The Ninth Year...: Food Animal Reproduction

Food Animal Reproduction was only a week long, but we packed a lot of awesomeness into that short week! This rotation focused mostly on dairy cows, although we did have a morning in the swine unit as well as a morning ultrasounding (supposedly) pregnant sheep. Oh, and we did do breeding soundness evaluations on beef bulls as well! Anyway, one of the big goals of this rotation is to introduce us to ultrasound in cattle and to teach us the technique for fetal sexing in dairy cows. Awesome? Yes! So on our first day, we got oriented to the ultrasound machines using reproductive tracts from dead animals and practiced palpating cows without the use of an ultrasound. For me, this was a great day, as I finally managed to figure out how to retract cow uteruses (I won't go into the details, I promise).

Trying out of of the ultrasound machines with goggle viewers- it's like a virtual reality video game!

Learning to use one of the new ultrasound machines; this one attaches to your waist!

One day, we learned about bovine embryo transfer. Basically, you breed a cow that has been superovulated (so she makes more than one egg) and take out the fertilized eggs. These eggs can then each be put into another cow. Although our cow didn't end up making any fertilized eggs, it was really interesting to see the process from start to finish!

Flushing the embryos out of our cow

Collection jar for all the little eggs!


Checking to see how many follicles she ovulated via ultrasound

Through the rest of the week, we started ultrasound into our cow palpation, starting by just looking at the tract; by the end of the week, we were all pretty good at sexing little cow fetuses when they were just 60 (or so) days old. It was pretty amazing to see their little legs kicking at the probe!

Learning to ultrasound cows!

My favorite ultrasound machine; loved the virtual reality goggles!

But fetal sexing wasn't all we did! One day, we spent the morning ultrasounding sheep to see if they were pregnant. It was a little disappointing, since none of them were, but it was fun regardless!

Another day, we spent the morning in the pig barn; we checked a few pregnant sows with the ultrasound to look at the babies, and took a look at one sow that had just had her piglets to make sure there were none left. All in all, it was a lot of fun rotation, and we learned a lot of practical skills!