Artificial breeding (AB) technicians are responsible for one of the most important parts of any dairy farmer’s business - getting cows in calf.
Each year, a team of 900 AB technicians carry out around four million inseminations across New Zealand, ensuring the arrival of the next generation of dairy cows.
Bridget Davis has been an AB technician for 25 years. An AB technician’s job is to artificially inseminate cows. Artificial insemination (AI) is the process of collecting sperm cells from a bull (male cow) and manually depositing them into the reproductive tract of a female cow.
“I didn’t grow up on a farm and I’ve never milked a cow in my life,” Bridget laughs. “Before I did this, I was working in the race industry but got injured. I still wanted to work in the outdoors and with animals and someone suggested AB would be suitable, you needed good livestock skills and to be good with your hands - which was me.”
Training to be a technician consists of completing and passing a two-week course, then spending a year as an apprentice working alongside an experienced technician and completing four national unit standards administered by Primary ITO (a nationally recognised training organisation).
“It’s pretty inflexible during the two-week training course, they have a scoring system which requires you to be over 80 per cent in the first week and at 100 per cent the next week or you are out,” explains Bridget.
There are many reasons that dairy farmers use an AB technician to get their cows pregnant.
AI enables farmers to access top-quality bull (male cow) genetics that would be too costly to purchase as stock bulls. It removes the cost of upkeep for stock bulls and the challenges farmers have around putting the right bull with the right females.
“Artificial insemination is one of the reasons we are world leaders in dairy. Farmers are guaranteed an animal that can produce a great amount of milk,” Bridget says. “Genetics are important and this way farmers can access these genetics. It’s quick, easy and cost effective.”
The semen comes from a very small group of bulls that have been hand-selected. One ‘lot’ of bull semen can be used to fertilize 3,000 cows.
“I call the bulls up in Newstead the All Black bulls,” laughs Bridget.
“There are a lot of good bulls around, but only fifteen make it through to be the hand-selected team - similar to our rugby All Blacks team.”
The semen is flown down fresh from Newstead in Hamilton, and delivered in person. The AB technician fills long thin straws with the semen fluid. The fresh or frozen straws are loaded into long stainless-steel pipettes and then manually deposited into the reproductive tract of a female cow.
One thing that Bridget doesn’t enjoy is seeing local farmers getting a bad reputation with false statements, such as they don’t care about the environment.
“All the farmers I visit are fantastic at protecting the environment, they fence off their waterways and plant native trees and have been doing this for decades - not just recently. Most Kiwi farmers are good land caretakers, and it annoys me when I see them getting the rap for ‘dirty dairying’.”
Being an AB technician is not for everyone, but Bridget loves it.
“One thing I like about my job is the people and farmers are really flexible and down-to-earth. I love driving the back roads and enjoy the scenery,” Bridget says. “The absolute coolest thing is when you see the calves in the shed and you know that they are your AB calves, it never ceases to amaze me.”
