Life down on the farm

By ESTELLE SARNEY

Imagine putting your hands into a bean bag and trying to find a loose button, then sew it onto a shirt in the right spot. Then try doing it in 90 seconds or less, up to 100 times a day, seven days a week, for up to 10 weeks.

This is one euphemistic description of what it's like to be an artificial inseminator. Right now, on all dairy and some beef farms throughout the country, the insemination season is getting into full swing.

Over the next three months about 3.5 million cows will be inseminated - about 85 per cent of the national dairy herd.

About 20 per cent of the national beef herd, mostly the stud animals, will also be made pregnant this way.

Artificial insemination is essential to improving breeds and production, and therefore New Zealand's international competitiveness in the dairy and beef export market.

The average dairy herd has grown in size from 120 cows 10 years ago to 260 cows now, so farmers are increasingly relying on technicians to do the job for them.

Hundreds of inseminators are now driving between the seven to 15 farms assigned to them, inseminating up to 100 cows a day.

One of them is Angela Hale, a 35-year-old mother of two whose husband, Michael, manages a sheep and beef farm near their home at Te Kohanga near Port Waikato. That's her description at the top of this story.

At this time of year, the pre-schoolers' care is taken over by Michael and friends while Hale hits the road with her insemination equipment.

Clad in overalls, gumboots and a glove up to her armpit, Hale laughs as she recalls that her day hadn't got off to the best start.

"I lifted up a cow's tail and it pooed all over me. You get to learn with experience where to stand to avoid that, or being kicked, or having your foot stomped on, or being squashed against a fence or another cow."

Why would you do it? Hale says the reward is in seeing all the calves born later, in knowing you've helped a farmer improve his breed and therefore his production, and in avoiding the spread of diseases between bulls and cows.

"A change in routine is as good as a holiday," adds Hale, "and the job is also very social - all the farmers you meet know people you know, which is typical of a rural community."

The money isn't bad, either. The two main insemination companies pay technicians between $1.75 and $3 an insemination.

Most technicians do about 2800 inseminations during a six to eight-week contract, so they might make $8400. Some can work for three months by moving from North Island farms down to the South Island.

"We have nurses, police officers, airline mechanics, people from all sorts of jobs who save up their leave to come and do a run for us," says William McMillan, artificial breeding manager for the Livestock Improvement Corporation.

Other recruits come from farming backgrounds, including an increasing number of women.

They make up about 40 per cent of LIC's trainees - many are farmers' wives who can delegate or put on hold their usual work to inseminate for 10 weeks of the year. Technicians range in age from their late teens to well into their 60s.

LIC runs a training course in conjunction with the Agriculture Industry Training Organisation, from which graduates emerge with a National Certificate in artificial insemination.

The Ambreed company also runs its own course. Both provide training on cows going to the freezing works, then send apprentices out with experienced technicians to practice inseminating cows on farms.

Ambreed trains 300-400 inseminators a year, including farmers who want to do their own work, and employs about 100. LIC employs about 1200 on short-term contracts.

"We have about 200 apprentices out there now, out of 400 who started the training earlier this year," says McMillan.

"About half can't acquire the skill, or can't do the job at the speed required."

Listening to Hale describe the anatomical details of artificial insemination, you realise it's a lot more delicate and tricky than you thought.

McMillan says it's not so much hand-eye co-ordination, because you can't see inside the cow, as hand-mind co-ordination.

It also needs to be done quickly so as not to stress the cow, and because the bull semen needs to be used quickly once it's prepared. A good technician can do 60 cows an hour.

"It's not a glamorous job," says Hale, with typical rural understatement, "but it's a very rewarding one. Even the cows are normally pretty good about it - as soon as you hit the spot they seem to quite like it."