Every few weeks, Dr. Weber comes to the farm to check up on the pregnant, recently bred and recently calved cows to look for a variety of different things. As students in this course, we are lucky enough to be able to watch this process and even help by providing some of the information that Dr. Weber needs. To begin, he asks us how long the cow has been milking, how far along in her pregnancy she is and the last time he checked up on her. This information gives him a better idea of what he is looking for, once he has the ultrasound probe in the right spot. Then, he puts on a clean glove and washes the probe in a dilute iodine solution. This type of ultrasound of the reproductive tracts is done internally, meaning that Dr. Weber holds the ultrasound probe in his hand, and the uses his hand to guide it internally to different areas of the reproductive system. On the screen, as you can see in the picture, we can see whether or not there is a fetus in the cow’s uterus. For cows that have been bred recently, he looks for signs of pregnancy, for cows that we know are pregnant he looks for the size and positioning of the fetus and for cows that have recently calved, he looks at the healing of their reproductive system as it has just undergone a ton between pregnancy, actually giving birth and recovering! Pretty cool, right??
The first pregnancy checks are done about 30 days after the cow is bred to determine whether or not she is actually pregnant. Once we determine that the cow is pregnant, she can be checked again, a few weeks later to look more closely at the size of fetus and how many there are! According to Hoard’s Dairyman Journal, 4-5% of dairy cattle pregnancies result in twins! This can be exciting but also can make the pregnancy and delivery a bit more complicated for all involved. A couple of other interesting things to keep in mind are that a cow’s gestation period is 280 days (a little over 9 months) and in a lot of situations such as a cow having twins or a heifer calving (a cow having her first calf), delivery can be up to two weeks early. This keeps all staff and on-call students on our toes at Witter when we have lots of cows expecting! Stay tuned for some more updates as we have three mommas due this week! It is a very exciting time at Witter Farm!