well good afternoon it's two o'clock um west coast time and we're going to start the in the swine barn series for our october meeting um our program today is going to talk about swine reproduction dr ryan samuel from south dakota state university is going to cover topics relating to foreign cell management and getting your pigs bred also covering our artificial insemination before we get started i'm going to ask you guys a poll right quick let me bring the poll up and i will launch the poll and basically it says what method of breeding do you use on your pig farm um are you one both are you attending for educational purposes give it just another 20 30 seconds so dr samuel we have some people that just use a poor some people that just use artificial insemination and some that use both and some that are attending for educational purposes so i think we you'll have it well covered today so i thank you guys for answering that poll as always we have jamie sackman on with us today from the washington port producers she'll be heading up the question and answer so if you have any questions and answers go ahead and put those in the q a and she will make sure that they get directed um to dr samuel or she'll text the answer to you in the in the question and answer um i will be watching the chat section along with anna myers from my office so if you have any problems with the platform we can go ahead and help you with that so um just want to give you guys uh just a heads up our november 12th seminar will be with uh dr russ daily from south dakota state university he's going to talk about basic swine health and diseases and treatment options for keeping your pigs healthy so you'll want to mark your calendar for november 12th on that day our speaker today is going to be um a co-presenter the co-organizer that does it in the swine barn series with me dr ryan samuel from south dakota state university so i will turn it over to dr samuel all right thank you i will get uh slides up here so and get that started all right welcome everyone so we're going to talk about swine and talk about some artificial insemination and then some of the bohr basics related to breeding and as far as uh with artificial insemination and those type of things so so just for an agenda today again we'll start with uh ai so again artificial insemination not artificial intelligence so this is the ai we're talking about today uh the twine estrus cycle we'll discuss that briefly and how that relates to when we're thinking about animals and looking at their heat cycle and when they would be ready for breeding and all that information so we'll talk a little bit at the end but about the bore some of the management thoughts thereof and how that goes together so and then as indicated if you have any questions please enter them in the q a and we'll have those available and answer those either throughout or or at the end so so i'm going to start with a video so this is a video that professor jeff clapper provided us this is from his class his reproduction class from just a couple weeks ago and so we'll start with the video and then i'll come back to the presentation thereafter oh jumped out of it there let's try this again this the insemination dose is anywhere from 80 to 100 mils is what we're going to be inseminating with okay so that's quite a bit and within that sorry i'm running into trouble here let me get this started you just bear with us for a minute um dr samuel is trying to get that video up hold on while we're wait while we're reading sir that this recording will be available after this and um that is true and also could you point us to the youtube channel um that has all of the previous recordings also yes so on our wsu animal bag.wfq um there's a link that has all the past webinars so just remember animalag.wsu.edu look under new and you'll see in the swine barn and that'll take you right to that youtube channel looks like yeah it looks like dr samuel has the video up ready to go it's all yours dr samuel okay yeah sorry about that here we'll try this again so some of the things we're going to talk about here are semen semen availability semen comes in a variety of different packaging comes as tubes comes in bottles like what we have here okay it comes in a plastic bag called a couchette as well does anybody know what size the insemination dose is the top of your head anywhere from 80 to 100 mils is what we're going to be inseminating with okay so that's quite a bit and within that 80 to 100 mils is 3 to 5 billion cells okay that's a lot more than what you would for use for cattle cattle you're talking about 8 to 20 million this is billion okay so the reason for that is we have a whole litter that we have to raise okay so comes in a variety of different packaging here and we have a lot of different catheters that we can use as well this is the golden pig this is the standard catheter that a lot of people use okay it's called the golden pig because it's got a big yellow foam tip here on the end okay now the way that you handle catheters is by this end here okay because this end is not going in the pig this end is going in the pig okay so if you would handle this catheter you handle it here down at the end that's going to be outside the pig what happens if you drop it on the ground you pick it up shake it off get all the dust off of it say okay here we go no you throw it away because these things are 15 20 cents a piece and a uterine infection is a lot more than that okay so you just don't want to even do it don't even want to try it now these things are not sterile they're clean okay you want to handle them by this end you don't want to put them under your arm you don't want to do this because that's dirty okay so you handle them by this end and what we're going to do is first thing you're going to do is you're going to go in and find out if your guilt is in estrus so what are some signs that that guild is in estrus push down on her and what happens she freezes right she locks up we say she stands immobile especially in the presence of the boar okay so the boar is going to stimulate her we're going to run the boar in front of them they're going to have nose to nose contact with them and that's very important that they have nose-to-nose contact because that bore secreting something in the saliva has anybody heard about bohr taint before okay it's a real musky type smell not very pleasant to us but the gilts and the sows really like it causes them to be stimulated and stand in estrus what's another sign that they're in estrus swollen vulvas especially in gilts okay the volvo will swell up it'll turn bright red and actually when that swelling goes down a little bit that's when they actually stand okay so when you see that swollen volume you know you're getting close you don't see the swell involved in the sows as much because they've lost all that elasticity there okay another sign flagging of the ears perking of the ears right especially in the breeds that have erect ears their ears will go up and sometimes they'll actually touch at the top okay another one is vocalization they become very vocal okay they'll i mean last month i was breeding one out here and the guilt screamed the entire time and i know she was in estrus another one is she'll search for the board now our guilts here are going to be in crates so it's going to be hard for them to search for the boar but if they were in a pen and we brought the boar in they would search out the board so those are some signs of estrus and these girls here we have synchronized them with matrix has anybody ever used matrix okay matrix is basically a progestogen and what it does is synchronizes we feed it for 15 to 16 days then we remove it and within five and a half to six days later they're in estrus and we'll talk about how that occurs later on in the course okay all the mechanisms of that so this is the golden pig okay this is a spyret type catheter so why would we use this right her cervix is interlocking she has interdigitating pads is what we say this is simulating the boar's penis okay glands penis on the boar so with this particular catheter the golden pig we would go ahead and we would put a little bit of lube here on the end and we would part the lips of the vulva we would go in at an upward angle then level off for about six inches there and then push it into the cervix okay and you'll feel what we say pop in there'll be resistance and then you'll push a little bit more it'll go in and she'll clamp down on it okay that's not how we use this one with the spyret we go in and we turn it counterclockwise okay when we're in the right spot we turn it counterclockwise if it flips back about a quarter turn we know we're locked in okay some of these catheters they will have closures on the end as well so that when you remove the semen bottle or whatever you can close this so you get less backflow so a lot of times what we'll do is we'll grade inseminations so we grade them on basically catheter lock how well she stands and how much backflow we have so we grade it one to three catheter lock means we stick the catheter in if she's a one she grabs a hold of it really tightly okay never comes loose two would be a little bit of movement three would be a lot of movement with the catheter then we grade her on how well she stands or locks up if she stands solid the entire time she gets a one if she moves a little bit she gets a two if she doesn't stand at all she gets a three and then finally backflow so if when you remove the semen bottle and you get very little backflow it's not uncommon to have some if you get very little that's a one some two and a lot three okay so it's always good to grade your insemination especially when you're starting to see if you're doing everything correctly we have another catheter here it's really really long okay so the end of it looks just like one of the foam tip catheters that we had okay but it's also got this part that comes out okay and look how much length we have here this is for deep uterine insemination so this would actually go the foam tip would go into the cervix and we would advance this inner catheter down into the uterine horn okay this is not for somebody who's not practiced this okay because it can if you're not careful you can scrape the uterine lining and you can set up a uterine infection this is not very this is not used very much there is another one that's used quite a bit it's much shorter than this it doesn't have this much of a tail on it if you want to think of it that way but it advances you get into the cervix it advances goes beyond the cervix we call that trans cervical insemination okay what we're going to be using today is a small foam tip because we have gilts here it's not uncommon to after you're done with the insemination process if you remove the catheter if you see some blood on the catheter that's nothing to be alarmed about sometimes they'll be tinged with a little bit of blood okay so is blood bad does blood kill the sperm no blood is not spermicidal okay but if you have a lot of blood on the catheter it means something didn't go quite right the lube that we use is basically sterile ky jelly okay never use petroleum jelly petroleum jelly spermicidal if you wear gloves you don't want to wear latex gloves latex gloves are also spermicidal okay but if you use a nitrile glove or something like that or a vinyl glove that's fine i myself don't use gloves okay so what we'll do is we will first we'll suit up then we'll go in and we will find out who's in estrus we do that by introducing the board in front of them pressing on their back rubbing their underline trying to figure out if they stand very well and some are going to stand better than others you're going to work in pairs okay so have a partner with you and your partner is going to help you with the catheter you'll take a catheter with you some sterile lubricating jelly and probably a paper towel as well to wipe off the vulva in case it's dirty so you'll part the lips of the vulva you'll go in at an upward angle for about the first six inches level off push it into the cervix that's when you would open up the semen bottle and attach it to the catheter once you attach it to the catheter you put gentle pressure on it to fill the catheter with the semen you don't squirt the semen into her what you want is her uterine contractions to pull it in for you okay so that's why it's important to go ahead put pressure on her back you're simulating the bore by doing that rubber underline rubber flanks that simulates the boar's front legs animal actually expels it on its own i like to remove it myself after i'm done with the insemination because i don't like all the catheters to get into the pit okay these catheters here that have closures on the end so once you remove the semen bottle you can go ahead and put close that that will prevent backflow the one with the golden pig here which doesn't have that feature you would just take it and bend it okay and that would prevent any backflow from coming okay so there's not one catheter that's any better than another some people just like one over another and that's fine they all work the same they all work well other questions how long do you leave the catheter in before you take it out it just depends um if you're if you're breeding guilt some people will leave them in a lot longer than what they do sows because if you're breeding a guilt it could take you 10 minutes to breed that guilt because they'll they'll start they'll stop it seems like an eternity when you're doing it it's not but it seems that way because when you compare that to a sow the sal sometimes you hook it up you start the insemination and by the time you look away it's half the bottle's gone because she's having those contractions pulling all that semen in then you can remove the catheter after that sometimes if she stops and starts during the insemination at which they will if you take the catheter and just move it a little bit okay and that that will help stimulate more contractions all right so we'll pick up from there so again dr clapper gave us a good introduction to artificial insemination talked about semen delivery uh dosages and all those types of things and so when you're thinking about this ester cycle of pigs about 21 days so within those 21 days 20 days or so after you've breed an animal you'll know whether you had did a good job or not because they'll start to show signs of estrus again if you did not get them pregnant that female will be receptive to breeding for two to three days and so depending on when you're checking those animals and determining when they're coming into heat or their estrus is beginning that'll set up when you're going to actually breed those animals so and commercially we would usually talk about that as we find an animal that's coming into heat displaying estrus symptoms or if you will that things that we'll talk about shortly what those look like and we'll breed them the next day and then the day after um and then with guilt sometimes it's a little less obvious of when they're those their estro cycle where they are in their estra cycle and so we may breed them more frequently or more early on to help help with that and get them pregnant so again that standing reflex so that standing heat that you might call it uh that's stimulated by the contact with mature bore and so on the image there on the slide we've got a bore there and you can kind of which is kind of hard to make out so in that case he's in one of our our rooms there and so that boar is able to walk back and forth in front of all those stalls but what he's doing is he's got his nose down there and the sow and the stall second he's got her nose down there too so they're getting some of that nose to nose contact below the feeder is kind of what's going on there so in those in the saliva this he's secreting he's secreting those pheromones and that's what bring those animals to that response to the standing heat and it gets them ready for for breeding and again that direct physical contact is best and so in this case where we've got that bore in front and he can make nose and nose contact in those pen spaces or if you've got a bore into a pen situation they can get ready right up close to them and so for heat checking guilts or heat checking your sows and you you can get the boar right in there that's helpful too so we'll look at another one of our videos in this short video here of some signs of estrus and stimulating those animals okay while we're waiting for the board to get in here if you want to press on some of their backs see if they'll kind of lock up stand still rub their underline you'll notice that some of them have swollen vulvas red vulvas okay that's an indication that they're close to being an estrous if not in estrus okay you'll notice when the boar comes in that they'll start paying attention to the board they'll go up to the front of the crate jack's got a good example over there he's got one that's laying down so if you start inseminating with a sour or guilt and she lays down you let her lay down and you just continue the insemination with her laying there so if you slap her and try to get her back up again it can stop those contractions they're probably not going to take this quote semen that well but i want you to feel the catheter law some of these are going to grab onto it a lot tighter than the others but working with your partner i want you both to feel what the catheter feels like when it's in the right spot okay so as you advance it you're gonna have to use some force to push it okay so using a paper towel if you've got one here if she's dirty on the back just wipe off the vulva okay most of these are pretty clean so this is the lube here non-spermicidal sterile lubricating jelly put a little bit on the tip doesn't require a lot and you'll have to share this and pass it around go ahead and part the lips of the vulva and then advance the catheter [Music] now i've bumped up against the cervix and i push it just a little bit further and then when i try to pull it out there's resistance that's the way i know i'm in the right spot to this point we haven't opened up the bottle of semen yet because we don't want to spill it but we can do that now i'll take this just trim off the end a little bit further down take the semen put it on the catheter general pressure just to fill the catheter you're not squirting it in remember and then start pressing on your back okay rubbing her underline and as the board gets up into her face she's probably going to take more of the semen okay all right so there's different housings that you can do when you're thinking about breeding so of course commercially um and here at sdsu these are some images from our barn so we've got those sows there in that those breeding stalls so of course but otherwise you can you could breed in pens and there are ways you can do that as well uh so it depends on your situation and your what information what uh housing and and infrastructure you have um when you're housing those animals so again depending on your situation whether it's stalls or pens um heat checking can be a little bit different so again that's detecting those sows and estrous and so with our girls in stalls i will run that boar in front of those animals and walk behind them and check for any signs of heat or signs of estrus if you've got pens um you can again run that bar either within the pen or along the fence and as dr clapper talked about earlier those girls will either run up towards that where the bore is or seek out the bore and you can get an indication of their heat cycle if you will be as they make contact with the bore again with breeding um you want those so these stalls and most breeding stalls like that have a low back gate and so you can access the rear of the sows easily or climb in to access them and so that's again how those stalls work or if you're you've got them in pens and obviously there's there's a space to get and work with them from there so you want a clean area um both in the barn and thinking about the animal themselves and so you want to make sure that everything's cleaned off and kept clean so you don't want to introduce any infection or any problems like that important note that bores should actually be housed separately from sows and gilts except for during breeding and the reason for this is you want that bore to be a new stimulus if you will coming in and so the animals react to that bore the presence of the bore if they're just housed with the bore or too close to the bore then they can get accustomed to and they don't react in the same way to the bore so semen handling as again as dr clapper talked there are different collection bottles that and different ways that semen can be shipped um so from a bore stud so when they've got you're buying doing artificial insemination you'll buy semen coming in and so that semen is collected from a bore and that's split into a number of doses and those doses can be either mixed with other bores or they can come from a single sire so it depends on what you order and what you're looking to do whether they're a mixed source or whether they're a single source and then that semen is they put in what's called an extender and that substance allows those sperm cells to live for for longer so you can have a couple days three to five days and there's even ones as long as seven days that you can get so again with bores and pigs you don't aren't able to do any frozen semen so everything has to come fresh but we'll have the extender in there that gives you time to use those doses and though demon can be packaged in those plastic bottles that we saw in the video or in vacuum bags that you can that you can use know that lights and extreme temperatures can damage semen and so it's important to store and handle the semen bottles correctly semen packages correctly which also includes temperature so we want to make sure that we're maintaining a proper temperature for those semen doses so you can buy special handling refrigerators that are specifically designed to maintain that temperature and they will keep those semen doses as fresh as possible so when you're inserting the catheter you want to make sure that you use an upward direction for the root that first six inches the reason to do this is to avoid coming in contact with the bladder and then after that first six inches then you insert into the rest and you level off and then insert the rest of the catheter again if you're using that spiret type catheter then you use a counter clockwise rotation that inserts into the cervix and again as dr clapper said you you lock that in and then it turns back about a quarter of a turn that indicates that you're in a good position uh uh um can you feel it but you're in the right spot so with breeding you've got a choice of catheters again the golden peg would be the one used most commonly and so that's sort of a picture of what it looks like there you can also use the spirit catheters as dr clapper talked about and then whichever you choose for those you can also use those ones that do the deep insemination so given experience you may be able to use some of those so some of those just require a little more extra care and caution in using them so you want to make sure that you're using a new catheter for every breeding and again if it drops or if something gets on it then go ahead and get a new one it's not worth trying to reuse them or any or if it gets dirty the cost that associated with an infection or loss of of that animal would be much more expensive than the just using a new catheter and after breeding you want to keep the female in a quiet surroundings for 20 to 30 minutes and this helps with the those contractions and the semen being brought up into the uterine horns and hopefully helps with that the litter size and actually getting the animal bread so we're talking about the semen dose so again based on what the whether it comes in bottles or whether it comes in the vacuum packages after you've got the catheter in place so again that upward indication for the first six inches and then level off get the catheter up against the cervix and then apply the semen dose attach it to the catheter you want to squeeze a little bit just to fill the catheter but then allow the sour guilt to draw the semen in with uterine contractions watching for backflow so you may need to adjust the catheter positioning ever so slightly to reduce backflow and important not squeeze because it's not it's important that those uterine contractions draw that semen in and you're not just squeezing it in and then provide stimulation by pressing on her back rubbing her underline running rubbing her flanks so again imitating what the bore would be doing with the if the board was on top there so these students are just sort of pushing on your back she's responding standing still giving that downward pressure and then again working pushing on the back rubbing on the sides giving that sow that stimulation you can also put more of your body weight on so also what you can do with breeding these animals is you can get what's called breeding saddles and with those saddles you can put on an actual it will hold the semen bag and you can it'll apply pressure to the back and the sides of of the guilt or style and so you can have sometimes have success with those okay talk a little bit about bores so again i you'll need a bore to be there for breeding but doesn't necessarily need to do the breeding and some of you will obviously have bores that you talked about that are doing natural breeding but i'm coming from perspective of more of the artificial insemination side so thinking about bores you can feed your bore a gestation diet you want to monitor body condition you want to limit how much they're gaining this is good for them because they want to you want to maintain a good body condition and you don't want them to get too big especially when you're doing natural breeding if you've got a big bore compared to a small guilt then that mismatch doesn't work out very well so you want to be able to match your size of animals size of bore with your size of of gilts or sows you want to keep vaccines updated on the bores so you're keeping them healthy likewise keeping your deworming program in place for your bores as well as the rest of your herd here's just what i talked about earlier that boar uh getting the attention of those guilts in this room again in this board was able to walk up and down in front of those all those guilts and so here's one of those guilts trying to get under the feeder and get no snow's contact with that boar and again there's that nose to nose contact you can see that they're able to uh to do that here so at south dakota state university here we have three bores or three or four bores i should say and each of them is trained to be attached to one of our bore robots and so this is uh logan tesh uh putting a harness on one of the bores and so with that harness on then we can actually attach them to the boar robot and so with that robot then that bohr is trained to work with the robot and so we can adjust the position of the robot with a remote control so again logan there is using the remote and we can move that board backwards or forwards in front of the cell we're working with uh whether we're heat checking or whether we're getting ready for breeding and so we've got that boar in good position for that sow and then we get the best response for heat checking or breeding so that's just how it would look and then again with the remote control when you're working at the back on those back into the animals we're doing the breeding uh you can move that bore backwards and forwards with the remote control so to summarize what we've talked about today i know that the swine estro cycle is about 21 days and again if you want more details on the what that looks like you would have to ask professor clapper i'm a nutritionist and so this is what i know about the swine estrus cycle runs 21 days you've got about two to three days where those sows are ready for breeding and receptive to breeding it's important that you house your sows and bores separately remember to handle semen carefully store it properly and then allowing the sower to get time to dry and the semen and again as dr clapper said it could take about 10 minutes to to breed a guilt for example so giving that animal sufficient time to dry in the semen and to improve your breedings important to keep everything clean so clean the vulva as needed use a new catheter every time for every animal and if ever gets dirty go ahead and grab a new catheter and instead of trying to reuse one and then managing your bore you can talk about board nutrition and health and your overall health of your herd so so those are really the the points that i had uh put together so if there are any questions or anything else i would be happy to answer them ryan i have some questions for you and we'll start off with the nutrition and reproduction question for you um feeding increasing feed for sows and or boars prior to mating uh talk to us a little bit about that please sure so the with boars it's important to you know give them enough feed and then so there's some that will find uh increasing nutrition just before that can actually increase semen production um and so but then i don't know that there's a solid good answer to whether that always works um and so i wouldn't necessarily recommend it as what i would would say wouldn't have a good recommendation on what that would look like so but just a regular nutrition program should be good for uh for breeding and semen production what about on um females so females uh yeah so coming off of uh if you've got sows that have just farrowed um and they're coming back into into heat uh bringing them on to to on a nutrition program and then we don't want to over feed them because overfeeding actually will reduce the effectiveness of the insemination that they're likely to come back into come back into heat or that they'll actually breed so i want to again feed them a good quantity because after they're coming off of uh out of the fairing room they're used to eating quite a bit um and so you can give them that nutrition we don't want to overfeed them so much that they don't actually breed and okay do you have any other suggestions um on guilts uh getting ready to breed guilts gonna rebuil breed guilts i think it's just uh patience so important to uh watch for the signs then they're not always as obvious uh with gilts uh what they're that they're coming in heat uh not so much in heat but um nutritionally speaking uh a nutritional flush on gilts sure yeah so uh exactly again some people have have done that and so exactly so if you uh work do the the feeding and the flushing like you say you can actually get a good success um get those animals to uh to come back into heat from there so so and so doing so that you're kind of feeding them and then removing nutrition and then they actually stimulates them into into heat so and what i've done um on when i was breeding gilts if i was using the matrix program i would increase their feed like one and a half times ish while they were getting matrix um through breeding so then you are kind of uh you're giving that nutritional flush along with that matrix so you're kind of on the same schedule all the time okay um uh what age can a board start breeding oh well they can start i know they start fairly early on so um six eight months or something like that so that could be pretty young to to actually start but you want to give them that's a good question i don't have a good solid answer to to when they actually start and and doing uh those solid collections but but they are not uh super old because they'll only be a couple a couple three years old that they'll actually before they'll be go out of the herd so yeah so somewhere in that window and i it also depends what you're doing with them if you have a single board that you're expecting to cover 10 sows that you've weaned at the same time that boar is going to be need to be a little bit older than one that you know you have one bore and you have one guilt um so probably i would say that probably nine months is a probably pretty um uh solid number on the lower usage boards if you're having one that you want him to turn in and breed a whole bunch of sows at the same time you probably need to be more like a year what do you think sarah i was gonna say if you don't want them bread they'll start earlier than you think and if you wanna bread they'll start later than you think so it it breeds condition of feeding um environmental conditions can all impact it um you can always have a semen analysis done if in doubt and really pay attention 21 days later because if they're showing it again if it's just one saddle out of many it's probably the sow if it's all the sows and gilts it's the bore it's the boar exactly um and same thing and that also gets to housing um actually sarah and i both saw a group uh or heard about a group of guilds in our area that weren't supposed to be bred they were headed to a market pen and magically somehow they were all bred um and that they were removed from they the people know that there was no bore in with them at what five or six months sarah yeah all these skills were bred so back to that housing animal separately yeah they were they gailed her ready and the boys were ready earlier than you thought yep and i'm guessing in that condition in that situation um the bores may not have been properly cut may have been the problem so all good animal management all the way around yep um let's uh let's talk a little bit about um vaccination programs prior to breeding sure so your good vaccination program um and so depending on which product you're using but there's there's cover of those so commercially available products you can use like a pharaoh sharer or or the other products that cover the the vaccines you need and so just important to gain whichever product um an early dose and and then another dose beforehand and then uh sow is more of a booster uh type shot so so definitely make sure you get that on first and second dose and in enough time for so if those animals do have a reaction to them they are done um their fever and their immune reaction has been able to subside prior to trying to breed them um i would also say if you are um bringing home show pigs um you've kept back guilt out of a show and you're wanting to breed her those pigs are probably even more important to make sure those are on a good solid vaccination program than a guilt that you've raised at your house um you're a you know you don't bring other animals in so there's not as much exposure to disease so your vaccination program probably is even more so important if you are moving animals in and out of your herd okay um another one for you um so is it do i have to have do i 100 have to have a boar on site to have a successful artificial insemination program or what are my other alternatives so the best yeah is to have a bore on site to do that there are some alternative commercial products that you can get some sprays um and other things other products that you can use that have that same scent and so can provide that so you can do use some of those and then you but and the same applies you could apply or do artificial insemination without the bore present but it just reduces the effectiveness or the chances of getting that animal pregnant so um those would be kind of my responses there i don't have a whole lot of uh experience with any of the with the spray or or uh you know replacement products so we've successfully used the bore spray pretty well without um having boars here um and again it's the same thing make sure that those animals are close to being um in heat when you're using that product so they know it as a novelty as opposed to just you know every day going out and saying let's see what happens right so um and again so again it gets more important to group animals because if you have more than one animal that's coming into heat at the same time they will also help you heat detect where the um board um if you don't have access to a bore because if you have smaller herds um handling and managing bores uh can be a problem because they're not uh fun critters to keep around sarah do you have any other questions well the only other thing i'd add is you know we talk about nutrition and one of the key things i see in this building block is make sure your mineral program is good it seems like it's a really minor thing but when you start looking at the development of eggs and sperm it's more than just you know a simple building block so and your immune system so make sure that nutrition i know that we have a lot of pasture-raised pork we have some people use an alternative feeds and the nice thing about these commercial feeds is they're usually a complete feed that has all their amino acids and their minerals in it or sometimes when we're letting them go out and either graze off of what we have or choose they don't always choose what's best for long-term production and the other thing i'd add on the ai you guys can correct me because you guys are pig people i'm a sheep person and even a little bit cattle there's some wines that just do better on ai than others i don't know is that the kind of the way with pigs that's what i found with the pigs i've had some are um you know you feel like you did a not as good a job ai in her as you should and she sticks every time has a big litter other ones you feel like everything is perfect and she's the only one out of a group that didn't settle yeah because it's it's a it's a window that they ovulate and it's how they receive that semen and so some are ovulating just perfect with your timing and if though if you're ai and you want to be successful keep those guilts back out you know in those maternal lines keep them back out rather than trying to keep forcing something that doesn't work right and the other thing about um heat detection this is for cattle also so usually those females are going to actually ovulate the eggs about 12 hours post when they quit standing so making sure that you get that last dose of semen and particularly if you're having doing like show pigs you're probably going to put two doses of semen in those that last dose in as she finishes um sanding that's probably going to be your most fertile dose is at the end versus at the beginning which is really hard especially with gilts because some of those a sow will stand for you know maybe a day and a half some of those guilts will stand for three days so if you put all of your semen in her on the front end the chance of her settling or suddenly with a bigger litter is not nearly as good as if you were able to put it in the on the back end so and that also what might mean um if you're able watch your animal especially if you have a smaller herd watch your animals so i know that they cycled three weeks ago i'm not ready to breed them yet but pay attention to how particularly guilt how they cycle did she stand for three days great take notice of that because she's probably gonna do it again next time and that first day you may just ignore her entirely because you know that she likes to stand for a little bit longer yeah i print off a calendar and i write down everything and then hopefully when it comes time to breeding i can predict them a little bit more yeah okay ryan another nutrition question for you um higher or lower protein content in commercial feeds prior to breeding oh good question um i don't know that i actually i'm going to go right in the middle and say i don't know you know higher or lower is necessary i think it's just sufficient so as long as you've got targeting those amino acids um and giving them sufficient protein to cover all the their their needs i don't know there's a specific requirement either way that uh that i'm aware of right and it's gonna have to do with what condition that's in i mean if she's a salad just milked really hard coming off um a litter she needs more protein if it's a guilt that you know maybe you over fed her a little to start with she's probably okay to be on that lower end but just what sarah said um correctly balanced is probably more important than what the protein level is when we're talking about that uh breeding window yeah okay yeah there's lots of you know in looking at there's all sorts of different um uh types of sema you can get there's a huge price range on semen depending on what your um what you're looking for with your mating so it's kind of a fun thing to do and if you have people who are into pigs um just looking at uh we refer to them as semen catalogs right sarah they come in the mail and you can look and see what their you know what their funny names are and what their lines are and what they're going to um improve in your herds those kind of things so lots of options and there's lots of really good ones out there and i'd encourage you guys to you know source them from those quality breeders that have a good biosecurity plan because even though you don't have the bore you can still get the disease if that place had it so um there's lots of good board facilities that have high biosecurity to make sure that they are trying to maintain disease free but be really careful you you can think that you're saving your like especially for jamie and i and the sheep and the cattle we think that we're we're protecting ourselves a lot because of this have not having the actual animal there where poor semen is a little bit more touchy in the diseases we can get um so you really want to make sure you're getting it from a reputable source that has some biosecurity um so you can remain maintain not only a clean herd yourself but have a live litter right and along with that too um if you are choosing a different um semen supplier call those guys ahead of time and know what their schedule is a lot of the semen suppliers will like collect bores on monday and ship out fresh semen on monday they'll also ship semen on wednesday but it's the same seaman that they might have collected on monday so especially if you are targeting matrix schedules or um weeding schedules have that seamen arrive to you as fresh as possible and then handle it correctly um because that's going to be your best bet of having live litters again if the semen was live when it left wherever it was collected and you don't handle it properly um we're doing all this for fun and shipping has gotten 10 times harder in the last year yeah exactly so anyway are there questions comments from anybody wow we did great this time right under the three o'clock you're gonna get out of there at five o'clock ryan right there you go yeah well with all the questions being answered i i think it jamie and anna for being on to help navigate this through thank dr samuel for for leading this through reproduction and artificial insemination if you guys have more depth questions or further questions you want be sure to email us we'll be happy to to give those to you or direct them to somebody that can even answer them better than us you will get a survey as you log out if you could please take a few minutes to answer that so that we can make sure we're driving this towards the topics that you guys want that'd be awesome and as i said last time it's going to be more around herd health and veterinary care and and vaccination and treatment schedules with dr russ daily so we'll see you guys all back here on november 12th thank you sarah thank you you guys happy ryan good week