 All right, it is noon, so we're going to get started so we can keep this on track and on time for everybody that's joining us Thank you for joining our agriculture challenges webinar today. We are going to be talking about management options for on-harvested corn So as we look across the state, I think that what we see the most of in the fields yet is that corn and There's we've gotten lots of calls within our extension offices and as specialists about options for what to do with corn that's on harvested but also Silage that hasn't got hard gotten harvested yet and quality concerns with that. So those are what some of the things we're going to be talking about today before we get started. Few housekeeping items is if you are not speaking, please make sure to mute your line or your device. We're going to be holding all the questions to the end. You can ask your questions either live or type them into the chat box. If you're worried about For getting your questions or in the webinar, type it in the chat box and we'll make sure it gets addressed at the end. So with that, we're going to get started. Our first speaker today is Greg Endress. He is the Cropping Systems Specialist at the Carrington Research Extension Center and he is going to give an update on the status of corn. Alright, good afternoon. So I'll be giving a brief overview of the ergonomic considerations of grain corn. And as I developed the talk I was trying to think of positive things, but it'll be short. I can think of a lot of challenges, but we're pretty short on on answers as compared to the LISAC specialist. I think they have a lot more answers than we as agronomists, but we'll do what we can. So in my talk, I'd like to just mention some of the general challenges with with grain harvest, both this fall as well as as Next spring when it comes to corn. So to get into it in general, this is amongst all crops, not just corn, but we will focus on corn. We certainly have good grain yield potential, in particular with corn and soybean. And considering the blizzard we had not very long ago, it's amazing the amount of snow loss that we've had. And that's certainly positive. Our cold temps might be hard for us, but it's good for getting people back in the field. And next week looks even better for for our firming up those fields and continuing our harvest and other activities. Certainly we have a lot of challenges and they include physical barriers just getting to the fields as well as in the fields and those barriers include blocked or bad roads. Snow banks, at least in the case of corn and sunflower. And then of course lots of inaccessible field areas, areas that we can see and oftentimes areas we can't until we're stopped and stuck and bad things that follow. And then certainly there's been equipment expense, additional expense, such as additional tires or trucks on tractors, combines, grain carts, etc. And then of course the damage to equipment, in particular from getting stuck. People are getting stuck very, very often and you know machines can easily be damaged trying to get them out or even non-visual things can happen. There's a lot of stress on this equipment, in particular in combines as they're moving through these fields. And we may not realize the damage right at the time, but in the future they're more exposed to or susceptible to breakdowns. So all in all because of these things and others we just have a slow harvest progress. And just everything's in a slower gear from getting to the field, working in the field and then getting the grain either back to the farm or in particular moving the grain to elevators. And so another point about this is that we are dealing with unusually high seed moisture in general. And so right now we may get into the fields, but can we practically harvest and move the grain out. And so for example in soybean, typically we harvest soybean at 13-15%. Oftentimes we deal with too dry a soybean, but this year it's different. We have soybean in high teens or even 20s and that poses a real challenge. The same with corn. Usually we harvest corn at 15-18% seed moisture. We're dealing in the 20s and oftentimes mid or even high 20s. So I thought it'd be useful to rank some of the other crops, not just corn. So with dry bean to me that's at the top of the list for being high risk to adequately harvest. Dry beans are very susceptible to seed shatter, direct harvest, people still need to do that. There's going to be high seed loss occurring. And for conventional harvest, I'm not sure that's possible. And then if we do get the crop harvested, seed quality is going to be concerned such as discolored seeds, dirt tag and other issues. With sunflower, say that'd be next on the risk list just because of plant lodging, seed shatter and bird feeding. Soybean would be next, little less risk, but we still have plant lodging and certainly the cutter bars on the comments will need to be lifted and that's going to mean increased seed loss. So at the bottom of the list is corn, fortunately, but there's still risk with that. Some positive things are that minimal plant lodging and year drop. We do have a very viable option of harvesting in the spring. It's regularly done, but some good things about this is that we don't have to fight with the current field conditions. We don't have to artificially dry it and the expense involved with that. And we don't have to store it. It's still in the field. That of course on the flip side, the spring we're harvesting instead of planting. And then of course challenges. We've already talked about the high seed moisture rule of thumb is during the month of October, we can lose about 2.5% of seed moisture per week on normal conditions, but this year isn't normal. And in November, we can lose 1% per week under normal conditions. So we're not getting much ground and seed moisture loss at the current time. And, and then the resulting is we just have even greater challenges with handling the storage. And then one other option is one other consideration is how about next year, if we get our fields harvested this fall, what are some of the challenges that we have for next spring? Well, certainly even if we harvest the fields, it's highly unlikely the whole fields going to be unharvested. And so those unharvested areas are going to be difficult to deal with. We also have plant residue that we can't deal with until next spring. We're going to have field ruts. We're going to have volunteer corn. And how about crop selection? How do you really plan if the crop is harvested so late? We don't know what all the challenges will be. And for sure there'll be late planting next spring for whatever the follow crop is. So I'm sorry, I'm listening to many challenges and so few answers, but I guess that's the way it is on the agronomic side of corn grain production. Close with that and send it back over to you. Thank you, Greg. So our next speaker is going to be Carl Hoppe, the livestock system specialist at the Carrington Research Extension Center, and he's going to be talking about some of the harvest options available for harvesting corn for feed. There we go. Now we're in with it. I get the opportunity to talk about ensiling corn this year, corn silage. A lot of issues going on out there and we're seeing a lot of it that's not being harvested. I'm getting a lot of phone calls routinely on harvest, on work when we find a harvester to show up. Of course, I don't have the answer for that. Everybody's busy with a backlog of harvesting that needs to be done, but I'd like to talk about a few things here about corn that's unique for this year. We like to do corn harvesting when the plants are around 65 to 70% moisture, which means 35 to 38% dry matter, which they sometimes say that's three quarters kernel milk line. So if you go and look at your corn, some of these forage varieties still haven't actually reached that point yet, so I'm surprised how much moisture is still in some of these plants. Which, like Greg talked about earlier, moisture dry down isn't occurring in our grain corn, so consequently the dry down time for our corn silage is taking more time as well. Just a thought here that when it comes to there's different varieties of corn for making silage out of, you can use grain varieties or dual purpose varieties or specific silage varieties. But actually when it comes down to it seems like there's some of those silage varieties are hanging on the moisture quite well, which means the plant hasn't dried down yet this year, which means there still is an opportunity for putting up some silage. Let's think about what we need for good silage production. We need harvest moisture that allows it to be packed in the pile and we need to drive over the pile consistently and quite often or to get a hard enough pack to exclude the air out of the pile. And then sealing with some type of plastic and then actually removing to sealing it reduces the amount of oxygen that gets entered into the pile it keeps moisture into the pile as well so it helps push the fermentation process along. To have proper plant moisture we like to have, like I said, 65% moisture. It allows for good compaction, gets the oxygen out of the pile. And that's the biggest problem people have right now is as your corn stock plants tend to dry down we have a harder time getting the plant, getting the pile to remove the oxygen that's in the pile. You don't get a good enough pack on it, that's a problem with the dry down side of it. So ideally, we'd like to have it be that like I said 60 to 70% water if we cut it too early, then we'll have a lot of moisture seepage out of the pile it'll start running. That's not the case this year was if you harvested it before the snow and the rain showed up. We see some of those piles that were harvested 70% moisture actually seeping and running right now. But most of it's now being put up when it's almost too late to dry. It's just doesn't pack very well so consequently you don't have a good fermentation and those issues just keep showing up. So one thing person might consider doing is adding a solid genoculant that'll help stimulate the fermentation process with good bacteria. Otherwise we rely upon the wild types that are in that are out in the country already on the plants. It doesn't cost that much to have it done always encourage you to do that. You can see by the digestibilities it may not increase as much as you hope to it, but it'll help start the solid pile in the right direction for fermentation. If the side just too dry, consider chopping it finer so you can get a better pack to it. Always use a kernel processor in my mind so you break the kernels up and make them into a smaller particle. Increase the availability starch of the bacteria to work on. If the pile again is too dry we can add water. I've been in piles where they put a garden hose on for two weeks to add enough water to have it be done, but it takes a lot of water to add much to a solid pile. So just one semi excuse me one truckload of solid you're going to raise it from 55% moisture up to 65% would take almost 500 gallons of water. Again that's a sizable amount of water not just a little bit. So if we're looking at ear leech that's something where you use a stripper head you just pop off the ears and hopefully just chop up the ear and the husk. We can get by with a lower moisture content or a higher dry matter content by doing that. That's because you can pack it harder easier without having the stock in the pile like you would with a cornstarch pile. Of course the energy content of ear leech is higher 65% TDN versus 65% TDN so there is more energy dense. An advantage using ear leech rather than just grain corn is that you get the cob in with it as well and actually that amounts to about 20% of the total weight that you have. So I look at it this way you get 20% more free feed by going with the ear leech and in a feeding situation ear leech competes quite well with grain corn or backgrounding or eating cows. We do have a publication that's listed at the top that you can access to learn more about ear leech. High moisture corn is another option you can put that a little up a little bit drier and we are people right now that are putting up a combine of their corn and grinding it and putting it up pile. I said grind it because whole corn doesn't exclude the air well enough in order to make it in silo. It'll probably heat and then mold and then you have other problems. The reason you want to in silo is to try to push the organic acid content high enough that it pickles, I use that term pickles the silage so it keeps bad molds from growing. That's the problem if you're less than 22% moisture run the risk of the pile just molding rather than in silo. One way to manage that a little bit closer is to put it into a bag and bag this high moisture corn. Some people have done that works quite well. The goal is to exclude the air and always remember if you're buying high moisture corn be sure to adjust the price for the moisture content. Don't pay dry corn price for what corn that you buy. Here's some observations that just happened recently. Silage has been cut this week was frozen because the temperatures are low daytime temperatures are also frozen. So the silage is cut frozen chop frozen put in the pile frozen. If you can read that little thermometer you say it's still at 32 degrees. Will this ferment will wait and find out it may just be frozen feed for all winter but you really haven't lost any fermentation losses here because the silage. It's not really a silage it's just a brown chop that's put into a pile that's filled with grain and everything else. So the problem you might have to think about is next spring have it fed up before spring fog occurs. Otherwise you might have rotting going on in the pile rather than fermentation just because it starts to eat from the outside. And rather than the inside out inside out works for fermentation. So bottom line here is chopping early is usually always better than chopping late but this year we just couldn't get into it because the rainstorms. You have a kernel processor please ask them to use it sort of breaks up the kernels and actually breaks up the job as well. I encourage you to use an inoculant and I say pack pack the pile and keep packing and pack some more. If you'd like to avoid some losses be sure to cover with plastic a two membrane plastic one that keeps the oxygen out and the water in. So with that I'll let to the next speaker. Thank you. Sorry about that. So our next speaker is going to be Kevin Sedevic the rangeland management specialist here in Fargo and he is going to be talking about options for grazing on harvested corn. He's here with me so I am going to leave and he's going to come in. Well good afternoon and it's a pleasure to be here today. I've got a chance the last two days to travel much of the southern part of North Dakota and it looks to me that at less than 10% of our corn has been harvested for anything whether it's grain or silage. And so there's looking at all these different options and one option we're going to look at is is grazing these unharvested corn. Brannis takes me out to use this. When it comes to grazing unharvested corn you know management of the livestock is critical. So you don't have this issues of over consumption and risks of death loss. And so I tell producers you really need to look at met if you're going to do grazing of unharvested corn know that management will be part of the picture and you just can't throw those cows and cows those cows out with that corn and allow them to have free access because you're going to have some health issues which Dr. Block's going to cover next. You're also going to have some some poor efficiency in terms of consumption when they have free choice. So when you're looking at harvesting these you're going to have to build that infrastructure and normally it's just going to be fence and water and producers don't get too high on putting in fence because there's a problem with where to put the fence how to get the fence in there. But if you don't have access or the ability to limit feed without a fence it's it's very difficult to do this at low risk. I'm also a firm believer that water should be always available for these cows. These are two pictures of examples that we have at the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center where we have Richie and one of the sites where we're grazing aftermath corn or cover crops. And the other one the bottom is a water tank that we have in place for our aftermath creating of our residues. And so the issues that you're going to deal with of course are health issues whether it's acidosis abortions lameness or death. And I'm going to save these for our next speaker to talk about but these are issues that you have to deal with when it comes to grazing these feeds. So I'm going to give you some top recommendations on what you should look at in terms of grazing these corn fields at low risk. One is adapt those cattle to corn to graze that corn before turnout. So give yourself a 10 day period and start those cows on a low ration of corn and build them up so that women can adjust in terms of the pH in terms of bacteria within that that woman so that they can they can actually handle this kind of consumption of corn. Do not turn out hungry cattle. So prep these cows beforehand basically give yourself two three or four days to feed these cows and when they go on into that field of grazing their woman is full so they have that time to when they consume that corn. There's that mix of forages and corn in that room and so you don't have any issues or you reduce that issues of toxicities cows that are experienced in eating corn will shell those corn cobs and eat that corn fairly readily. And so these cows will be obviously quite prone to issues because if they've learned and adapted those cattle that are new to eating corn will take some time to learn and adjust and find the corn or at least figure out what they're doing there. So you create a natural delay in the consumption of the actual corn grain, which gives you an acclimation period for those cows. And so you tend to have a little more time with those cows that are naive to grazing corn. And last and I think still important is you need to have a cross fence set up to minimize access what it reduced it reduced it increases your efficiency. And it allows those cows that first day they're going to consume corn grain corn and then the second day they're going to consume forages so you always have a mix of corn forages in your diet. You don't need a back fence. And typically what you want to do is allow a two day rotation or movement of those fences and some people were giving up to three days on that time for when you're moving that fence away from the water to improve your efficiency. The last question I'll often get is how many cows can I graze on a per acre corn. And the literature on this is a little bit a little bit odd and trying to find some answers here but you just look at the numbers of a six foot tall corn tassel produced about 12,000 pounds of dry matter. They're going to consume about 60% of that feed adjust for 35 pounds of intake and looking at about 125 to 150 cows for one day on that acre of corn. So if you have four acres of corn, you may not have enough cows to consume that corn so be realistic in what you have in terms of acres and try and consume those acres that you want to do with the size of your herd. So you can make that number. So if you just budget that one and a quarter to 150, it'll give you a feel for if you want to graze for 30 days, how many acres of corn you're going to have if you have enough corn and you can figure your numbers up as well. That makes sense. So if that helps you on looking at ways to reduce your risk, get the most out of that grazing component on that corn and kind of give you a feel for numbers you can have in terms of raising those acres. So thank you. Thank you, Kevin. As Kevin mentioned, our next speaker is going to be Jana block. She is the last assistant specialist at the Hittinger Research Extension Center, and she is going to talk about some toxicity and health concerns when you are grazing corn. Hey, thank you Miranda. So a lot of these toxicity issues are fairly commonplace and basic. I think it's just important to mention it regarding, you know, regardless of whether you're thinking about feeding some corn grain because of hay shortages or possibly getting out and grazing some of those corn fields. So the first one I'm going to talk about is bloat. Everyone's pretty familiar with this, simply a buildup of gas in the room and normally the cows eruptate this but oftentimes in the case of high grain diets. A stable form, a stable foam will form over the room and liquid and kind of prevent the release of that gas. Preventing bloat is much easier than trying to treat it. If any of you have dealt with that, you know that that's the case. Ionophores can help with bloat and also with several of the other digestive disorders that I will mention. And those can usually be included with a mineral supplement, which is necessary anyway. Maintaining adequate refuge levels is going to be really critical in most of these digestive disturbance situations. Maybe even consider putting out additional hay when they're in a corn field to kind of assist with that. Kevin talked about adaptation. That's definitely critical and then not turning hungry animals out. So because of the ability of cattle to selectively graze, like Kevin mentioned, when they're experienced they will go out and definitely sort through and select the grain first. So that's why grazing management is so critical. The normal room and pH is going to be around a six and a half to seven. And on these high grain diets, we can get pHs of less than five and a half. And so because of the time that it takes for the rumen to adapt, when that grain hits the rumens, you know, suddenly without adaptation, the lactic acid producing bacteria grow extremely quickly. They produce even more acid. The rumen will eventually shut down. You might see some diarrhea for the ones that survive an acute acidosis issue. You're going to see things like weight loss. They could potentially get into some liver abscesses, which definitely affects performance and will impact carcass quality in the end. And you can also get an increased susceptibility to secondary infections such as respiratory disease for those cattle that survive. For the ones where metabolic acidosis takes place, usually that will result in death. So founder, another fun one we get to deal with this is actually just mainly a byproduct of acidosis. So if the acidosis is really severe, there can be a large amount of damage to the rumen wall, which allows the toxins to then enter the bloodstream and travel to the feet and damage foot tissues. So you can see things like hoof deformities, formation of ridges, abscesses. In some cases, the soul will actually ulcerate. So those cows are definitely going to be sore. They're going to be lame. Again, prevention is going to relate back to adaptation and also including thinking about including some buffers such as a sodium bicarb or limestone. That can help neutralize the rumen pH, which is kind of the major factor that leads to these issues. Also wanted to mention, if a cow does founder, we've heard producers mentioned that you can see issues with lameness and foot health for years afterwards after the founder experience takes place. Kay, the presence of mold on corn does not necessarily indicate that you have mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are just compounds that are produced by specific types of mold. And so the presence of mycotoxins, which are harmful to livestock, can only really be determined by laboratory testing. So this is where NDSU Diagnostic Lab comes into play. So these are some four fairly common types of mold that can produce mycotoxins that could be a threat to cattle. So the first one in the top left corner, aspergillus, so this is a grayish-green kind of powdery mold. It will produce an aflatoxin. The kernels will be kind of a brownish color, and they may be shrunken. Moving over to penicillium. This is also kind of a green or blue-green powdery mold. Usually occurs at the ear tip. You will see some bleaching, maybe, or streaks in the kernels, and this will also produce mycotoxins. Gibberella is a red or pink mold that usually begins at the tip of the ear and produces vomitoxin. And then, of course, our fusarium, also a problem in other small grains such as wheat. This is kind of a white-to-pink cotton type of mold, and that can occur anywhere on the ear. That will produce a number of mycotoxins, vomitoxins, xeralinone, T2, a lot of challenges with that one. So, in general, the mycotoxins function to reduce feed intake, they reduce nutrient content and absorption in the diet, they alter metabolism, and they can also suppress the immune system. So, we do have some established guidelines for feeding cattle some of the mycotoxins, but definitely not all of them. Again, submitting a sample to the diagnostic lab is the best way to know what you're dealing with and how to manage that. I did also just want to briefly mention nitrate toxicity. Although, in most areas, we do have a pretty good corn crop. There are still areas that were affected by drought and may have had poor grain fill most of the time. Our challenges with nitrate come in a poor weather year, different weather conditions that can reduce photosynthesis. So, drought is one of those, but the tricky part about nitrates is you just don't know when it's going to show up. It can be really dependent on the type of soils that you're dealing with, fertilizer rates and other factors like that. So, if you do have a case of nitrate toxicity, you may see symptoms such as staggering, difficult breathing. Basically, what that nitrate does is it takes the oxygen out of the bloodstream and the animal eventually suffocates to death. You may not ever see any symptoms, you may just come out and have dead animals. So, the bottom third of the stock is going to contain the highest level of nitrates. If you're thinking about cutting the corn, if you're able to do that, raising the cutter bar is one effective way to kind of manage that. Also, ensiling can reduce nitrate levels up to 50%. However, as Carl mentioned, some of the challenges that we're having with maybe having corn silage too dry, it might not ferment properly. And so, that nitrate may not be fermented and kind of leached out as well as it will be in a normal silage pile. So, again, with nitrates, as with many of these potential toxicities, testing is going to be the best way to go. And of course, also really careful feeding management. So with that, I will turn it back over to you, Miranda. All right. Thank you, Jana. And I just have one last slide to share with everyone. So, Brian Parman was going to be joining us, but he was unable to since they're traveling the state with their egg lenders workshops. And so, he just wanted me to bring up these few reminders for financial considerations, specifically more related to the insurance end of things for the corn. So one is contact your insurance agent to make sure that you can explore your options and what you can do for harvesting or maybe extending your period. Contact your local FSA office. Make sure you know which programs you're eligible for and what the restrictions on those programs are before you make any decisions. Appraisal is required to calculate many of the indemnity payments. It's also going to be required for those of you that are in counties that may end up being eligible for the WIP Plus program, which will not be open until we receive a secretarial declaration, which we have not yet received. But you need to have either production data or you need to have your appraisal data from your insurance agent to be able to complete the paperwork for that program. And lastly is insurance period does not end for corn until December 10. So if you decide to use it for another purpose other than its intended purpose prior to the state, you may not receive your full insurance payment. So make sure that you have that conversation with your insurance agent before making any decisions related to that. And if you have any other questions related to these considerations, contact insurance agent FSA office or you can contact Brian Carman here with NDSU Extension. That concludes our portion. We'd like to open up to any questions that you may have related to this topic. Brian, there is one question statement. Oh, yes. So one of the statements was that there may be some problems with leaving corn in the field. And can halving caution that you should check stock strength, your shank strength and in the soil maybe will be extremely wet in the spring, which may prevent harvest in the spring, except on soils that such as sandy soils that won't be saturated. So losses can be very high in the field. And one thing I want to remind everybody of is that if you are looking for the recordings of these webinars for this one are are the other ones that we have done. You can go to the NDSU extension page, the livestock management page on within there. And then at the bottom, there is within the topics, you click on the section for the webinar series and all the recordings are located there. If you do want to contact any of our speakers go to the connect tab and there's contact information for all of our speakers except Greg, because this is a live site page and he's an agronomist. So you will have to go to the crops page or it's the Carrington research extension centers page to to find his contact information if you don't already have it or just call the center. That is all I have for other housekeeping items. Our next webinar is going to be Monday. We're taking a break tomorrow. And that one will be on assessing available forage resources and your herds forage requirements coming into the wind going into the winter. One last chance. So if you have any questions. Okay, well I want to thank you all for joining us and I hope that you're able to join us again on Monday. You hear me Miranda. Yes, I can now sorry I was on mute. I had one quick question and I'm not sure who can answer this. Okay, these guys that want to graze this corn. The corn itself is more likely going to be froze solid. What kind of digestibility can we expect our calls to actually get out of that. Carl or Dana do you have any insights or Craig. I would share with Craig that the digestibility really won't change in the cattle once that grain has been warmed up and made fermentable in the room and so there might be some challenges in just consuming the frozen corn but cows have a will so they'll probably keep chewing that until they get it. And then the chewing process and then go ahead and then swallowing will probably warm up the feed enough that you won't see any digestibility problems as such. Okay, thanks. I would say because it may take a little bit more energy to get that digestion process going. You're just going to really and this is a case with any type of grazing situation. Just really keep an eye on condition because you don't, especially with pregnant cows you don't want them losing weight getting closer to calving so just kind of keep an eye on condition and make sure that you're supplementing if necessary. One last item. If you are still with us please take time and take this short survey give us your feedback on this webinar or any of the other ones that you've watched and we're also looking for some input on topics for future webinars if we are to expand this series. Again, thank you for joining us. The link to the survey is also on the web page if you don't have time to click on it here. So thank you again for joining us and we hope we are able to chat with you all on Monday.