bulls and straws

We artificially inseminate our cows as a general thing.  This lets us have Jersey fathers without keeping a Jersey bull, a good decision for the family health and well-being, and a must when you farm on monastery land, but it means keeping a nitrogen tank for the semen straws, or rather, in our case, borrowing space in your neighbor's nitrogen tank and then watching assiduously for signs of a desire for romance on the part of your heifers and cows.  The Powley family have shared their tank with us for a couple of years; it is people like these, helpful and encouraging, that go a long way toward making people like us -- inexperienced, tentative -- feel like we dare keep trying to teach ourselves to farm.  Tonight, however, we were hitching up the stock trailer to take two young females -- a heifer and a four-year-old which has calved one time -- over to bunk for a time with the Powleys' registered Hereford bull, Timex; we want to see what those genetics will make together.