Day 10: 605 Sires by: Khloe

 Today's Sponsor: Hillsborough County Cattlewomen

Today we went to one of the last stops of our 10-day trip, 605 Sires. They mainly work on the beef side of the livestock industry that works with semen collection and also does IVF on donor cows. They have multiple tanks that they store their semen in, and each tank holds about 70,000 straws of semen each, which means that they could possibly hold about half a million straws of semen in one building. To ship semen out of state or out of country you must be specially certified to ship it out. They house some donor cows at the facility so that way they can sell embryos along with the semen, and they collect embryos from the donor cows every two weeks. Once they breed the cows they wait seven days to flush the embryos and store them in a freezer and then on day eight, they take the embryos and either keep them in the freezer or transplant them into the cow(s) that they are needed in.

One of their semen storage tanks.

They usually collect semen every day. Their peak season for collections is February to about June 1^st. They also use smaller tanks when transferring the semen from place to place and those tanks usually hold about 280 straws of semen each. The smaller the tank the shorter the semen will stay frozen which means you have to refill it more often than you would a bigger tank and the big tanks they use for transportation hold about 3,000 straws each.

Mr. Cory Schrag, the owner of 605 Sires, explained the multiple parts of the business. In Vitro Fertilization, Embryo Transfer, Semen Collection, Sexing Semen, Housing bulls and donor cows.

  

I enjoyed this stop to see the process that could be used on my own beef animals back home.