Around 24 hours.

Selective breeding is a tool that takes particular characteristics of the dam that the producer wishes to expand or increase on, and desired characteristics of the sire that the producer wishes to bring into his herd, and produce daughters that, hopefully, exhibit the desired characteristics later in life.

To make it more clearer, here's a couple examples: one on the beef side, the other on the dairy. A beef cattle producer wishes to produce heifers that have better calving ease, better milking ability, bigger calves, and last longer in his herd in terms of fertility and better forage convertability. Heritability is important in these selections, as some characteristics are more heritable than others, such as bigger calves and milking ability. However, bigger calves are also attributed to what the cow eats in her last trimester. What the producer can do to obtain this goal is do a few or all of a number of options:

1. Cull all undesirable cows in terms of condition and health issues

2. Pay better attention to nutritive needs of his/her pregnant and nursing cows

3. Don't buy bulls simply because they're sold cheap

4. Introduce a cross-breeding program into the herd

5. Select a bull or bulls that have characteristics for producing good daughters (are maternal-type bulls, not terminal-type bulls)

6. Introduce AI into the herd if none of the bulls being looked at meet any of your sepcifications.

7. Introduce body condition scoring to find the cows that keep their condition and fertility better than others.

8. Other things I can't think of off hand.

A herd bull is bought and selected to improve the genetic quality of your herd, not to maintain it nor decrease it. A herd bull with maternal qualities is what the producer needs to produce daughters that meet most if not all of his speficications. Other factors listed above also help in producing desirable calves and also help weed out the cows that are hard-keepers.

The dairy producer wants to produce daughters with higher milking ability and better docility. What this producer has to do to achieve this is similar to above: cull out undesirable cows, and find bulls that meet these specifications. Most dairy producers breed their cows with the use of AI, so selecting bulls for producing these daughters and ordering semen from these bulls' owners is the only way to produce these daughters.

The estrous cycle of cattle is the period from one estrus (heat, phase of sexual receptivity) to the next estrus. For the cow and heifer, this period averages 21 days, with a typical range of 18 to 24 days in length.

That would depend entirely on the length of the mother. Calves are born the length of the mother's head. Sizes vary from 8 feet (under 1000 lbs or 453 kilograms) to 20 feet or more (3000 lbs or more or 1360 killograms or more!)

In the womb, yes, just like all mammal fetuses do. When the calf is born, the umbilical cord breaks and the placenta is expelled.

It is FAR more dangerous to inbreed cattle than to crossbreed them. Inbreeding exposes genetic abnormalities that would only be exposed if a hetero cow was crossed with a hetero bull for a particular genetic abnormality. Inbreeding is only done if you are mating siblings, daughter to sire, son to dam, cousins, son to granddam, daughter to grandsire, etc. It can also kill your herd as far as productivity is concerned because the more you inbreed, the worse-quality your cattles' offspring will be.

Crossbreeding on the other hand, occurs when you breed a different breed a bull to a breed of cow: for instance, breeding a Black Angus bull to a Hereford cow. The offspring that comes with this cross is the exact opposite of inbreeding: you get a very vigorous, high-productive calf that will excel above either of his parent's breeding in the feedlot or in the breeding herd. Generally cross-bred animals live longer and are much better-quality than those breeds that it came from. If you want a herd with great-quality cattle, use cross-breeding.

A beef cow is ready to be slaughtered at around the age of 1-1.5 years.

· An egg is taken from the 1st cow

· The egg cell nucleus is removed

· A body cell is taken from a second cow

· The body cell's nucleus is put into the egg cell

· The egg cell divides

· The embryo is then put into a third cow (usually the mother who has been chosen to carry the child.)

Yes, you just look for a big long string hanging from the cow's vulva with a reddish ball at the end. This is the placenta that is on its way out. She may also be hanging around a certain area too, and this will be where her calf is. You may be lucky enough to see a new baby calf at her side too, if you are patient enough.

Visit your local county extension agent for information. A local agricultural college or college that has an agricultural program involving dairy and/or beef cattle is also a good place to visit to get breeding info on cattle. The internet is also a good place to go with, but be sure to make sure you are visiting good sites and not ones where you can't find where they got their info from.

Here's some good sites I found for you:

http://www.thebeefsite.com/articles/cat17/breeding-and-genetics

http://www.agric.gov.ab.ca/app21/infopage?cat1=Livestock&cat2=Beef

http://www1.foragebeef.ca/$foragebeef/frgebeef.nsf/all/ccf1007

That's just a start, as there is plenty of info at your disposal if you know what to look for.

A newborn calf, a baby calf or just a calf.

Well, most vets would probably say 1-2 weeks after the due date, but it really boils down to what the cow looks like at the time. There are many factors that play into a late birth, sometimes the calf is backwards or upside down - it might take longer to ease itself into the birth canal. If this is the case, usually the pregnant cow is not affected. But if the cow is not eating, or if it walks slowly, or shows unusual behavior, then something might be preventing the calf coming out. If that is the case, I'd call your vet to see if what they say about it.

People in Germany farm potatoes, wheat, barley, rye, sugar beet, fruit, and vegetables. They also raise a wide variety of meat.

What part of "unmated" cattle are you referring to? Are you referring to females, or males or both? It's hard to tell what you're asking, but I'll do my best.

An "unmated" young female, or a young female bovine that has not been bred yet is a heifer. A bull that has never bred a cow or heifer before is often referred to as a virgin bull. A cow that has calved but hasn't been bred yet is referred to as an open or barren cow.

None. Calves don't suckle on any breast, they suckle on the udder (NOT "utter") of their mothers, being cows. Breasts are for baby humans, apes and bear cubs and possibly even elephants. But not calves.

Rarely. Most heats occur only once (even rarely twice) then not happen again until some time after she has given birth.

A calf that has just been weaned from its mother. It's a calf that no longer relies on its mothers milk for food and growth, but is now dependent on hay, silage, grain, water and mineral for its source of food.

Most Angus calves are born at around 50 to 80 lbs at birth, which is about the size of a medium-sized to medium-to-large sized dog.

This question has already been answered in two separate questions. Please see those questions in the Related Questions section below.

A cow SHOULD be producing milk after calving, since this is the kind of liquid that calves have to live off of for the next few months of their lives, or until they are weaned. All cows HAVE to produce milk after they've calved, no exceptions, no matter if they're a beef cow or a dairy cow.

However, a cow that is not producing milk after calving is a cow that could be malnourished (being too thin) and doesn't have the reserves to produce enough milk for her calf, or she's too fat, with too much fat deposits in the udder that are hindering milk production. Or, that cow is not being fed proper nutrition, and this is also causing her to not be lactating properly after birth. You will have to bottle-feed the calf until either the cow has been fed adequate nutrition enough to help her with proper milk production, or until he's old enough to be weaned while you put the cow on the cull list and give her a one-way ticket to the salebarn.

It's often called "first milk" or, more technically, colostrum. It contains important antibiodies and immunoglobins that are critical for the calf's health. If the calf does not get colostrum within 3 days after birth there is a very high chance that he will not survive.

Only if the cow that they're mounting is in heat.

The primary disadvantages are the costs associated with the health of the herd. The producer may experience cows that can go down with milk fever or ketosis, or have to have some animals that require C-sections because a female was bred to the wrong stud and ended up with some larger offspring to birth out than was intended.

Other disadvantages include increased number of females that are needed to be bred at the same time, which often require AI, because the costs of keeping a sire is too expensive in relation to the costs required to care for, manage and feed females livestock. Mix-ups, like what was mentioned above, due to human error, are also concerns. Record keeping is a must, and can be a bit tedious if they aren't kept up to date. Special facilities must be built to separate females that are needing to be bred from those females that are pregnant and those that are birthing (this is especially true in swine housing). For dairy cows, this is also the same, with an additional facility or corral needed to house cows that are drying up before they have a calf, and for those that are being culled and sold off the farm. Costs in building and maintenance can stack up, as a result.

Another disadvantage is that, in intensive production, one person can't do all the work, so more money must be handed out for hired labour to help with the care, breeding and birthing of livestock. The producer expects his hired hands to do what he expects them to, but there are many instances of hired hands slacking off or doing something that they're not supposed to. This is a big risk the producer has to take when hiring people to help him raise his livestock.

So all in all, the main disadvantages a producer faces when breeding and raising livestock intensively are vet bill costs, maintenance costs, record keeping, and risk of hiring the wrong people for the job.

There are several reasons why:

1) Bovines would go extinct if cows were not producing calves all the time

2) Cows do not live forever, so they need to produce offspring to keep carrying on their genetics to the next generation.

3) The only way to get good quality beef is to slaughter calves from cows that have been raised to a slaughter age between 18 and 24 months.

4) Cows cannot continue to produce milk if they do not have a calf once a year. In order to produce milk, a cow must give birth to a calf.

5) It's a natural thing for cows to do, just like in all animals in this big ol' world (including humans). It's all a part of the Life and Death cycle.

only a tiny little bit the rest are unnatural chemicals made by man