The splooge wagon in question. All photos by the author
I spent a day last week driving around in a semen delivery truck, which is kind of like a pizza delivery truck, except it’s for impregnating dairy cows and doesn’t smell especially great.
Videos by VICE
I met Gary—the incredibly nice driver of the sperm truck in question—in the parking lot of a centrally located KFC. I ditched my car, and he showed me his ride. It’s a nicer-than-average white pickup truck, outfitted with a cab on the back, filled with nitroglycerin tanks to keep the semen chilly. If you didn’t already know what a cum delivery truck looked like, you’d never guess that Gary’s whip is full of jizz. It’s not like the company logo is a bull schlong, or even a bull, so it just looks like all the other vaguely agriculture-y stuff driving around our vaguely agriculture-y province of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
The concept of the traveling animal-jizz wagon is really quite simple. Gary takes cow semen orders and drops them off, occasionally doing the breeding himself (“anywhere from a wrist to your shoulder” is how far you have to stick your hand inside a cow, he says). His orders come in when farmers realize their cows are in heat—either via devices that measure cow activity or by observing serious cow lesbo action in the fields—and then give him a ring with the type and amount of semen they want.
Surprisingly, selecting the right flavor of cow cum is not as simple as picking between two or three good-looking man-cows (or bulls, as you probably know them). It’s a real science. First, there are few-to-no breeding bulls in the entire province, so the bull butter is flown in from around the world. Second, the options and price differences for cow semen are tremendous. Anywhere from your typical Joe bull to one that is “proven” by having hundreds of nice-looking daughters can range between $10 a dose to $50 a dose. It’s not enough that the bull has to be handsome as all hell—their kids have to be as well. If my Facebook feed is any indication, good-looking parents do not always equal good-looking children. So these bulls are truly rare.
Once the perfect jizz has been chosen, farmers also have to decide if they want to pay extra to get “sexed” semen. It’s not what it sounds like, depending how that sounds to you. Sexed semen guarantees a female calf. Since we’re talking dairy, that’s what you want. A male calf is worth less than $200, but a female, depending on how much milk and calves she produces, could be worth tens of thousands of dollars down the road.
Anyway, it’s time to start Gary’s daily delivery of bull-batter, so we’re on the road before 9 AM. First stop: a few doses to a farm just outside of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. We hop out of the car and Gary chats with the farmer—like most island farmers, he knows him well, knows how his year is going, and how his cows are milking.
There’s a bit of hustle between the two men and the first deal of the day made.
That’s the first time I actually saw the semen. The way it’s handled, it looks like a cartoon scientist handling dangerous chemicals.
Gary hops in the back and opens the nitro. He has little prongs to handle the straws full of splooge.
Immediately he knew which he was getting, though I still don’t understand how he recognized whose semen was whose. Mist floats through the air around the nitro, creating a small and sort of mystic cloud around the event. He pops the straw out—ten “doses” of semen are in one straw—it’s just a small amount per dose, a cubic centimeter. You don’t usually buy one at a time—usually in multiples of five or ten.
Quickly, Gary takes the semen straw to a carrier and puts it in. Any exposure to warm temperatures will kill the swimmers, and that obviously has far-ranging impacts on the business. All of the farms have tiny coolers full of nitro—so carefully, he puts the straws into the barn and prints off a bill for the farmer.
And that was the first transaction of the day. Potentially, we helped create ten calves, all before 10 AM. Mostly him, but I was there too.
Satisfied with our (his) (the bull’s) great work, Gary and I got to chat for a bit before our next run.
I asked him how he got into the insemination game: like a lot of islanders, he grew up on the farm and still has a farm, but didn’t want to make a go on that alone. He always wanted to breed cows and picked up a side gig doing that full time. That is, the literal putting-the-semen-in-the-cows part.
I asked him if he was any good at it, and he said yes, he is. He says he can be having a conversation with someone and get a cow pregnant without the person realizing it. I don’t know how that works. I cannot picture that. But I believe him, because Gary is a believable guy. From there, he got the delivery job easily, and he seems to be a very adept jizz merchant. He will breed the odd cow, but doesn’t do it as much anymore.
Then a client calls, asking for some gear in a farm next door. We carry on down the road.
I can tell immediately the place is high-end. The barns are huge, there are fair ribbons all over the place, and it’s a multigenerational, well-established farm. Gary is top of his game. They don’t want or need semen, but Gary’s pulling out some big names to try to convince them otherwise. Lots of cows in this barn are descendants of a proven stud, Gold Chip. That stud kind of changed the Holstein lineage. Gold Chip died, but there’s still some semen available from him. More common, though, is line-breeding, a.k.a. cow incest, because demand is up for Gold Chip’s semen, but he’s dead, so supply is very limited. It’s pricey. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t make the sale he’s hoping for. But we do unload some product, and I do get to look at some young cows, which are very cute. This one is only a day old.
This is what happens when Gary does his job right.
The next stop is a ways away, on the other side of Charlottetown. We get a bit into the business between popping into barns all afternoon.
The thing you need to know is that this business is insane. It’s very, very competitive. I get the sense Gary’s company is pretty high-end. But he took the sales job only a little over a year ago, and he’s fighting to win farms over to switch from their old semen guys.
There’s one in particular that’s giving him a run. I won’t name him because I like Gary and want Gary to get all the business. But this other guy is an aggressive seller, and he trims cattle feet. The feet-trimming gets him into barns for hours at a time—which lends him the ear of the farmer. From there, he sells semen while he trims feet. It’s sort of like if the person on an infomercial also provided you with an essential service while selling you whatever’s on the infomercial. We hear about this guy and his very competitive prices at almost every barn we visit.
Likewise, every farm we go to asks for a deal on the price. Call them jizz hagglers, if you want. We went to six or seven farms. Gary has some degree of wiggle room, but he knows all the farmers would talk to one another and compare what prices they’re getting. He can’t give preference to one because it would alienate the others. He’s still pretty good to offer actual sales to people or let them know when a bull’s jizz is about to skyrocket in price.
The job’s not all roses, if that’s not keenly evident by the fact that sometimes Gary sticks his arms shoulder-deep into cows.
So what he does to try and win people over, when not getting phone calls asking for deliveries, is pop his head in at all the farms, try to understand their needs and farming aspirations, then pitch them stuff—semen, mostly—that would help them get there.
The day we go out, that’s only mildly successful. He chats to a couple people and sells them only supplies like gloves and insemination guns—the thing you put the semen in before you inject it into the cow’s lady parts. But he says it’s a long game. And he’s just going to keep doing it, until he sways other people.
Ultimately, obviously, it’s not that different from any other sales job. It’s just weirder, because it’s cow jizz.
Follow Kate McKenna on Twitter.
