BusinessReport.com

Tim Hastings has heard all the wisecracks.

“Did you blow in the cow’s ear first?”

“Send her any flowers afterwards?”

“So you’re like, um, a bovine gynecologist?”

Yes, Hastings is that guy⎯the one who artificially inseminates the cows, which requires that he stick nearly his entire arm inside their fannies.

Scrunch your nose and utter “Eewww!” if you will; the dirty deed must be done. It literally puts milk on the table.

Hastings is the farm manager for Kleinpeter Farms Dairy, and it’s a fact of nature that the beasts must give birth to produce the creamy white stuff. With 750 milking cows to tend on the rolling St. Helena Parish farm⎯and given that artificial insemination doesn’t always work the first, or the second, or even the third time, and that each cow typically has as many as seven calves in a lifetime⎯Hastings is filling in for the bull pretty much every day.

The 45-year-old has been doing so since he was about 12, although the task admittedly is much easier now that he’s taller. Raised in Oregon and Washington, Hastings is a third-generation dairy farm manager who’s tended herds much bigger than this one [think 11,000].

The ins and outs of artificial insemination Hastings learned from his dad. “It was just from necessity,” he says. “He always used to tell me, ‘If I have to call the vet, you follow him around and learn everything he does so I don’t have to call him again.’”

For all the jokes and snickers, what Hastings does is actually a precise science.

To begin with, each of the 750 cows has extensive computerized medical records tracking every vaccination, fertility cycle, insemination attempt, pregnancy, lactation and illness throughout their 10- to 12-year lifespan. Farm hands provide updates daily from the pasture via Palm Pilots. “They probably have better medical records than we do,” Hastings says. “Six full pages of what happened during their lives, from birth until death.”

Once they reach breeding age, each cow is scored on eight different body traits⎯everything from the size of their udders to the structure of their legs. If it sounds like a questionnaire from match.com for cows, it is⎯but only to hook them up with the right semen to improve upon any shortcomings in their offspring.

Kleinpeter Dairy spends anywhere from $15 to $50 per unit for prime swimmers, which are pre-sexed and have a 90% chance of producing a female cow. The semen is stored in straws in liquid nitrogen at 240 degrees below zero until it’s time for Hastings to do his thing.

“What artificial insemination does for you is allow you to improve genetics decades faster than if you were bull breeding,” Kleinpeter Dairy President Jeff Kleinpeter says. “It’s well worth it if she gets pregnant and it’s a female.”

Sometimes, though, nature just has to take its course. About 30% of Kleinpeter’s cows have to make a “trip to the bull” because artificial insemination just didn’t work.

Inside the feeding barn, Hastings prepares. As the cow chomps casually on a mixture of grain, he slides an extra-long plastic glove on his left arm, lifts the tail and slides in. He palpates her uterus, finding the three rings of her cervix. With his other hand, Hastings inserts the syringe into her vagina, depositing half the semen into one of her uterine horns; the rest into the other.

“The first 50 times you do this, it’s very difficult to feel anything other than manure,” he says. “It takes awhile to develop a touch.”

But Hastings apparently has it. The entire encounter takes less than 90 seconds, and the animal emits nary a “Moo.”

“And we’re done,” he says, pulling his arm back and displaying a plastic glove now smeared with fresh manure. He pats the brown bovine gently on the behind. “I’ll give her some wine and send her some flowers tomorrow.”