Time to Breed Heifers

Today would be one of those days Bruce would say he puttered.  He got a pallet of lime delivered but we aren't set up to just set the whole pallet in the barn so he got that carried in.  Barn lime is finely ground limestone that serves two purposes.  We spread it on the walk alley in the barn so its not slippery under foot.  It eventually gets scraped into the gutter and spread on the fields where it sweetens the soils for our crops.  Bruce let the silo unloader down a door and the feed box got filled again today.  Now that the animals spend the summer harvesting their own feed we are much more aware of how much more time it takes to keep everything fed during the winter. We have a group of heifers ready to breed so we had our breeder come and insert cidr's.  These are a slow release hormone that are inserted vaginally, somewhat like an IUD.  In one week the heifers will get a  prostaglandin shot, the next day the cidr's are removed. The heifers will  then be watched closely for signs of heat (estrus) so we can breed them.  We use this process to synchronize their ovulation.  Watching for individual heats is incredibly time consuming so grouping them allows us to focus on watching them for a few days instead of every day for a couple months. If we watch heats naturally they need to be watched approximately 1/2 hour twice a day.  The optimal time is dawn and dusk, which also happens to be the time of day we are milking the cows.