Not only is the Auburn brand totally awesome looking, but just the idea of freeze-branding sounds awesome to me. In addition to freeze branding we were also going to learn a little about ultra-sound and it's uses with livestock, beef cattle in particular.
The lab began with Jason, the amazing ultrasound technician. And when I say awesome, I truly mean awesome, he can see some things on the ultrasound screen which I swear don't exist, it is like he has super-vision. It really does take a specially trained eye to read an ultrasound.
First Jason placed the ultrasound between the 12th and 13th rib of the cow to view the ribeye.
He explained that viewing the ribeye via ultrasound allows them to determine the amount of marbling she has, how close she is to being "finished", and also it allows them to judge the quality of the meat to determine if they want to breed that particular cow, before she is slaughtered. A cow may look good from the outside, but until she is on the kill floor you cannot tell the quality of the meant, until now with ultrasound technology.
As I mentioned above, it really does take a trained eye and a pretty good understanding of cattle anatomy to be able to decipher what you are actually seeing on the grainy and small screen of the ultrasound monitor. Once we had it explained to us about a dozen times I was able to see the back fat and the ribeye area pretty well. But as you can see from the picture on the left, it is not as easy as it looks.
After struggling to keep up with the ultrasound lesson for about 30 minutes, Jason packed up his equipment, and we began the exciting task of freeze branding.
I don't know what I was expecting but I certainly was not expecting the brands to weigh as much as they did. I felt like such a wimp struggling to lift and hold the freeze brands, especially the big AU brand.
We placed the set of brands into a styrofoam ice chest and poured liquid nitrogen over them. It bubbled and fizzed for about a minute, and once the bubbling stopped we were ready to freeze brand. I took a number brand first, and pressed it against the skin of the cow. I needed to make sure I kept contact for at least 20-30 seconds, which was a little tricky the first few times because the cow was jumping and squirming around within the head catch. Once she calmed down though I was able to hold the brand steady for 30 seconds, applying pressure in a rocking motion.
The freeze brand kills the hair follicles, and the hair will grow back white in the pattern of the brand. This is ideal for Auburn's herd which consists mainly of Angus cattle, the white hairs show up really well against the dark hide.
It was a good thing the cows we branded were about to go take a visit next door to Barney at the Meats Lab, because the brands were a little ugly to say the least. I wouldn't hire me to be professionally branding anytime soon, but I'm glad I got the experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment