 and then I've been in the AI industry dating back into the 80s and very active the last decade. So I appreciate Tyler asking me to speak to you tonight. And part of this presentation I gave with New Mexico at a meeting several years ago that we try to focus on what makes us successful and and ultimately profitable when we talk about AI and we're going to gear this towards project heifers and and kind of wind up the evening talking about how we maybe could apply it at home for some of the larger operations or or even those you've got a smaller counter how we might apply that. And I'm going to ask Tyler to interject whenever he needs to to ask questions if we've got immediate questions we want to address. Sounds great you can go right ahead there sir. Perfect so as I indicated we're going to talk about show heifers and then we'll get into the cowherds a little bit later. When I think about AI and I talked to customers about this all the time it's a program you kind of got to be in for the long term and you'd be similar to a feeding cattle it's not something you jump in and out of it's something you have to have as a goal long term you got to do it for five or six or seven years and see to see the ramifications of how how it applies. And I think it has to be a well-rounded program it just doesn't stand out there by itself in terms of advancing your operation or your genetics it takes it takes more than that I'm just going to briefly touch on these four areas and then we're going to talk more about how it applies to specific show heifery implementation. And so we'll start off talking talking about nutrition and this applies to your cow herd at home you always want to keep track of body condition score throughout the year. I like to see that monitored you know starting in the fall at preg test time and then again at pre calving and use that as a monitor to see where your cow herds at nutritionally. I'm a firm believer in you can't catch up from the day of cow calves until you're going to try either to breed her naturally or to breed her with artificial insemination. The only time you've got to catch up nutritionally and improve body distance scores from the time a cow weans a calf until she calves the next time. When we talk about those virgin heifers or heifers we're going to breed for the first time I think is very important you know more at the ranch than what we're talking about show heifers specifically but we got to have them to an adequate weight and there's quite a bit of discussion on that more recently you know the school that I taught you know when I was at Oregon State University was that they need to be somewhere around 65 percent of their body weight. Where I live in the west most of the time we probably breed heifers that are a little less than that we probably are closer to 55 percent nature tends to select on those that are most fertile. As you're working with the cattle from the nutrition standpoint and I think it's important that you either keep those cattle and I'm talking probably cows and even young heifers on a plain of nutrition as level or increasing so they're always on the game. When you try to take cattle and take them backwards or on a cow that's slipping condition the reproductive performance of that animal is always compromised so if you can bring them up steadily and keep them advancing or keeping it a level you're going to have a lot more success with your program when it comes to AI or natural service. Just some basics on herd health and this could probably be a whole presentation in itself when we talk about vaccines you know the the minimum we talk about is 30 days prior to breeding and I'm probably a bigger proponent of somewhere between 45 and 60 days prior to breeding depending on the products that you use to protect for behavioral lefto all those kind of of vaccines that we're trying to get into these cattle prior to the breeding season. In terms of application to this is probably more at the ranch but it probably applies to show heifers too it's probably worth doing a pre-breeding exam rectally find out how advance the reproductive tract of that female he is in these virgin heifers make sure that you find follicles that are functional and you know can get a heifer pregnant down the road and if you want more information on that University of Missouri has done a super job with a program called show me select and there's actually training that goes on out there with working with veterinarians to be more proficient in that tract sporing. Uh just be observant especially you know when you're feeding cattle out in the cow herd or if you're feeding your show heifers and you got them in a group start watching for those extra signs of heat you know our part of the world we're more of a January February calving so you need to see them heifer cycling through the winter and we'll talk about this here in just a minute be able to map that those of you that have smaller herds like I do we run about 75 cows I pretty much have on a calendar whenever cow cycles prior to the breeding season what that allows you to do is we're leading to this next statement when you're talking about synchronization if that's the route you're going to go you're going to know if a cow's cycled before you start and you know our parameter the most of time is that we're not going to try and synchronize an AI breed a set of cows that aren't at least 40 days postpartum when you start the protocol because we talk about this a little later that would make them somewhere around 50 days postpartum when you do the actual insemination um facilities you know it this is probably one of the things that is I find a lot of importance in uh it makes for a real smooth operation when you're trying to do these breeding projects or even working with a a single animal and you just want something to cattle are more comfortable with something they flow through easy um I always encourage people to make sure everything's sort of in tip top shape no sharp edges or nails sticking out maybe that doesn't necessarily affect your AI conception but it it maybe doesn't offer the most comfort to the animal if um you know if they get lacerations or poked going through the process and we're talking about breeding cattle that are maybe not on the halter when we're breeding cows out in the you know out in a larger setting I think it's always important that the cattle have some access to adequate feed and water uh whether we're trying to gather them in or hold them in a dry lot and probably this bottom one is speaks volumes sometimes you can have the fanciest most up-to-date welded pipe perl and if the cattle don't use it well it's not very efficient uh some of the most efficient facilities I've been around um are very very simple and the cattle handle very well flow very very effectively so the animal handling thing how important is that in this situation there Claire? From my standpoint I mean that the animal handling keeps the cattle calm uh it allows for efficiency so if we're talking about larger projects where we're time breeding um if the cattle are on the muscle or a little hyped up you don't have as much success in terms of uh conception rate and you can take cattle that are a little attitude-wise that are a little higher strung and if they're handled correctly they don't seem to elevate in temperature you know as a technician when I you can almost tell as a technician how the cattle have been handled you'll pick up a difference in rectal temperature when you when you go ahead and palpate the cattle and so from my standpoint I really like to try and get the animal handling right now if we're talking about a show half or a block and shoot most of them are pretty docile pretty easy to get along as long as you could get them in a block and shoot I breed a lot of heifers for our 4-H members that way or even tied up to trailer with those drop down bars they're pretty docile but in the general population of our cowards they're not quite that gentle does that answer your question okay so in general we'll talk about synchronization and the AI process and when we're visiting with a customer whether they're breeding one cow or you know a thousand cows we try and get a calendar laid out and have an agenda so each person on the team understands what's what's expected on what dates are coming up and what they're expected to do and we try to go through understanding of the program and what hormones are utilized and when they need to be given and then I really encourage this because this is probably the one of the places that toes get stubbed or we fall down on protocols is people tend to wait till the last minute to order the semen that they want and we're like right on the edge of shipper showing up same thing happens with with the drugs and cedars involved so plan that ahead of time as much as possible and if you're not if you're not synchronizing just have it planned out so you're ready when those animals come into heat if you're just doing a heat detected breed and I encourage people to use heat aids and I say I can show half hair and and you don't really want that glue in there so observation can be your heat aid check those heifers you know all the time so you know the next time she's gonna come in heat I'd like you to know if she's an 18 day heat cycle or if she's 22 days just keep that on a calendar keep good records of that and then as we talk about AI and the breeding season and I'm going to give this two folds post AI management support so if we're in the cow herd and we use up all our you know one day I we use up all our feet around the corrals just to make that process happen because it's handy and then we take them out turn them out unless pasture we made such a change there that you know we see that and that's the next statement here he's got a sudden change in nutrition that can really alter your conception rate so have a plan how you're going to handle them before you start the AI really out there about 60 days after AI in the case if you have to transport cattle like loading them on a semi or even trailers to take them take them out to pastures now the best time to do that is within four days of the insemination process and if all possible don't change what's going on with those cattle nutritionally management wise fly control running through the shoot try to have all that done you can just let the cattle settle settle and be still for about 45 days post breeding and we'll get into this in the show half or side of things but it's probably just as important there as it is out in in the larger cow herds so any questions so far before I dive off into talking more about project heifers and and how we implement AI we got any questions in the chats or Tyler so far I'm not seeing anything other than just the availability at the end so I think you can keep on going here Clint okay perfect so when when I think about show heifers and I just preference that I judge a lot of county fairs I got the opportunity and been blessed to judge a few national shows and got to judge quite a few state shows and I know how serious all of you take putting together a nice show heifer or steer to take down the road so you know we all want to get in the purple and you know be successful so before you get too far into the season I mean fine have a plan kind of what shows you're really going to focus on and you know how early in the show season are those shows and if you're going to have to transport cattle in different adverse conditions you know cattle generally handle the cold better than they do the heat a lot of times when you go out go to these junior nationals in the summer or late state fairs in the summer you're just dealing with unless you're going like the Grand Island Brass good you're dealing a lot of adverse conditions for those animals and it really plays a big role in keeping those keeping those heifers pregnant so lay out that roadmap decide where you're going to go and then work backwards and come up the plan how to how to get those heifers bred so I know in your part of the world Tyler and you have some of those winter shows you know you just got done with the Black Hills Stock Show not too long ago and so those heifers obviously opened during that time frame and if you're not going to go out and hit any state or regional shows till May or June this is probably an opportune time to make a plan to get your heifer pregnant and there may be questions come come from the crowd as we get into discussion later is like well I really don't want a heifer to care of at Christmas time well those are decisions you have to make for yourself if you want to be competitive and you want that heifer to be productive as a cow you may have to get her to care earlier than then you normally would manage your other cows and that way when you get into the heat of the summer you've got a pregnant female and not one you're trying to get pregnant so we go back you know we go back to traveling through these winter shows and you know try and map that heat cycle every time you take one out it doesn't matter if it's a heifer or a gill or lamb it seems like you take them to a show and they're young and stress them out either they come into heat right there at the show or in there and heat right after that so be aware of that be aware the signs of what heat would look like especially if you only got one animal I mean they may show signs of heat towards you as a human look for the signs of some extra mucus coming out of their vulva some heifers are just overly aggressive we have a half red angus heifer that we're going to show some in the summer and then on a bed on rad show in November and you don't have to question when that heifer is in heat she balls walks the fence tries to crawl through the fence to get in with other cattle if you've got her separated so I would really encourage you to be aware of what your individual heifer is like when she comes into heat and it becomes more obvious when you got her mixed with different groups of heifers or maybe with the project steer and start reporting those behaviors now so as we get ready to say if we're going to have the heifers cabin February by the time may comes around we know we know where we're at sure hey Clint how how long is your cycle I don't know if you mentioned that yeah they're normal cycles 21 days yeah a normal cycle is 21 days but it can range from 18 to 23 and there's not really any particular you know animal that kind of stays in a particular cycle range so I I always try and watch for that next heat if I observe with you know basically we're March 1 today if a heifer's in heat today I start watching for her to recycle somewhere March 16 to 17th and I observe her pretty close for four or five days and if you look at what we do on the dairy side we've got piles and piles of data on those cows when they come in the heat and there's not a perfect trend but 21 days is just a common common average good question so the bottom statement talks about body condition advantage and fat and this this goes back to kind of growing heifers slowly you know I know you got you want to get them big enough to be competitive I know you want to get the right kind condition on them to be competitive but the toughest animal there is to get pregnant doesn't matter if we're talking about heifers on the halter or heifers at the feed bunk is a heifer they get starts getting excessively fat and you see the fat showing up in their udder around their tail head um you know those are things to manage early and try and keep them I'm not telling you to lean them up but keep them as a fresh in terms of their condition as possible so you have opportunity to get a bread the interesting thing um the interesting thing about heifers is when they get pregnant they really get easy to get fat and so if you can get them pregnant early on then you can do lots of things to help increase increase weight performance get that extra center body feel because you're going to be carrying that pregnancy you can do it with you can do it with less energy and you can keep the animals looking fresher as a judge it's a real challenge for me when you get an animal it's got a lot of brisket bone and udder fat you know she just got pushed maybe she was the most competitive you know heifer you know early on but later later on she's not as competitive because she doesn't have that fresh appearance so I go back to this statement I made earlier is that if my advice would be is get these heifers settled between now you're kind of done with your winter shows or your your early spring shows and before you head out to start doing your summer shows or jackpots and if it's anything in your area like it is here once we kick off in the month of May there's a jackpot show every weekend sometimes two jackpot shows on any given weekend and the cattle have to endure a lot of stress the hauling the heat up and down you know if the cattle aren't conditioned to be up and standing for lots of hours it's tough to maintain a pregnancy I've been involved with nationally competitive heifers that we aid them on the way on the trailer on the way to junior nationals they were still trying to get them pregnant july so really encourage you to get them pregnant get them pregnant primarily somewhere around 45 or 60 days before you want to really take them out and get them in a competitive class and why say 60 days is if we say that we're going to take our first competitive show is June 1 if we get that heifer pregnant you know try to catch her heat in ai or april one we got 60 days till our first show so she should have a chance to settle if she doesn't settle then we're going to catch her again somewhere you know mid late april and have a second chance to get her pregnant she's going to be somewhere in that 40 day range before she goes out into into some of those stresses we have hauling cattle down the road and and being out in the environment especially if you have cattle and coolers at home so it helps maintain her pregnancy if we could get that accomplished early and some of you that show and those of you judge I mean this is my perspective you know those heifers that are kept fresh all through this early part of their show season they're maybe not quite as competitive as show heifers if they're a little bit greener when you get them pregnant early then you have the opportunity to add a lot more fill to them and use that pregnancy to improve body capacity you'll start to see their udders start to fill up and have that realistic look in terms of t quality utter dimension and fill it's real hard to get an open heifer to express that you know in the later shows and the state fairs so that this is just my perspective it's easier to get one pregnant early try and keep her fresh you don't always have to use quite as much energy and she will do it naturally with a pregnancy on board you know as you go into those competitive shows and I keep I keep coming back to this but just have a plan work at it 60 to 45 days before if if you have a technician that'll help you or if you're doing it yourself I would really encourage you to catch the heifers in a natural heat and AI before you start trying to do synchronization now and we'll talk about this just a minute if synchronization is the only way then we'll have to utilize that to to the best of our advantage use any heat detection aids you can you know if you're if you got quite a bit of hair on the cattle we use ester tech patches on all kinds of cattle they they do take some hair out I know that you know you can probably use some kind of paint some of the paints we have come off when they come into heat rub off so if you're you know using tail paint you apply it every two or three days and make sure it's fresh make sure you catch those heifers in heat and a good strong heat so with that tail paint here Clint you just go over the tail head and then kind of right over the hooks yeah so and really if you just got it right over the tail paint right over their tail head this is kind of a powdery leaves a film on them like if you got a black kefir a lot of times we use pink or orange paint and you just put it on there kind of have some of an oil base I usually try to make it looks like a x or a t right over the top that way if they're a little bit higher on your tail set you know they'll rub off the sides they may not rub off the middle because heifers get kind of fatter or a real heavy muscled heifer they may not rub right off over the tail here versus like using grease chalk then you got to get that out of their hair later on sometimes that's a little tougher to do that you just use that paint tail paint it gives you indication that's easy to apply again you know as you breed them or if you're not sure of the heat you could throw some on the one thing I would talk about heat detection aids is you got to think about the environment around the heifers if they can go out rub on the trees or anything just give you an example I gave the estermate shot which is a prostaglandin to bring heifers in heat I gave it on sunday and I threw an ester tech patch on well I already got one heifer that they had access to go down my working alley to go she goes in there and works back and forth until she rips the ester tech tag right off her back so you're going to have to eliminate any tree branches or anything they could go under dust bags or oilers because they'll they'll rub that off and they'll fool you what's natural heat there's nothing better than having one animal ride another for heat detection where can you pick this stuff up from like the paint for heat what do you look for as far as the farm store or yeah what what do you look for with the paint I know you said the powdery stuff can you just use regular paint and where where do you purchase the stuff you're talking about here regular paint won't do the job I mean if you're working with an AI company a lot of them have what we just call tail paint like in the dairy business we use piles you know it's or like the construction paint you see people have around that you can turn upside down and make lines like even for baseball that paint works fine it has a powder coat you'll stick to the hair it's not greasy this is a regular spray can paint that you would use a rattle can something that won't work so that that's a good question just make sure it kind of leaves that powdery film on the animal when you first put it on and make sure you have enough color differentiation like you got a red heifer you probably better use blue paint or something that you can see pretty easy other questions on that I think that covers it thank you perfect you're gonna get tired of hearing this but you know you gotta continue to plan plan and plan and this probably become this comes from a technician standpoint like if you're trying to get heifers pregnant and you want your local technician to help you out in the springtime that's probably their busiest time of the year so if you're gonna do that may I'd encourage you to already be talking to the technician telling them what kind of project you got going on make that plan and have it ready to go and you know just like I'm saying we're at least two months out from that happening three months in some of your your cases keep these heifers coming on the game and you know basically a lot of times when I judge shows I see both ends of the spectrum on these these heifer calves we're trying to bring them into the breeding season you got heifer calves that are too fat already and so you're kind of having a holding stage and you have heifer calves that have probably been turned out or just getting real low quality or average quality grass hay or alfalfa and not much energy and so they're on on the thin side and so you've got if you're if your target breeding time is May you got plenty of time to work on your nutrition in the next 60 to 90 days you can start increasing or on a plain of nutrition or if that heifer's starting to get get a little chubby you can keep her maintain maybe add some more forage back into her diet high quality forage get a little more protein in it just to always plan and have a continuous plan of how I get this heifer pregnant there is a I think I was sharing with Tyler last night when I coached coached a team there was a pair of twin short horn heifers and one of them was champion at Kansas City and one of them was champion in Louisville and then the same one was also championed in Denver and of those two heifers only one of them was pregnant the whole time and the one that did the most winning was kind of open the most time that she showed and the practical cow then standpoint that's really not what this project's about we really like these show heifers they end up the cow her to be productive down the road so if we can manage how they they gain and how they put on condition that that leads to successful conception in terms of AI all right clan are we ready to roll it ready to roll into some some protocols and go through some different things that way yeah we're close to that now we just we'll go to knowing whether we're going to heat detector or AI and so there's different protocols um heat detect an AI or do a time deployment so there's protocols that that land differently for that we'll talk about um if we're not just heat detected and having our technician come out breed when we observe in heat uh we're going to use some protocols that we could use to to bring the cattle into heat at specific time and make arrangements for a technician to be there and breathe so can everybody see this screen okay Tyler you see the screen yep you're good yeah we got the beef F for protocols for heat detection and time AI yep it gets pretty bright here with this white background so I would I would encourage you those that have a pretty good idea of when your heifer is cycling or when our normal heat cycle is I would encourage you to use what we call the select sync plus cedar we're commonly called the seven day protocol and that's the the two protocols on the left side of your screen um they're shorter term protocols and they're very effective okay so the top one if you're going to discuss that let's say you know that your heifer is going to be in heat typically on March 7th we would start by putting a cedar in our today or tomorrow and with the GNRH product like fur to gill we'd leave it in for seven days so if we did that today that's a Tuesday the following Tuesday we would remove the cedar and give her a shot of prostit gland which is common name would be like legal ace or ester and then you would observe heat for up to 84 hours or if you can't really you got to have ignition and he's pretty tight or she's pretty tight with their time they can only be there a certain date then we would look at this bottom protocol where it says that we can breathe around 54 hours or or 22 to 24 hours after that so you would basically set up a time with them so when you would pull the the cedar in the early morning and you would be you would arrange for that technician there to be there in the afternoon two days later so if that's on a Tuesday you would arrange for the technician to be there Thursday afternoon to do a time to point in the business that I'm in I probably discourage you from doing that I would do as much heat detection if if your technician will allow you know to make sure you have the right kind of success because halfers they're probably the least consistent in the way they cycle on these seven-day protocols you'll have keffers coming as early as 28 hours after you pull the cedar and all the way out to almost 100 hours after you pull the cedar so there's a pretty wide window I'd really encourage you to breathe the heifer when she's in standing heat if you don't your success is going to go down I'm going to briefly talk about these protocols on the right side these would be called long-term protocols they take a lot more planning as you can see on the bottom axis on both protocols you're those are days from day zero to day 36 with the mga protocol and with the 14-day cedar you're from day zero to day 33 so for example if you're going to breathe the 5th of May you're going to start your your protocol somewhere around the first to April so from a standpoint of planning you can see how important it is for me to bring up having a calendar and having everybody on board hey one question go ahead Tyler I was I was going to say they were curious or somebody was wondering is there a percentage advantage between the seven versus 14 yeah let me finish let me finish okay sorry go ahead yeah you're good let me finish a comment here and then we'll go back and forth between those things so the one advantage and as a for the job that I do I recommend the bottom right protocol to a lot of my producers and this is why and you know heifers they go through the winter and like the winter you guys have had in the Dakotas Nebraska that area it's been a tough winter and there's been a lot of ups and downs condition you probably have not observed a lot of heat in your verge and heifers the advantage of this protocol these two protocols on the right is with either mga or the cedar uh you're gonna you're gonna have those heifers have a heat cycle somewhere where you see on the axis day 14 somewhere around day 17 18 and 19 those heifers are going to have a heat and a lot of times those heats are not fertile so don't be tempted to breed the heifers on that heat what it does is make sure that that heifer is reproducing track from the standpoint of maturity and follicles on the ovary that's preparing them for the next heat that you're going to induce on day 30 or 33 when you give them a prostagland shot and the neat part about these two is I alluded to in the seven day you had a wide range of heats from somewhere around 28 hours following cedar removal out to 96 or 100 hours after these two protocols tighten that up somewhere you'll start seeing observed heat somewhere around 48 hours following the last shot and usually it only goes out to about 90 hours so it narrows the time frame that you're going to observe heat okay so back to your question tyler make sure I got this right is there a big advantage one way or another to these one protocol or the other my answer would be is if you know your heifers are cycling throughout the winter you got some of those observations in mind I probably prefer you do a seven day because you can you already know that your heifer is fertility cycling and you can more effectively time cedar removal somewhere around 18 to 23 days post your last observed heat okay if those heifers you're working with have not showed any heat cycles in the last 60 days I'm going to tell you the advantage is use the 14-day cedar protocol so you know that those those animals are not silent you know that the disappointing thing about a seven-day cedar protocol is if your heifers don't show a sign of heat through aids of heat detection your success goes way down in terms of conception in the 14-day protocol you can actually see a pretty good advantage in conception because you know those heifers have had a previous cycle somewhere around 15-16 days before you give them the last shot so even though you might not see an observed heat when you breed them their body their biological clock if you will from their brain to the reproductive tract is in line it's in sync the ovulation is synchronized and so you you're going to have a little more success in getting one pregnant that's not showing sign of heat so before I go on to these next ones I would I would just make a comment about that we do a lot of work with ester tech patches and they have a scoring system that's one to five and the patches that are scored in the three four and five are somewhere in the 80% range higher becoming pregnant than those that are scored a one or a two and the ones that are four and five over one two three is more like 90% chance of getting pregnant so what that tells me is when you see animals in a standing riding heat your success goes up so I would shoot for that every time you know you're dealing with usually as one animal and maybe you got a steer or another heifer around it's the heat detector try and catch them in the riding heat does that answer that question Tyler I believe so yes sir okay perfect I had a question on MGA here um so if you uh how are you able to tell if you fed the right amount of MGA in terms of uh is there a negative for too much or too little for what you feed her yeah okay so I understand the question MGA has prescribed it now and you know it's comes in two forms uh like on a large-scale feed lot it comes in liquid and they get so many grams a day per head and in those situations the cattle need to get pretty close to that amount one time a day so the MGA needs to be administering the AM feeding the bunk needs to be clean when they deliver the feed so all the cattle involved have access to the MGA okay and if you're going to use this on a show animal it also comes in a pelleted form and in that case most time we encourage them to have the carrier feed if you will so most companies make a feed that's very similar to the MGA feed that's just minus the hormone feed depth about 12 or 14 days before you start them on the day zero with the MGA and then you go 14 days with the hormone product on course when you take them off you switch back to the previous feed for another 14 to 21 days to keep that plain nutrition even it's a very good protocol it is quite a bit cheaper from a commercial standpoint than a cedar but it does take a lot of detail you can't be you can overfeed it and cause like heifers that I got too much condition it'll stay in the fat they don't respond quite as well if you underfeed it we we basically have what we call protocol jumpers you'll go out there one day in the middle of the MGA from day zero to 14 and there could be eight or 10 heifers out of 100 heat which tells me that they'd got MGA long enough to suppress heat but when they came off they were stimulated to come into heat if that happens you might as well ditch everything that's from day 14 off because it takes away the synchronization part of it fair question yep okay perfect so I wanted to show this this is what we use for fixed time AI and a lot of times this is for just for larger commercial projects where you're going to be there one specific day and if you your technician only can allow you so much time in their day you probably need to take a look at these protocols there is two more protocols on here than what we saw in the previous slide there's what's called a five day protocol and I would show you the difference between that and seven day but the obvious difference is the cedars only in five days but the biggest difference and the most the one that's probably the most important is you have to give them two shots of across the gland eight hours apart on that day five lots of people say well why don't you just double the dose across the gland and give it once they've done a little bit of research about that it doesn't allow for the synchronization it'll the synchronization gets scattered out you want to give that second shot you know eight hours apart it's not as big a deal with virgin heifers without a calf as it is cow calf bears so the timing here is 60 hours post cedar removal you'll see on a seven day which we saw in the previous slide you're going to breed them somewhere between 54 and plus or minus two hours mga i would recommend time day i on show heifers with this on the commercial side large groups of heifers somewhere between 66 and 84 hours is a good good way to do that the 14 day protocol is i mean it's the tried true protocol for synchronized large group of heifers you can basically start say we're doing 500 to 1000 heifers in a morning as an example you can start breeding those heifers about hour 63 and if you're done about hour 66 to 68 your timing is perfect okay this bottom protocol is called the seven and seven this is a very new protocol it's only been really approved for heifer use since this last fall i'm going to tell you to proceed with caution i'm not going to recommend you use this because we don't have a lot of pregnancy data out the field on it right now the neat thing about it is we've used it on several medium size groups of heifers and we see nearly a hundred percent estrus response or riding activity with this protocol it says time breed of 54 hours my experience is we've never been able to make it to 54 hours and if you wanted to use this protocol you need to heat detect and it doesn't have to be morning and night but i'll just give you an example we had two groups of about 50 heifers back to back not this fall but the previous fall and we had the earliest heifers were in heat about 28 hours and the last heifer was in heat at about 40 hours so if we went away to 54 hours to breed those those early heifers we would have been on the outside of being able to get them settled yeah question Tyler well i was going to say what uh what was the map on those heifers were they all cycling pretty regular right before you did this protocol or do you have that yeah i mean that would be hard for me to answer the heifers were in really nice condition i would tell you this is when i put the cedars in those heifers there's lots of sign of previous activity and what i mean by that is rubbed off hip bones and roughed up hair on their tail hips so the response didn't surprise me and if you look at the number of days involved how many hormone shots are on that lower lower schematic i mean you're basically taking total control of that bovine brain you're not given them much choice not to have the heat if you'll follow what i'm saying i mean they're almost locked into they don't they really don't have a choice okay so i'll tell you my personal concern with this protocol is just the elevated and this probably is more in heifers that have a lot of condition on them is that a lot of hormones in a 17 day period and if they don't settle i i have a lot of concern that you know maybe there would be some some chance they wouldn't want to respond to those hormones in the future fair enough now we're doing on time yes we're uh we're gonna about three minutes till we're supposed to be wrapped up here clan so that'll be perfect so the last this last part here is just kind of a little bit about what i do and a lot of this is pictorial i can get this there are you so this what i see this is my crystal ball we're at the lowest count numbers we've been i don't know if anybody hears 80 years old on here today but those of you tyler's eight have never seen count numbers this low and female retention in the next decade is going to have to be paramount for us to supply a hundred world and we we want to search out fertility and try and impact those in those early born you know heifers that have been born early in your cabin season our philosophy is what i do is we work on large projects and our goal is to be able to take our equipment and our crew and our service to any corner of the ranch so if your feed is in the furthest pasture away and that's where you have to have those cattle so you can see by these pictures this is the kind of equipment we have and we use in our area all the time so we pride ourselves and be able to take the business to the cows i would tell you uh planning and personnel and good people are running is key our success and i think that can apply if you've got one animal you know your crew meeting your parents your brothers your sisters your ai technician have a good working relationship with them and you'll be successful and then i'm lucky enough to do is i get to see some pretty wild cool views with what i do with my job this picture here we're setting up breeding of like 500 cows in a two-hour time frame you can see that there's there's a one barn you can barely see but there's two ai double barns there are two double daniels alleys ways we're breeding somewhere around 200 cows an hour with about 100 cows an hour going through each barn another view where we bred right at 800 heifers in about four and a half hours set up where we're you know bringing multiple cattle we got a efficient set up in the back and we've got four people breeding cows and two people thawing semen inside of those closed in farms and this is kind of one of my favorite slides is how do we implement ai like i said it's a long-term commitment we got to have communication between all parties involved to understanding that where we're headed and why we're committed to this and in our case we have in our business we have to be willing to follow some roads that lead to some great scenery okay we really focus on and take pride in trying to have the best results for for what you have our slogan is is your success is our passion and we really like to be involved that make your operation better so with that tyler if we're at that point we can entertain some questions i really appreciate the opportunity and maybe the next time in north dakota doing customer meetings i'll get to meet some of you tyler this is curt clint this curt frail like county extension agent dickinson north dakota i was monitoring the chat and the q and a there was a question from erin what is your experience opinion of sexed semen good question i think it's something that we don't take a hold of it right now and going into future you're leaving a lot of opportunity behind i'll just tell you the two differences in it that i think are important to know about is it's more fragile to handle you have to be very very diligent and knowing your thawing equipment's right on know about timing and the second one's probably most important you did not breathe an animal a sex semen unless they're in standing heat and when you see them in standing heat you need to wait a minimum of 18 hours is a general rule even up to 24 hours following a first observed heat if you go too early you're not going to have as much success conventional semen is a lot more forgiving you can breathe cows when you see them the first observed sign of heat and have a fairly good success we do it every day in dares so timing is important knowing that when you see that first anxiety wait wait wait until you breathe them don't use a typical ampm rule we're used to with conventional semen great question curt thank you there is another question that came through from Samantha i've never worked with a technician before what will the technician ask me what should i think about before i call him good question so if you're not proficient with ai yourself this is what a technician's going to bring with you okay he's going to have a semen tank that stores the semen so if you buy semen you're going to have to arrange with that technician to have the semen shipped to him or her and have it stored there you can expect a technician to bring all the proper equipment to thaw the semen um he should give you advice on these protocols we've talked about today the he or she should be timely and i would say that those people's time when you're probably wanting to breed those heifers are very valuable so you need to have a mind of budget you know i would say the technicians i work with the breed one single animal if they're next door you're probably looking at 50 bucks ahead if they're 30 40 50 miles down the road it could cost you 150 dollars ahead so i would say be aware of that good question thank you curt another one just popped up does my show have for needing natural cycle before i can ai that's a great question um my advice is i would i would like to see her have at least one natural cycle before you try to ai and the reason i say that is we don't really know when she started puberty and if if her first cycle is the one you observed the chances of you getting her settled on that may only be about 40 50 percent versus if you wait one more cycle you may up your chances of conception as much as 10 to 15 percent on natural heat another good question follow that up curt one minute here go ahead brian uh before we start losing too many people on our uh webinar this evening want to thank everyone for attending as curt mentioned earlier we will get this the recording put up on youtube we do have a couple webinar or a couple questions that we would ask that you would participate in answering before you jump off so if you need to jump off know that the recording will be up shortly we do have time for a couple more questions if you want to stick on and ask those questions we have one more at least in the chat box so brian i do see the uh the poll that did pop up so going back to our question um how well does seven and seven sink work on cows or is there a better protocol for cows good question i'm going to start by saying you need to make sure your cows are ready for seven and seven seven and seven's a lot of extra work so it's one more time through the shoot but if you've got your cows in a good body condition and they've got some cyclists ahead of time it's not uncommon for us to see cows in the range of 90 you know high 80s up to high 90s percent cycling off of the protocol if you get that you could expect as much as a 10 to 15 percent jump in overall conception rate on the flip side if you're trying to to bump up and get a higher conception rate and you maybe don't have the cows in the right kind of condition or they're short on energy uh don't waste your time stay with the seven and seven protocol or excuse me a normal seven-day protocol that answer their question i believe so they haven't followed up with anything and i guess uh i just looked at the q and a part there's nothing in there and i think unless brian or tyler um somebody else has seen anything i think we've uh got all the questions that have been typed in uh out to you perfect i i would entertain any i told tyler i wouldn't put any punches in for working for select sires but if people wanted to reach out to me via email or a phone call if you do have a select sires beef directory my contact information is there in the front and the back of that catalog tyler are are you still with us tyler i absolutely i absolutely am so if you guys have not uh filled out the poll it would be greatly appreciated just to get a little gauge of of where we uh you know if there's any other questions you guys have uh please also bring those up and i'm actually in the process of pulling up the the series that we're going to have so that way you guys can tune in for the next war that we will have available here so we'll give it a couple more minutes here if any other questions come to mind and uh we'll stick on here a couple more minutes and wait for those again like tyler said uh if you haven't uh done the webinar poll we'd ask you to do that uh before you jump off uh again we will come with another webinar next weekend uh or next tuesday evening and tyler just pulled that up on your screen there so uh and next week uh this week we talked about the artificial insemination and synchronization protocols next week we're going to talk about uh the natural breeding services so uh just going a little different direction there uh after that we're going to get into our nutrition uh for post calving and pre breeding nutrition some show animal nutrition later on in march and our we'll wrap it up with the grazing ready readiness hoping we'll start to see some uh light at the end of our winter here and uh we can start looking at some getting cattle ready to go out in graze so uh there's our schedule for the next four weeks with our webinars tuesday evening starting at 6 30 central time and we encourage anyone if you know other people that would like to uh jump on to these webinars uh get them sent over to get registered and uh can use the same link uh each week to get on so so brian and tyler there was another question that popped into the okay clint did add answer it how many times should i try ai before i move to natural service and that guy that asked the question is very famous guy i think sheep business um i did answer it i what i do with my own heifers if you do have the natural bull available i try him a couple times ai and then i go to natural and my main thought process is thinking down the road if you're trying to have that heifer pregnant going into the competitive part of the show season uh pregnant heifer's better than an open one sometimes ai just doesn't work for every animal well i'll see and oh go ahead i was just gonna say i'll throw it back to brian and tyler to wrap up the evening well tyler i don't see any more questions coming in and we're starting to lose some of our participants so uh on behalf of our uh 4h animal science uh program and we just as we say that we do have another question that pops in do you think that an animal that doesn't easily breed ai ai is a good option to call i i would call some of the best cows i've seen in the business in terms of raising big calves um you know if you breed them the first time ai and maybe stick the next time to natural service and raise a strap and big bull calf you know some of them disposition wise or something just doesn't work in that process and so i i'm not one that would call that one okay well on behalf of our 4h animal science team here in north dakota we want to thank everyone for participating this evening we want to thank clint for providing his insights to the artificial insemination and uh sync protocols tyler for lining this up i hope you guys join us again next week uh tuesday evening 6 34 our natural breeding uh service webinar so thank you everyone we'll see you next week thank you tyler we probably can end recording