Canyon 32
The Agricultural Trade Catalog
This charming spot-color offset from a photograph of the Montana-bred Hereford bull “Canyon 32” (ABS No. 6641) was featured on page 10 of the Nov 1967 American Breeders Service, Inc. Beef Sire directory. IYI, here are his technical specs:
As should now be apparent, ABS wasn't advertising the bull for sale, but rather his breeding ability.
So, yeah, this post is about bull semen - you're more than welcome.1
American Breeding Services (ABS) was founded by John Rockefeller (Rock) Prentice in 1941.
If there is such a thing as a high road in the beef and dairy cattle artificial insemination industry then Rock took it. Unlike his (often nefarious) competitors,
he sold only semen from "progeny-tested" sires.
The watershed moment for the company occurred on 29 May 1953, when their first calf, appropriately named "Frosty," was born from semen flash-frozen by ABS staff. Stunned by this breakthrough, Rock immediately invested in extensive liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation R&D and, with Union Carbide's Linde division, developed a small Dewar-type flask that could preserve frozen semen and yet still be used in the field by local inseminators.
It was the most patentable thing imaginable in the burgeoning AI field, but Rock gave it to the industry as a gift. As I already said – the high road. Finally, in failing health, Rock sold the company to W.R. Grace in 1967 and today ABS Global, now owned by Genus plc, but still headquartered in DeForest, Wisconsin, has subsidiaries in 14 countries and ships semen
to more than 70 countries. No one is going to confuse the ABS Beef Sire Directory with the 4-color 1967 Sears Wishbook but for every Wishbook there were hundreds of catalogs just like this,
advertising not what a farmer's wife could mail-order for Christmas, but what a farming family needed for their livelihood. According to the receipts straight-pinned into the centerfold of the directory, what the family of xxx of xx needed in xxx was the semen of xxx bulls: 1. TMI time: The current workflow for beef and dairy AI goes something like this: the bull is mounted on a teaser cow and ejaculates into an artificial vagina (a warm-water jacketed rubber tube). The collected semen is then mixed with extenders, including egg yolk or pasteurized milk, as well as preservatives and antibiotics. The final product is packaged in 0.25-0.5 mL "straws"
which are flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen (-320°F), Properly frozen straws are viable nearly indefinitely. Dams are inseminated by warming the straws then placing them into a gun which is guided into the cervix using the common
rectrovaginal technique (which, trust me, once you learn you can't unlearn), with most success occuring at or after midestrus.
For more detail see the Penn State Extension's Artificial Insemination Technique fact sheet
(online).
For a complete supplier of AI equiptment, assuming you want to do this yourself at home, see the Verona, WS-based
MOFA Global. If for some weird reason you read this far hoping for details of human AI (now termed assisted reproduction), see the SAGE catalog
(online) for all your specific needs. 22 Dec 2010, updated 24 Jul 2013 ‧ Design (otherwise file under Americana)