My early July post, “Breeding Season Starts”, was full of optimism. We started breeding season with five, virile bulls, breeding 131 beautiful cows. We now have one, extremely popular bull, with 131 cows.
The bull in the bottom of the picture above, “New Chapter”, fought with the other bulls instead of breeding the cows. We took him to market after he hurt the other five-year-old bull, “New York.” “New York” is refusing to rejoin the herd and is recovering his confidence in the back pasture. “Red Direction” and “Judge” are lame and limping along with the herd.
But “Julius”, “Julius” is thriving! Look at him in action!
Even though he’s busy, he still makes each cow feel special after he puts a kink in her tail.
We’ve kicked around some options to make sure the cows get bred. We could take the yearling bulls out of the heifer pasture and put them with the cows. We could buy bulls, but we may not find quality bulls on short notice.
We’ve decided to watch and wait. We aren’t seeing many cows “in heat” now. We think the bulls settled many of the cows during the first heat cycle. A cow’s cycle is 21 days. We are nearing the end of the 2nd heat cycle, so a decision needs to be made because the 3rd cycle is their last chance to get bred. All cows that don’t breed are butchered.
We won’t know for sure what percentage of the cows are bred until November when a veterinarian pregnancy checks them. I’ll let you know how we did, then.
Curiousfarmer 
Oh lawdy….bulls just do whatever they want don’t they. This same story happened on the horse breeding farm (for racing) when I was girl. Stallions that cost tons of money doing nothing – nothing. They got gelded and became show jumpers. Go figure.