One thing we've wanted to be able to do for a long time is to ship semen on our stallions to other breeders. Unfortunately in our area there aren't any facilities offering collection and shipping services without driving 2 hours both ways, which becomes a bit unrealistic in the busyness of summer. And with as many mares as we cover here on our farm we need the boys to remain close, not ship them off to a breeding facility. Which leaves us with the option to learn the skills and do it ourselves- exciting, but one more thing to figure out!
This will be our third season collecting stallions on the farm. Over the years we've increased our own knowledge base and skill set as well as adding pieces to simplify the process, such as our designated teaser mare. I thought we were finally getting close and in anticipation of using March to prepare ourselves and the boys I placed a few large orders for supplies and got our teaser mare set up for her job. But when you're working with 1200-1700 lbs of freight-train muscle in a testosterone fueled stallion you really can't predict how things will go and each of our boys has decided to present us with a unique challenge...
First we have Ash, our imported blue roan Brabant stud. Everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to breed their mare to Ash! Which is amazing and we would love to share him. If only he would learn how to collect. He has had far and away the most practice, having been collected to AI our own mares for the past couple of years, but he's just flat out terrible at it. It often takes several jumps and nearly an hour to get him to actually be excited enough to 'give up the goods' which is frustrating for both stallion and handler. Unfortunately, his live covering skills are no better so we need to use AI in order to know that the mare is actually getting bred. Ash was doing fairly well last summer and we thought we had him figured out, even if it was a less elegant process than most stallions. But this spring it's like he's forgotten everything he knows about breeding and has no interest in the mare at all... and there's certainly no way to force a 1700 lb stallion to jump! I'm hoping he's the type of stallion who simply knows that the mare is not truly in heat and therefore is not interested in breeding her (rather than having forgotten all he knows). This would likely prevent us from shipping semen on him but would mean we can continue to collect off an in-heat mare for our own use on the farm.
Our senior Gypsy stallion, Jack, has a very different problem from Ash. He's quite excited about mares and aside from the times he is so excited that he can't focus on his job (usually after watching his herd mates go off to collect and being made to wait on his turn) he's actually easy to collect. The challenge here is that I've yet to analyze a good semen sample from him. Some of this can be due to timing- stallions need to be collected several times in the spring to get rid of accumulated dead cells- but even in the midst of summer breeding season I've noticed the poor motility in his collections. Which is very odd to me, as he is consistently settling mares both in-hand and in a pasture breeding scenario. We'll continue to collect and analyze Jack through this pre-breeding period in hopes of finding a schedule that works well to maximize his counts but if that's not possible we may have to accept that he's a great on-farm breeder but not much of a candidate for shipping semen.
Fig is our 75% junior Brabant stallion. He had at least one 'surprise' foal at the farm he came from so we knew that he could breed mares in the pasture. When it comes to training for collection the biggest issue that we've had is that he's smart enough to know that the dummy is not the mare and he wants to jump the mare! This is an issue we've worked with on and off the past few years, but with only being able to practice with a mare in heat (often after she's already waited for Ash to do his job) training has been sporadic at best. Now that our teaser mare is available we have done a lot more practice on dummy training and Fig is improving. He still wants to go for the mare but we can usually re-direct him onto the dummy. We're still working on getting an ejaculation from him as he has a weird habit of trying to do his job while standing as far back from the dummy (or mare) as possible which means his balance is terrible and he often falls off before finishing. I think with more practice we'll get him figured out but it is going to take time and a few good jumps.
And finally we have our new Gypsy stallion, Boone. Boone has been primarily a pasture breeder at his past farm, although we did see him collected (off a tease mare) when we took a mare up to breed to him. I wasn't quite sure what to expect when we started to train Boone to the dummy. The first round he really impressed me and did his job in just two jumps! After that, well, things have been a bit rougher. He jumps the dummy fairly well but we're still working on figuring out his exact preferences to complete the collection. We always get there in the end but I'm hoping with additional practice he will be easy to collect. His numbers look great so maybe, just maybe, we'll have a stallion to ship on.
There is so much that goes into shipping semen. After collection comes semen analysis, test cools/freezes to see how well they will ship, and the mechanics of figuring out a process for ordering and shipping semen to customers. Collecting stallions is not without it's challenges, but it's not supposed to be the major hurdle... isn't this what they were born to do? For me, the most frustrating part is how frustrated I get when what should be easy and exciting for them (at least to my mind) requires so much effort and troubleshooting. I believe that with consistent practice and a few successes most of these boys are going to figure out what to do and enjoy it, but once again we're not quite there yet...