurity is still a concern, but it's much of a less than a concern. The cost of purchasing a quality ram every few years. I'm involved with the quality ram industry, and you can spend $10,000 to $20,000 for one ram. So I mean, it gets pretty cost prohibitive, but in order to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak, you almost have to do that or suffer and pay the consequences at not being at as high of a genetic level as what everybody else is. And you'll have a harder time selling your rams, getting interest in your breeding stock then. In the last comment that I had to say about why artificial inseminate is some of the lesser known breeds of sheep, like the Icelandic, the Blueface Lesters, there's less of a genetic pool available, so it's harder to get good rams. So with artificial insemination, we can bring genetics in from foreign countries and spread those breeds out in the United States then. So when we look at waste artificially inseminated sheep, there's basically three big topics for categories of them. Laparoscopic would be the first one. That's a surgical procedure, just basically like if you have a gallbladder that needs to be removed, they'll go in laparoscopically, look inside out of the camera, pull that out and you're done. You've got that same process in sheep and goats and white-tailed deer. However, it is a surgical procedure, so it takes some extra care and guidance on that. And it's also an expensive and labor-intensive procedure. Some of the white-tailed deer, you're talking at $200 just to inseminate a white-tailed deer by the laparoscopic method. It comes cost-prohibited in some areas. Trans cervical, those that are involved with cattle reproduction, AI and cows, will pass a rod through the cervix and then the semen is deposited in the uterine body. However, the way God made the sheep cervix, it's very turgid and very not straight. It's got a lot of crooks and crannies in it. So that makes it very difficult to pass a rod through it to be able to inseminate successfully. A lot of times when you try it, what happens is you hit a side of the cervix, you cause damage, and then that decreases fertility rates. So that's why trans cervical is not too much of a go in sheep. And the third area is what we call intravaginally. And so semen is just deposited within the vagina of the U. However, with that, we have decreased conception rates because the sperm cells have to swim through the cervix into the uterine body, up the uterine horns to the place of fertilization. So by the time it has to go all that way, a lot of the sperm cells are dead or are dying before they get to do their thing then. And one advantage with this though is it's a very simplistic procedure. So kind of a lot what Don already talked about, why are we doing this grant? And it's simply to investigate if there's an economical and practical way for farmers to artificially inseminate their own sheep. And so the group that's involved with this is Don and his wife Anne, Jeff and Kathy Beelink, Ginger Davidson, Dr. Dale Nuer, and myself. And here's a picture of just the motley crew up there. And so what we did, we decided to look at the inter vaginal artificial insemination technique. We looked at doing trans cervical and we went back and forth on it and we thought just for the ease of everything this would be a good start to see if it would actually be an accomplishable thing. So the three flocks that we used were Don and Anne's, Jeff and Kathy's and also Dr. Nuer's. So we had a mixed group of breeds. We had the Toddens, Polly Pay and Blueface Lesters and we used 20 used per farm. And for the actual artificial insemination a seaman must collect it either by elective ejaculation or use of an artificial vagina. And whenever your AI is cheap it's kind of tricky. You have to synchronize them meaning you have to have them all come into heat at one given time. It's not like cows where you can call slacks hires and they can come the next day or that evening whenever you saw them in heat and breed them. We have to do a group of them at one time in order to make it to make it practical. So we'll talk more about the synchronization here a little bit then. So most people have heard of breeding soundness exam on rams. And what that basically is doing is looking at the overall health of the ram and you'll want to do this prior to the breeding season. Ideally a month to two months before the breeding season. And the reason for doing this is we want to make sure that our rams that we're going to be using a month or two months down the road are actually fertile so they can get the job done. We want to look at the body condition score of the rams. We don't want a skinny ram. We don't want a fat ram. Skinny, they're going to have a hard time breeding and fat rams is the same way. Feet and legs, we want good confirmation on the rams. We don't want any foot rot. We don't want any abscesses, you know, so on and so forth. We want to check their teeth not one. So they can eat properly and two, if they have a broken mouth we're going to potentially be passing those bad genetics on to future generations. We want to measure testicle size. One of my professors at vet school always says size is important for this. The bigger the better for testicle size. Small testicles aren't going to have the ability to produce the amount of semen that it takes to breed a high number of use. And how we collected the semen for the breeding salicyx was either by the artificial vaginal or electric ejaculation. Just something to kind of remember. The ram is half a flock and garbage in equals garbage out. So if we throw a ram in that's not fertile we're going to get garbage at the end. So just something to remember there. So this is just a picture when we were up at Kathy's measure of scurril circumference there and getting an idea on that one of the steps of the breeding salicyx exam. And in that picture there is an example of an artificial vagina. And in there we are collecting one of the rams there. We have a jump u or a teaser u and then the ram there. You've got to be pretty quick to get them caught there. And then there's just a picture of Kathy looking at the semen under the microscope looking for the morphology of the sperm cells. We want to make sure that the sperm cells are properly made so that they can swim to do the job that they're supposed to do. And then also we look at concentration to see if the semen is concentrated. There might be cells there but if it's really dilute semen that's less number of use that and that could be bred then. So for this study we collected the rams and then we did a microscopic evaluation of the semen to look for a lot of things that we just talked about. You know the morphology and we also did a look at the concentration. The concentration was determined by a specific method. And then once we knew the concentration we could know how to use we could breed from that given ejaculate from the rams then. And we also did we used an extender to dilute the semen out so we could breed more use in an appropriate manner then. So for the intravaginal insemination the steps that involved with it are restraining the use. That's kind of what Don's expertise was in for the trial we had somebody restraining them, holding them we had to clean the vulva region. That way we just used like a dilute iodine scrub and we wanted to make sure that everything was clean in that area because we don't want dirt to go up in and potentially contaminate the semen and decrease our conception rates then. So the extended semen was then drawn up into a pipette. What we used were I unfortunately didn't have any at home to bring along to show but it's basically just like a hollow pencil is what it reminded you of with an opening on the one end or actually on both ends and then the other end fit onto a tip of a syringe and then we pulled the semen up into that pipette and then the final step was to just deposit it intravaginally So that here what we're doing in this picture is Dale's the one bending over with the beige hat on he's cleaning the vulva region there getting ready to inseminate and then this is a picture of a loaded pipette you can see right here the syringe and in this here it's not showing up real good but that would be the pipette filled with the semen then and then there's Jeff you can see that he's inseminating the U right there so it's a pretty simple procedure we did about 20 and 2 hours, 2-3 hours I mean that's pretty that's pretty good as time went on and we got more experience with it it went a lot quicker and we kind of learned some tricks of the trade and that sort of thing so practice practice makes perfect so in order to synchronize the use that we talked about before to have them come in at the same time we have a product called a cedar has anybody heard of what a cedar is? okay this in my right hand is what's called a cedar and it's loaded with a hormone called progesterone progesterone is normally made in the body of a U but this does when it's inserted into the vagina it basically mimics her being pregnant so it stops her from coming into a heat and this is the tool that we use and it fits into this gun inserted into the vagina and then it releases over time and it causes a constant amount of progesterone the cedars are left in for 14 days and on day 12 we give a shot of another hormone called prostaglandin and prostaglandin is a hormone that's normally made in the body of the U and when she's coming on the end of her cycle prostaglandins will actually always normally be produced and that signifies tells the body to start to get ready to come into heat then so we gave a shot of that at day 12 and then on day 14 when the cedars were pulled we have to give another shot of a product called PG600 and what PG600 does is it stimulates the ovaries to produce follicles and what that does also is to cause ovulation at a set time and when a U ovulates it releases the egg down into the fallopian tube and then the sperm meet up with the released egg and then causes fertilization so 48 to 52 hours after the cedars have been removed in the injection of PG600 is when you want to to breathe the U's and that's the procedure that we followed and it's kind of a common procedure in the AI industry and she so you might be wondering do we just waste our time and waste our money and everything and doing all this big project and everything and to be honest with you I was kind of skeptical and tried and just every so many years there's a big new swing of it and it kind of falls off just because it's not an easy thing to do so I was really hesitant that if it would actually work and so after the first time we did it at Kathy's Kathy and Jesper we all just sounded them about 40 days after roughly 50% of them were pregnant so I was expecting maybe to be honest with you, maybe 2 out of 20 would be pregnant I never said anything to anybody but I thought we were wasting our wasting our effort so I was very excited and very pleased to see that we got 50% and the remaining two farms both at Don's and Dale's it was at least 50% it was probably closer to 70% so there is a lot of future in this area so just as a conclusion I noticed the last one of the day people want to probably get home but you know we got roughly 50% of the used pregnant from this trial and the first time this has been done really so there's room to make improvements so that number shouldn't go any lower if anything it should be going up higher in years to come so you know I see this as reminding it a new tool for the sheep industry for those that are into breeding sheep then it's a practical approach one thing that in the future additional work will need to be done then I consider the seaman family part to be a major area that will need to be addressed and another area is will we be able to collect the ram and door jump ship the seaman chill to a pile and then probably use and actually get live lands in that's kind of the the obstacle I think for the future this trial if it's not over we're going to be going for another year then this trial showed that we can't get used to pregnant but long term will we be able to get those genetics from one area to the next and actually make some genetic progress so that's kind of where I see a lot of work needed to be done on this in the future any questions for any money what's the approximate cost for you of the just your implant in the process of administration you're talking the cedars themselves cost about five to six dollars and then the PG 600 in the prostate gland and shot you're talking probably about another six dollars so I'd say roughly 12 to 15 and that might include some of the other miscellaneous expenses some of the like the pipe pets and just the miscellaneous supplies any other questions I'm not familiar with the electro shot yeah what that is there's a rod that fits into the rectum of the sheet and there's electric pulses that are released and that causes the random to extend as penis it causes ejaculation how do you mean does that make this comfortable to them or yes there is probably some discomfort we have to we have to do a repair in everything but there's some some places and some places not depend on a lot of the circumstances sure in this case the farms you're collecting you're losing the rounds around the same farm so we could take a new one that was already brought into heat put her in the chute and ran to come right in right there it was able to naturally go right in breathe so if you're doing the electric jack well the same thing on that farm when we were doing the chute we were tipping them on the side and there is some straining to go along with the ram on them because of the collection we got a lot more seeming collected artificial by far one farm we didn't get hardly anything and then did an artificial and not one jack to breathe 20 years at that one spot so that's there was a nice different type of there was another nice difference in some cases the cleanliness of the vagina here and especially in my farm as a wool farm it was a lot easier to clean out or shade the vagina area the back of that area I think it was a lot easier in the hair sheath of Kathy there was no problem it was just a matter of cleaning so there was some things we had we were learning the artificial the collection of the ram if we had cleaned around the bellies on them a little bit better or hadn't even done that in some cases there was some things that definitely did some things wrong but from one farm to the next farm we were learning there's just some things you could do oh yes secret collection is a hard thing it's a hard thing not all rams will jump into you and then not all of them will exactly use it so it's kind of a great area there was an easy way to make it a lot easier see back in the 70's when I moved to Ohio we were just starting with stallions and I was with an equine program it took 20 years for all the reading departments in the country to get this down to somewhat of a reasonable situation where we could shift even overnight to California to chill so now we're trying to figure out how to get this done here also so that we can get something out of Arkansas or Florida if we can get it on an alphabets and stallions and then we get 50 to 60 cc's of cement at the jackpot where the ramp we're getting 1 milliliter and that was a whole new game how do you divide that up I mean with a stallion you can do 10-15 merits this way you're doing 1 milliliter that was a whole new that was a whole new body and then you had to add the extended to it there were three different types of extenders on each farm with the extenders we had a few different trials going on well, my wife was involved with the extenders and the microscope work and understanding a lot of cement evaluation and mobility so the extenders they're also feeding the cement once it's collected and they're giving a a protein a protein to this they're feeding the cement along with extending and preserving it so you had to keep the cement alive so we did a 24, 48, 72 hour deal after the first few farms after 24 hours we had a live cement on the microscope after it was chilled all right so we used an equine which is a normal cement extender, that's all we knew and by the time I got done I was caught in the select ciders and the select ciders said I need to call this guy in Iowa I call the guy in Iowa he says to me, I'm just the US posterior all the extender for select ciders and then comes out of France all right and he says I can sell you for $16 to extend all the equine facility we were getting all the extender from he says we just got some from France we just got some from Brazil so he used the French the Brazil and the US extender at the end and the end after 72 hours we had a live cement French and Brazilian and the US extender was down to about 0 and we were able to extend that live cement I need to microscope chill there was a better 50% French and Brazilian extender and to me that's one of the things we need to go with in the future the next step is talking to different organizations that are interested in this and different breed associations that are getting frozen cement they're getting frozen from the Icelandic people from Iceland they're only getting 50% off from the frozen cement my next step is is there a possibility to go up to and that's another project we're learning our way through it very cool any other questions sure we need to be careful about the angle that you inserted in that's a good point usually you go up about a 45-year angle for just a little bit and then it takers off raise that pipe back off and then go straight and then what happens then is you hit cover contact with the server and then that's pretty much where you deposit the cement very good question just the way the vaginal floor is it goes up at an angle and then it takers off just the opposite just the opposite any other questions thank you much