Adventures in Cow Breeding

Cow breeding has turned out to be a good way for Garry to help people in the village, and it turns out other villages. He started breeding cows artificially when we got our herd, and bred a few cows in the village that winter, more when the last live bull in the village was eaten. Most calves, both males and females, end up as meat (and faster growing calves are dinner sooner), because cows in Ukraine often milk for ten years.When the first calves were born, people were thrilled with how big they were and how fast the half-Holstein calves grew. This meant more people wanted cows bred by artificial insemination the next year.  He uses Canadian semen, he first bought it from the Ukrainian-Canadian Dairy Commission people, but now he buys it from a company in Molochansk (see the post about our Mennonite tour/semen buying trip this spring.) This morning he is there, getting some more semen, because he is breeding a lot of cows this fall.

Most cows in the village are red, but the black  ones are AI bred

He has created his own competition, some people in the villages use a real live bull to breed their cows and heifers, and the most popular ones are half-Holstein bulls from cows Garry bred.

One man had him out to breed a cow for him because he had to get rid of his bull because he was getting troublesome as he gets older, so he wants a replacement for him. Apparently he was making a good income breeding cows for people with his great bull. Garry buys inexpensive semen, and charges about what it costs to breed the cows, which is less than the going rate to use a bull in the village. There is one village with no bull right now so he goes there more often lately.

Max and Andrey really like jam

Yesterday morning -while I was making grape jam (Garry has a bad habit of complimenting people's fruit when he is breeding cows, and then they give him some to take home, on Monday he bred a cow in some village and told them that they had such a nice bathtub full of grapes sitting outside on his way to the barn, and when he got back he  gave Maxim Boradin a bag of purple grapes to carry in the house to give me " so I can make more jam"-
 Garry was off in the fog to breed a cow, this happened to be at a place near the river, he says it is as far as he has ever gone to breed a cow. He says it is a nice little country place, owned by a wealthy man who decided to move out of the city. The fog was even thicker by the river, he said. I assume the guy came and picked up Garry and the semen tank, since that is the way it normally happens, that way he doesn't have to try and find a place, although sometimes he goes a village in our car when he has been to the place before, or watches for a a lady standing out on the street waiting for him to come. Garry had been there about six weeks before to breed a cow, this time it was a heifer to breed.

They had Garry check the other cow to see if she was pregnant, since Garry is not a veterinarian 42 days is a little early for him to tell, but he told them she probably was.  He now gets people who want him to tell them what is wrong with their cow if she is not getting pregnant, or if they have not seen them in heat (showing signs that the cow is at the right time in their cycle and ready to breed.) He would rather "preg check" them when they are 3 months along, much easier to say for sure. A few weeks ago he was breeding a cow in different village (he now breeds cows in 4 or 5 villages) and they asked if Garry could check their neighbor's three cows, because none of them had been bred yet. Garry asked if they had been bred in the last 2 months, and the people said no, so he decided that they could have injections of hormones to bring them in heat, since they felt like they were in the part of the cycle when this would work. Afterwards, they thought one had aborted a calf... which is why he had asked about whether they had been bred, it is hard to tell if they are less than 3 months pregnant! He said that when he went to breed the cows, the one they thought had aborted seemed to feel too normal to have aborted, so he thought she had not lost a calf and had a good chance of becoming pregnant.

Garry's pet peeve at the moment is people who have moved out to the villages from the city and get a cow or two, but have no idea how to care for one. They don't know all the things that people who have grown up in the village and around cows know, like how much feed you need to put away to keep a cow all winter, so they have skinny starving cows in spring, who are barely milking, and not pregnant because they didn't know they should have a calf yearly so they will give more milk again. Of course it is difficult to get an undernourished cow pregnant, so they are not very successful in becoming self-sufficient and enjoying inexpensive village life.

Now that fall has arrived he mostly is breeding cows in people's cattle sheds, but in the summer he sometimes bred cows in fields where they were grazing with that village's herd. The owner would (try) to catch the cow and tie or hold her while Garry stuck his arm in her and placed the semen through her cervix with the metal breeding rod. Ukrainian cows are very quiet and used to people catching them and putting a rope around their horns to lead them around, although no cow likes something new, and sometimes getting them secured and getting the semen inside the cow would take a while.

If you are wondering, Garry does all this talking about breeding cows in Russian. One of the things his Russian lessons this year have focused on is things to say about your cows in Russian. Many village people speak a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, so he has to tell them he only knows a little Russian, and they go on from there.

 It used to be that people wanting a cow bred would either come to the house, or phone Maxim Rudei and he would tell Garry about it. Now some people have Garry's phone number and call him and he has conversations about when and where he will breed their cow, entirely in Russian. We still have people who show up at the house, looking for Garry to breed their cow, now if he is not here, either Andrey or Maxim Boradin will talk to them. A couple weeks ago I was the only one in the house (except company)when an older lady showed up at the door, with a guy behind her- he was her driver, people who don't have a car to pick Garry up in will hire someone in their village to go get him- she talked for while, and I finally heard two words I know "inseminate corova" and I told her he would be back in "adin chas" (one hour). Garry told me when he rode with them to the village he couldn't understand her either, she was speaking Ukrainian but the driver spoke Russian to him, and told her to also.

Sometimes when we are in the city Garry will get a phone call from Max asking when we will be back, because there is someone wanting a cow bred. Last week we were in the city and Garry got a call from Max and said we should be back in an hour and a half. When we got back as the sun was setting and a thick fog had rolled in. Garry was hoping that the people had not waited but the guys had an address for them, maybe it was somewhere he had been recently and easy to find.... maybe even the man who he had bred a cow for the week before, who had said he'd have another to breed soon. If so, I think Garry was hoping to avoid a wild ride by driving himself. However, when we got back about 15 minutes later than planned because there had been a traffic jam in the city, there was a familiar ancient white Lada.

About ten days earlier, when it was rainy, an old man with a very old model Lada, came to pick up Garry to breed his cow in Petropol. Usually when a person (generally a man, but not always) with an old Lada comes to pick Garry up, they drive very slowly and carefully to their place and back, with the semen tank in the back seat. This car had no back seat anymore, but a nice spot to wedge the tank in so it stayed upright.
Garry climbed in the front seat, and the man backed out of our driveway really fast... and started up the street in the village about 90 kph, running over a cat and splashing water from a puddle on a babushka pushing a baby carriage. When he reached the highway, he didn't slow down, zooming down the fast lane, passing cars at 130.... before he reached the road into the village of Petropol, he turned and flew across a field and pulled up to his house. They returned just as fast. Garry decided to be clever and told him in Russian " I am a very busy man, maybe next time you can drive faster."

I was very relieved when Garry returned home safely from breeding the cow on that foggy night, however he said the man actually drove slowly because of the fog.