 Today, we are going to talk about assessing cow and bull condition and managing bulls as we head into the breeding season. My name is Lisa Peterson, I'm Extension Livestock Specialist and Extension Beef Quality Assurance Specialist with the NDSU Central Grasslands Research Extension Center near Streeter. So as we start talking about body condition, there are some important landmarks to look at. I encourage producers to look at the last two ribs, seen here by number one in the diagram. If those last two ribs are visible, your animal, whether it's a cow or a bull's, body condition score will be less than five. If it is not visible, they will be a five or greater. Next I have producers look at the spine area, showing here by number two in the diagram. If the spine is visible, those animals are a body condition score of three or less. And then finally, I have them look at the area from the hooks to the pins. We call that the thorough. If that thorough is a deep V shape, they're a body condition score two. If it's a more shallow V shape, they're a body condition score three. And then all the way up to a flat V shape, which is body condition score six, and the flatter that line becomes, the higher they are in body condition score. It is important to know that the U.S. beef body condition scores range from a one to a nine with a body condition score one being a starved animal and a body condition score nine being an obese animal. This body condition scoring system is the three step body condition scoring system that is found in the BCS guide for range cattle from the University of Wyoming. So a look in real animals. The animal here in the upper left is the body condition score three. We know this because we can see her last two ribs. Those are visible, so she's less than a five. We can see her spine. Actually, this happens to be a stair. We can see his spine. That means that he's body condition score of three or less. And we have that strong V shape in his thorough between the hooks and the pens. So we know he's a body condition score three. The cow in the bottom left hand quarter, we can see her last two ribs pretty easily. That's a body condition score less than five. Her spine is not visible. What you see hurt here is she's a little bit thin, so she's greater than a body condition score of three. And the shape between her hooks and pens is a V, so that's a body condition score four. A note about this cow. She's shrunk up. I think she's probably been off water for a little bit. And so it looks like you can see her spine. But that is really her back muscle, her loin muscle. And that is not her vertebrae. When we look over here on the right hand side, the cow on the upper right hand corner is a body condition score of five. We cannot see her last two ribs, so that means she's a five or greater. Her spine is not visible, so that means that she's greater than a three. And she has a strong U shape here between her hooks and the pens. So that leads us to a body condition score of five. And finally, the cow in the bottom right hand corner is a body condition score of a six or greater. So we can't see her last two ribs. We can't see her spine at all. And the shape between her hooks and the pens is a very shallow or flat U, which tells us she's a body condition score of six or greater. And I would say that she's a seven, maybe even closer to an eight. As we're looking at bulls, you can see this bull on the left. We can't see his last two ribs. So we know that he's a five or greater. We can't see his spine. It's not sticking up or visible. So we know he's a three or greater. And the shape between his hooks and his pens is a strong U. So we know that he's a body condition score five. The bull on the right is heavier in his condition. We can't see his last two ribs. We can't see his spine. The shape between his hooks and the pens is very flat or very shallow. And so we know he's a body condition score of greater than six. As a note, this bull was ultrasounded pre-sale time and he had a back fat of a quarter of an inch. So let's talk a little bit about spermatogenesis or that would be the fancy term for semen development. The spermatogenesis process takes about 61 days, so two months if you think about it. So anything that has occurred in that past two months is going to impact semen quality and a bull's ability to pass a breeding soundness exam and successfully breed and fertilize cows. I encourage people to think of the semen process, the semen development process is a factory. And that anything that has happened in the production along the way in a factory line can result in a lemon. And so when we think about those things that may happen, sickness in a bull, so maybe he's had a fever, a very cold snap or really big cold snap that has caused some frostbite to that bull's testicles or scrotum that can decrease semen quality. Being too fat or too thin can also cause that. So we need to think about the things that have happened in the past two months that can impact that breeding soundness exam. One of the things I like to look at is the effective body condition score on semen quality and bulls that are physically sound or physically normal. The Canadians have done a lot of work in this area and Baltham Waldner published a paper in the Canadian Veterinary Journal in 2002 looking at the effective body condition score on semen quality. And so as you look across the bottom here and these bars, the green bars were bulls that were body or excuse me, were breeding soundness exam or a semen tested in January through March. And the yellow bars are those that were semen tested in April through June. What they found was that when it was colder in these early periods, those animals with lower body condition scores also had a lower percentage of bulls with satisfactory semen quality. And those numbers improved as we got further into April and June. But the real striking difference here is in the middle. So if you'll notice that when we get it into bulls with a body condition score of four, five, and six, all the way across their percentage, the percentage of bulls that had a satisfactory semen quality or passed an exam was higher. And so what this tells us is that our target areas for body condition score in relation to bull fertility is in that body condition score of a four to a six. So once we get less than a four in that three area, bulls that are really lean in their condition and getting thin or bulls that are getting obese in their condition at a seven, we start to decrease semen quality. This graph, also from the same researchers, notes the effect of weight loss and fat loss in breeding soundness exams. So what the researchers did was that they compared breeding soundness, motility, and whether those bulls would pass a breeding soundness exam, 10 to 42 days after a sale, and then compared that again, 43 to 85 days after the sale. And they weighed these bulls off. They actually did some ultrasounding on these bulls. And so what they found was that bulls that were BSE or semen tested about a week after the bull sale would pass the test. Pretty overwhelmingly, three-fourths of those bulls passed the test. However, when they got further out and those bulls got leaner and started to lose some weight, the number of bulls that were passing those tests went down to the point that only about half were actually passing the test. And so what they found was that in that period of time and those 85 days or about three months, there was a back fat loss of about a 10th of an inch. And those bulls weren't exactly heavy when they started or at least extremely fat when they started, but they were losing condition. And so one of the things that we know is that as bulls are losing condition pre-breeding, we decreased the quality of their semen and we decreased the ability to pass a breeding soundness exam. Just briefly, I'm going to touch on the effect of frostbite on semen quality. I think that it stands to reason that when we start getting severe frostbite, which is noted as being one or more scabs that's larger than a penny, we will start to see a decrease in semen quality and the ability to pass a breeding soundness exam. And so when we have these bulls that are exhibiting severe frostbite, even into April, May, and June, only half of those bulls are actually still have good enough semen quality to pass a breeding soundness exam. When we look at the slight side, so those would be bulls that have smaller scabs on their scrotums, they find that about three-fourths of those bulls will still pass, but it's a good reason to have your bulls breeding soundness exam evaluated before breeding season. And as you want to think about some things, store some things in your head for the coming year, it's also a good reason to provide some windbreaks and bedding for bulls when it's really cold. So in summary, we need to be sure that our bulls are in a body condition score of four to seven on a one to nine scale pre-breeding and at turnout. In fact, we would like to see them in increasing condition as we go to turnout. One of the things I see producers do is that they bring their newly purchased yearling or two-year-old bulls home from a sale and they just throw them on some poor quality hay. That is a really bad plan because we would like to maintain the plan of nutrition of those young bulls and then slowly step them down as they come home. I think that goes back to that slide that shows the loss of body condition or the loss of fat and its impact on semen quality and the ability to pass a fertility test. A good reminder is to check our body condition of herd sires now as someone else to also look at them. Sometimes we see our livestock so much that we tend not to see changes in their condition, whether they're improving or going down. Don't confuse their hair, muscle, and or hay belly with condition. That's easy to have happen and if your bulls are in a little bit of thin shape, see if you can get some help in developing a ration if you need to add some condition. Breeding soundness exams are really important, but you need to have your bulls tested right before the breeding season. We need to remember that the semen test is only good for the day it was taken. And so if you have those bulls, for example, semen tested when you buy them at somebody's production sale in February or March, a lot can happen between February and March and turnout time in June. And so it's really important, I think, to have another breeding soundness exam performed on those bulls. Don't save pennies to waste dollars by skipping a breeding soundness exam. We say that a bull can cover somewhere between 15 and 30 cows dependent on a train and how large pastures are. If you don't breeding soundness exam, those bulls put them through that test and if they are going to fail in a breeding program and leave you with open cows, that test looks pretty cheap. So that's one of these places that we don't want to save some dollars, save some pennies to waste dollars by skipping that semen test. Remember that sperm development takes 60 days and we also encourage you to visit with your herd veterinarian about preventative vaccinations for your bull battery. We tend to remember to boost the vaccinations in our cow herd, but we sometimes forget our bulls. For more information on this topic and other topics, be sure to contact your local NDSU extension agent. To find your horse, you can go to www.ag.ndesu.edu.extension.directory.counties.