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Jessica Lancaster knows a thing or two about cattle, having grown up in a rural setting in southern Idaho.
She has learned more since arriving in Iola last fall to attend Allen Community College, recruited to be on its livestock judging team.
First-hand learning experiences come with “chores we do every day” on the college farm, about six miles north of town. It’s there she and other ACC ag students are learning how to put together a herd of purebred cows, and it’s coming about in a high tech way.
“My first year (2006) we had 11 cows and nine calves on the farm,” said Jeff Nemecek, one of ACC’s ag instructors.
The cows, crossbred and sometimes not the pick of the litter, knew which calves were theirs, but Nemecek had no idea. They weren’t tagged, and family resemblances don’t always tell the tale.
All is changing.
ACC is working with Schaake Farms, Manhattan, to develop purebred Simmental stock.
“Our five- to 10-year goal is to build a herd where all the calves can be registered,” said Nemecek. “We’d like to reach the point where we have 40 to 50 Simmental calves each year.”
Purchasing embryos from Schaake Farms — Dr. Scott Schaake is an animal sciences and industry professor at Kansas State — was the surest way to improve the ACC herd, he said.
In 2012 two calves came from Schaake embryos transplanted into ACC cows.
A heifer was retained in the local herd. A bull was sold to Schaake, but didn’t pan out as a breeder and ended up at a sale barn.
This year, the first embryo calf was a heifer, a full sister to the 2009 Kansas State Fair supreme champion. The second, a bull, was born Monday and another calf is due about April 1.
EMBRYO calves differ from those born naturally only in the process, in much the same way as in vitro babies do among humans.
When a cow is bred, usually as many as 15 eggs are fertilized. Left in the womb, one generally attaches and grows and the others fall aside.
