A day in the life of an A.I. technician

by Earl Ingram, Select Sires Reproductive and Dairy Management Training Specialist

For people who love to work with cattle, there is no job more satisfying and rewarding than that of an A.I. technician. This is really a hands-on kind of job; the A.I. technician is the person who inseminates the cows. Every day the A.I. technician gets to work with hundreds or thousands of cows that have grown accustomed to him being around them. Also, this job is not gender-selective; both men and women are currently working successfully as A.I. technicians.

A typical day for the technician begins with going to the farm. The first chore is to detect cows that are in estrous (heat). These are cows that for that day are in the correct stage of their cycle to become pregnant if inseminated. Cows in heat will behave somewhat differently than normal. It is like they are doing the technician a favor by letting him/her know that they are ready to receive viable sperm at that moment. This is when the technician uses the first skill of the very unique set of skills of a good A.I. technician, to decide if the cow should be bred or not.

Heat detection is the area that separates the excellent and average A.I. technicians. By nature, about 25 percent of the cows in a herd will not show obvious signs of being in heat, and it requires acute observations, cow knowledge and proper record keeping to assist in the determination of their status. With his five years of experience as an A.I. technician at a 7,000-cow dairy in Garden City, Kansas, Eliseo Salto, in reference to heat detection said: “This is the single most important technique that can either make or break a technician, and tail striping helps a lot.” Tail striping is a heat detection system that allows the technician to determine if a cow stood to be ridden when no one was present to see it happen.

An A.I. technician is not just the person that inseminates the cows; he must also be a good “cow person” because the farm greatly benefits from another pair of eyes observing the cows. The A.I. technician has to be aware of the surroundings and should be constantly looking for anything on the farm that may affect reproductive performance and cow health. All problems must be reported, knowing very well that any problem on the farm will eventually reflect on the herd’s reproductive performance.

After determining what cows to breed, the next skill in the toolbox of expertise, proper handling of semen and equipment, enters the picture. Antonio Lopez, another experienced Hispanic AI technician who works at a 5000-cow dairy in Michigan, put it nicely when he said: “It would be a mistake to ‘hurry up’ in preparing semen to breed the cows. After you have gone through the work of detecting the ones in heat, you need to properly thaw the semen and maintain it at a constant temperature until you breed the cow.”

We must think of artificial insemination as a chain of events, in which if any of those events is not properly performed, there will be a negative effect on the herd’s pregnancy rate.

What comes next is to inseminate the cow, and this is another very important skill that comes into play. The technician needs to have a vast knowledge of the anatomy of the cow’s reproductive system. Semen must be deposited in the uterine body which is approximately the size of a quarter just after the cervix and just prior to the uterine horns. Semen deposition in the uterine body, which is a very delicate organ, must be performed without causing physical damage. Insemination must be done very cleanly in a relatively short period of time.

The next step is to properly record inseminations. Proper record keeping is essential in monitoring performance. The technician not only has to report which cows were bred that day, but also to which bull. Additionally, cows found in heat that day that for some reason were not bred are also noted; this is valuable information in helping to detect that cow in her next heat.

The A.I. technician is a highly valuable resource on the farm because he/she is a self-motivated and hardworking individual. The technician is an example to other employees on the farm as to how a disciplined and organized employee should conduct himself. Pablo Sanchez, in a call from Pennsylvania, said that the two herds on which he works have expanded in the last two to three years, and both decided to use estrous synchronization, so his work load has dramatically increased. He spends his days heat detecting, breeding and injecting cows to be synchronized. But the biggest day of the month for him is pregnancy diagnosis day. He said: “Just to listen to the vet constantly repeating pregnant, pregnant, pregnant…is music to my ears. I take pride in being good at what I do.”

Luis Lopez works at a small dairy in Northern Florida and gladly expressed his pride and joy about his job by saying that he gets to participate in selecting what bulls are to be used on each cow. He said: “There are many cows in this herd that are the product of my breeding and my mating. I am still learning to do the mating, my boss does it very well and he teaches me and more and more he is accepting my choice of bulls.”

So what does it take to be a good A.I. technician? For all of you who are asking that question, here is a summary of the required qualities:

• The technician must be self-motivated. Virtually all aspects of technician service require being fully engaged in the process of leading the way in planning and in the efforts required to make those plans happen.

• The technician must be disciplined. From the first cow to the last, his attention needs to be focused, methodical and thorough. The technician must always be alert to potential problems within or outside of his immediate responsibility. The dairy relies on this extra set of eyes to spot issues affecting herd health such as feed, cow comfort, handling, etc.

• The technician must be a communicator. The technician is with the cows daily and should notice changes or problems before anyone else does. The ability to interact with the owner/herdsman, herd veterinarian and nutritionist solidifies this position as a key herd employee.

• The technician must be professional. That includes performance, appearance and communication.

• The technician needs to be proactive. Any technician who waits for problems to find him will soon be run over by them. A technician needs to be fully aware at all times of how the work is going and whether it is meeting goals and if not, why.

• The technician must be able to work “outside the box” meaning flexibility and knowledge on how to work with a herd’s unique characteristics. Adapting the principles of tail striping to facilities, milking order of cows or unique personality traits of an employee may require a new approach to efficiently get the job accomplished.

The above requirements define that the A.I. technician, in many ways, can have a significant influence on the proper operation of the dairy, due mostly to the relations with other key personnel on the farm, and because in most cases, the technician gets to look at every cow every day. EL