 here. So just as a reminder, this webinar is sponsored by the North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. So most of us know that as North Central Region SAIR. So they're the ones that put forth the funding and would have given us lunch if we did on this live, but instead we're doing it this way. And so we just really appreciate them and all the support that they've given us. For those of you who don't know, I don't know that I've introduced myself. I'm Mary Keena from the NDSU Carrington Research Extension Center. And I get to work with this team that's putting this on. And so I'm the Livestock Environmental Management Specialist and you'll get to hear more from me on Thursday. Today, our first speaker is going to be Miranda Meehan. And Miranda is the Livestock Environmental Stewardship Specialist. Miranda is located on campus. And so Miranda does a lot for us and with us with grazing, grazing readiness, riparian work. And so today Miranda is going to talk about the NDSU grazing calculator that she's helped put together and how that can be a useful tool for you. So Miranda, I'm going to turn it over and turn myself off. All right, thank you, Mary. And as Mary said, I'm going to talk about the NDSU grazing calculator and how that can be used to calculate our stocking rates in a cover crop system specifically. So as an Extension Specialist, one of the most common questions I get is, I have planted this cover crop and what is my stocking rate? How many cows can I put out there? And my answer is always the same. It depends. And specifically, it depends on forage production. Can anybody, can you guys put in the chat box? What are some of the factors that would be influencing forage production in this type of system? And Mary, if you could maybe yell out if anyone's putting what folks are putting in there since I can't see that right now, that would be fantastic. Can you give us one example? Oh, here we go, rainfall. Rainfall would be one of them. Yep, precipitation. Whatever form that comes in, right? Last fall it was snow. The species that's planted, so the grass species and the seeding rate. Great, so that's a few of the main ones. So species selected, planting dates, another one. Is it a full season cover crop? Is it a spring fall cover crop? That's gonna impact that. And as a few of you said, the available moisture, whatever form that may be in. And another thing is the site characteristics. So what are the soils? What's the quality of soils at that site? And how is that gonna play into it? And the management of that site also is gonna influence what we get for production. Here's a couple of examples. Just the difference of yield between a purple top and our Paja turnips. And then here's an example from some research that Marisol has done looking at planting dates. And we have a July 27th planting date and then an early August planting date. And just though I think it was a weak difference, Marisol can type in the chat box exact dates. And just that few, that short of a time period made a huge difference in how the productivity of these forages. We have some tools available that I'm gonna be talking about today. The first one again is the NDSU grazing calculator app and it's free to download on either Android or your iPhone. And the little icon up here is the app icon. So if you're looking for that, that may help you find it. That is actually also in a web-based Excel format that you can download and use those instead if that's you're more comfortable with using Excel. And then we have two primary publications, which the first one is the determining carry capacity and stocking rates for range and pasture and North Dakota publication. And then also the NDSU extension range and forage production sampling kits publications. And those have all the instructions on how to determine both forage production and carry capacity stocking rates. So a lot of people, they ask stocking rate, but what they're really wanting to know is that forage production are the carrying capacity. Stocking rate is actually a management decision and it's the number of a specific kind class of animals grazing or utilizing a unit of land for specific period of time. So we calculate this based off of the forage demand of that specific animal and how long that animal will be grazing. And then this hopefully is based off that available forage component. When we talk about stocking rates, we typically talk about animal unit months or AUMs. And that's the amount of forage that livestock will consume in a one month period. This is the standard for this or one AUM is equivalent to one 1,000 pound pound with a six month or younger calf by her side. And I don't know how many of you have 1,000 pound cows, but I know most of the producers that I've worked with, you don't have 1,000 pound cows. And so if you see over here, here's the equivalence of some other classes of livestock sizes of cattle that you may be grazing. So to calculate it, the formula is you're gonna take the number of animals you're gonna be grazing, that animal unit equivalent from that table and you multiply those and you get the number of animal units. And then you'll take that times the period of time that you're grazing or number of months to get AUMs. You can also adjust this to number of days. I know a lot of people when we're working cover crops express in animal unit days instead of months. And you would just multiply it by 30 to get the animal unit days. Now, if you're using the app, so this first image here is what it looks like when you enter the app. And then we have our different calculators here. So the first ones are stocking rate calculator. We open that and you'll see that you can determine the number of classes of animals that you're grazing. And so if you're grazing cows with a bowl, you would have two classes of animals and you're gonna put select the class of animal under the number of classes you have, the number of head in that class and the number of months you're grazing. And then you'll click forward and then it'll calculate your total animal unit months or an average animal unit equivalent that you're grazing. So, but what we really wanna get that and what's gonna actually influence that stocking rate is our carrying capacity or the amount of forage that's available for grazing. In a range line setting, we have estimates that we can use to predict this based off of lots of data that's been conducted and that's contained in our ecological site descriptions. Unfortunately, this is a little trickier for our cover crops systems, especially given the amount of variability and there's not a lot of well-established growth curves for our crops. And so the most reliable method is doing a clip and weigh and clipping the amount, clipping your forage, weighing it and using that to determine forage production and then entering carrying capacity. I have seen things like grazing sticks that can be used to calculate forage production and I think those work in a monoculture system and can be used in those types of systems but when we're using cocktails we have lots of different species with lots of different heights and growth potentials and so it gets a lot less reliable in those types of systems and so the most reliable method again is the clip and weigh and once you feel comfortable and done it enough, I know a lot of producers just can look at a field and say, this is how many grazing days I have for my cattle based off their experience but I think the clip and weigh gives you a good way to hone your estimation skills so you can do that in the future. These are the different plot sizes. This comes from the Orge Production Sampling Kids publication. The most common one we use is this 1.92 square feet plot and this is if you wanted to build your own frames for clipping that these are the dimensions and then this is a curved version right over here to convert it from grams to pounds per acre and this is the one we recommend for most feedings especially if we have something like a rye or a cereal component. If we have something that has a little more bare ground we might do a bigger plot than this 9.6 and this actually is the conversion rate if we did rows and in the publication it tells you the length of row that you would need to sample for row crops based off of the spacing of those rows and so after we clip you're gonna put your frames out there clip it all the way to the ground and then we need to dry it down to determine our dry weight. This is because when we calculate diets and we calculate Forge we look at dry matter and so then we know there's a lot of water in our cover crops and we need to dry it down before we can accurately predict how much Forge we have available for grazing. When we clip rangeland pasture we will use paper bags like you see in these images. Cover crops we have a lot more production out there so sometimes you might wanna use something like if you can get a paper grocery sack that those would be ideal but you can use things like garbage bags just make sure you cut holes in them because we need them to air dry and we need air to circulate through those samples for them to dry. And then after we get those air dry weights we're gonna average it. We wanna clip three to five samples across the fields we have a good representation of that field depending on field size. We're gonna take it times the conversion factor and that's gonna give you your production in pounds per acre and then you'll take that times the number of acres you have in your paddock and that's gonna give you your total production for that field. If we're using the calculator you're going to go into the forge production portion you're gonna select the cover crops or row crops if that's what you're grazing or a residue or something on those lines and then in the sample net weight you're going to put the dry weight of your samples and just separate each one by a comma and then click forward and it will calculate your forge production in pounds per acre. So the reason it's important to dry your samples down again is just our cover crops have a lot of water in them and especially when you look at those cocktails with those brassicas and high water content and it's just the picks that like with our rise in this research study in 2017 we had 32, 50% dry weight of that, or percent of it was actually dry matter of the weight and then for those cocktails it was somewhere between 14 and 22% and again just showing the variability from year to year between biomass this is the same sites but in 2018 and we had a lot less production and our rye here and that's partially because we got out there and grazed it earlier when it was more nutritious and then we see our warm season cover crop only 3% of the wet weight was actually was dry so there's a lot of water in that cover crop cocktail and we wanna make sure that we're adjusting for that appropriately as we're grazing. So to calculate our carrying capacity we're gonna take that total forge production we just calculated and we're gonna take it times the harvest efficiency. So as you know cows are not 100% efficient they're not gonna graze everything out there and a lot of times we don't want them to especially when we're using cover crops we wanna leave a little residue out there to protect the soil and so we use the harvest efficiency to determine to make an adjustment to show how much is available for consumption. If we're using a take half leave half rule of thumb for grazing cover crops that would be a 35% harvest efficiency so we wanna leave half of it there and then we know that some of it's gonna trample so if it's gonna get lost in essence things like that and so we bring that to 35% of it it's available to be consumed. If we're using a full use we've found that that's about 70% just there's still gonna be some waste and you don't wanna push those cows too hard and the full use will push your cows pretty hard. And so that's kind of the range of harvest efficiencies for cover crops and you can adjust the harvest efficiency can be improved through some management things which I'll touch on at the end. So once you take a time is that harvest efficiency it gives you again how much is available for consumption and then you're gonna divide that by 913 and 913 pounds is the amount of air-dried forage that one AUM requires for a month. And so this gives you how many AUMs you're able to support off of that field. If we go into the calculator we'll go if you go into the carry capacity one on the main page select your cover crops if they'll actually pull your forage production number from the forage production part and you'll put in how many acres you have. I just put in 40 in this example and then select your harvest efficiency and then you'll press forward and it will calculate total production here total available forage after we use that harvest efficiency and then the total AUMs available for grazing in that field. And so this is just a good example that those two bookends of the take half are full use for harvest efficiency and how that can influence how much forage is available there. And obviously 35 and 70 we have double the forage available for grazing when we use that full use system. And so as we make those decisions between that harvest efficiency are we taking half are we taking everything? There has been a little bit of research done at the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center. Erin visited about this a little bit on our last webinar because it was some of her graduate research and she found that between those harvest efficiencies that there was no impact on soil bulk density or aggregate stability, which one of the biggest concerns with increasing harvest efficiency and the number of animals out there potentially the length of time that they're out there is that we have more impact on that soil increased potential for compaction. On the other end they did find that it increased return which no surprise given that you have twice as much forage available to graze you have a longer grazing period and that's cutting down feed use in other places when we're doing that. Some of the things that we can do as a grazing manager to increase that harvest efficiency we recommend a lot of time limit feeding because that's going to reduce waste and how we would do this in a cover crop system is strip grazing. So we're going to put fences across and only allow the livestock to have so much access to so much of the field at a time. And then when we feel that it's to the point where we wanted it to be consumed open and up to the next paddock up to them. The other way we can do this is if you don't want to mess with the fences and you have enough animals is increasing the stock density because basically that limit feeding strip grazing is increasing that stock density. So that is another way to do it. A lot of people do not have the number of animals needed to achieve those stock densities depending on the cover crop systems they're using. That's really all I have. I'm happy to feel any questions. I think we might be doing a couple now. Let me re-manage that. And here's my contact information. Awesome. Thank you, Miranda. So we don't have any questions in the chat pod now. Just as a reminder, you can put them there. You can also email me if you'd rather do that. I have my email address in the chat pod. But Miranda, I do have a question for you and you may have said this. Is the app free? Yes, the app is free. Okay. And the rangeland portion is North Dakota-specific for North Dakota ecological sites, but the forage production part as it relates to cover crops would be applicable anywhere. Okay, great. Okay, so I do have one question here for you. So will your calculator calculate a paddock size based on a wanted stocking density? Example, if I want 150,000 pounds per acre, I want 150,000 pounds of livestock. So I'm gonna read the question one more time. Will your calculator calculate a paddock size based on a wanted stocking density? No, it's not that sophisticated. And when we developed it, it was more targeted toward the rangeland setting. And then with the increased interest in grazing cover crops, we've made a few adjustments. But that's a good idea for future improvements. Okay, awesome. All right, with that, I think we'll let Jana get hers up. And if you guys do have questions for Miranda, if you think of some, just go ahead and keep putting them in the chat and we'll manage those at the end. In the meantime, as Jana is sharing her slides here, I'll just do a quick little intro. So Jana Block is one of our extension livestock specialists. Jana's located at the Headinger Research Extension Center. So she's down in the Southwest part of our state. And Jana's gonna talk today about cover crop toxicity considerations for livestock. We get a few questions about this all the time. And so this is kind of an area where Jana likes to work in. So we thought we'd invite her on to talk about it. So with that, Jana, let's do a sound check and then I'll let you take over. Okay, sound good? A little closer. Sound good? There we go, all right. My screen's up, everything's good to go. Good to go. Good. Alrighty. So just like with any cropping system, it's important to start with your end in mind. So there are a ton of different objectives that you can have when you're thinking about a cover crop. So some of those might be to improve your soil structure, different methods for weed control, just maybe managing your soil moisture a little bit, of course, nitrogen fixing, and then hanging and or grazing. So can you guys, how many of you on this call today are currently hanging or grazing cover crops and or thinking about doing that? Can you just raise your hand or give me a thumbs up? Mary, if you can kind of keep track of that. Yeah, so down at the bottom, if you scroll down to the bottom of your screen, you can do a little reaction. There's a smiley face with a plus that says reactions. So you can always click on that and give Jana a thumbs up. Otherwise, you can just type it in the chat pod as well. And that'll let me know to tell her, yes or no. Jana, what was your question one more time? How many are thinking about hanging and or grazing cover crops or currently doing so? All right, so we have maybe more so people who work with producers who are doing that. Okay. So in this series today, you guys have heard from a lot of agronomists, brain scientists and specialists, people that have kind of focused on these other areas. So today we're just gonna kind of focus more, obviously on the livestock side and thinking about specifically in terms of different species, what some of the potential issues might be when it comes to livestock health. I did want to point out a resource that we have available through NDSU extension publications. It's called annual cover crop options for grazing and hanging in the Northern Plains. So this is not just specific to North Dakota and it has a lot of good information based on your goals, the season of planting and whether you're, what those different objectives are in helping you with species selection and management. So that's a good one if you want to check that out. So these are just a few of the potential toxicity issues we can get into. So I'm going to go through all of these. It might be a little bit of a review for some of you. Hopefully you don't have personal experience with these. That's never a good thing. But I do want to talk a little bit about what the issues are and potentially how you can manage those in your cover crops. And then at the end, if there's anything I didn't touch on, be sure and bring it up in the chat box or just go ahead and ask. So we'll start with nitrate toxicity. This is probably one of the major ones because as you can see here, the nitrate accumulating species are many of those that we use in cover crop mixes in North Dakota and the surrounding region. So any of the small grains are sorghum, millet, or brassicas, canola. And then we can get into situations both in pastures and in cropland where we have weeds like kosha and lamb's quarter that can accumulate nitrate. So when we have normal conditions in rumen and animals, the nitrate is converted to nitrite and then to ammonia, amino acids, and protein. And that is done through the microbes in the rumen. But when we have these nitrate accumulating species, we can get excess nitrate and essentially it just overwhelms the ability of those microbes to convert the nitrate to protein. And so what we end up with is that first step takes place and the nitrate is converted to nitrite, which is around 10 times more toxic than nitrate. So this is where we run into issues. And in fact, I don't know why we don't call it nitrite poisoning because that's actually what it is. But essentially that nitrite then builds up in the rumen and it's absorbed in the bloodstream and the hemoglobin in the blood, which carries oxygen, is converted to methemoglobin, which then can't carry oxygen. So the animal essentially suffocates. So you may or may not see symptoms depending on the dose and the level of exposure to the nitrate accumulating plants. Oftentimes the first sign we see in pregnant cows is abortion. You may also see weakness, incoordination, tremors, their membranes around their eyes, nose, mouth, and udder may turn a bluish color. Again, it's just related to that lack of oxygen in their bloodstream. So those are things to kind of look for. You can get chronic cases where the animals are just sort of exposed to low doses of nitrate or you can get an acute case where you see these symptoms or actually just end up with a dead animal. So one of the challenges we face with education on the nitrate issue is that people tend to relate it to drought. And I kind of want to put a thought out there that this is really not only a drought related issue. So anything that impacts the leaf surface area and the ability of that plant to conduct photosynthesis can potentially result in nitrate accumulation in the roots and the lower portions of the plant. So things such as hail, hard freeze, a chemical damage, different mineral imbalances in the soil, and crop history, which is a lot of times one that people don't tend to think about, but I've seen issues where someone came in and planted in an old alfalfa field that they had converted. And there was a ton of nitrogen in that soil, of course, from the alfalfa. And so they hadn't fertilized and didn't think they should have an issue. And they had a huge nitrate issue that year in their crop. So it's just some things to think about. Anything that might affect photosynthesis can definitely result in that nitrate storage in the plant. So how do we manage for nitrate toxicity? Well, obviously sampling and getting those samples analyzed before you hay or graze is recommended. Cover crops can be challenging, again, because depending on the complexity of your mix, you could be looking at multiple different species, all with different ability to accumulate nitrates. So you might wanna think about sampling those individual species and sending them off individually. If you think you have a really consistent stand, you could also just get a representative sample that would hopefully approximate their diet quality. Again, with grazing, it's really challenging. It's much easier with hay. You can use a hay probe and get a pretty good representative sample. Grazing is kind of a guessing game and it can be a challenge, but sampling is better than doing the tip test where you just send animals out and see who tips over. So those room and bugs that I talked about that allow for that conversion process, they can adapt to high levels of nitrate in the diet. It just takes time. And so really watching those animals closely over the first couple of days to a week or so of being out on those high nitrate forages is important, giving them time to adapt to that. Thinking about access to different pastures, maybe some rangeland if you have rangeland adjacent to your cover crops, making that available so they can get some different forages or providing hay can also be another option. If you're worried about abortions and pregnant cows, maybe think about grazing some stocker animals or open cows just to make sure that doesn't occur. And then another strategy that has been shown to be successful is providing some energy supplements. So some distillers or another energy supplement cake or corn or really anything considered an energy source that will help with that conversion process of nitrate to proteins. And honestly in our cover crops with our brassicas and small grains and things like that, we actually have a lot of energy. So that might not be necessary in the cover crop situation but it is something to consider. Okay, moving on to grass tetany. So we encounter this situation a lot in the springtime and we have lush, rapidly growing forages. We end up with high potassium and low calcium and magnesium. And so a lot of times we'll see this in crested wheatgrass and also in small grains. It's not only in the spring, we can get this in the fall and winter with harvested forages, particularly in our small grain forages. We don't always see that in North Dakota. Some of the research here indicates that the mineral profiles are a little bit different from fall with that regrowth. So might not be as much of an issue but this is highly dependent on your area. Some people have issues with this every year and some don't. But definitely if you're using some of these small grains, it's a potential if you're turning out early and they have access to that lush forage. So kind of similar to nitrate toxicity, you may or may not see symptoms. They're usually very excitable. They might stagger. A lot of times when the animal is down and they end up dying, you can see marks where they've kind of thrashed around. They get very excitable. And so it's important to try to keep them calm if you have to take them in and get the vet in to give them treatment. If you do sample your forages, you can calculate a tetne ratio. And so what they've kind of found is anything over a 2.2 when you calculate that ratio is a potential for grass tetne. So obviously you'd have to do that sampling ahead of time before again, before turning the animals out. And another strategy is to begin supplementation with magnesium oxide or magnesium sulfate mineral several weeks before turning it on pasture. The animals that are most susceptible to grass tetne are high producing lactating animals. And so they just have high magnesium requirements for milk production. And so they're the ones that are most likely to be struck with this. We do have some issues getting them to eat the mag oxide. It's usually not very palatable. So sometimes you might have to think about using salt, a corn or distillers or something in the mineral mix to increase that palatability. The mag sulfate is a little more palatable and they seem to accept it more. Either way, you're gonna wanna eight to 12% magnesium in that supplement. One other thing to consider with the mag sulfate is that it does contribute to overall sulfate intake. So you wanna make sure and account for that when you're calculating the sulfate levels, which we'll talk about more here in a little bit. Okay, Ergut, this was one that we dealt with a lot of producers dealt with last summer. So it's basically a fungus that grows in the seed heads of some small grains and grasses. We didn't used to think of it much in terms of the grasses, but now they found it in the wheat grasses and brome and fescue and Timothy. So a lot of grasses can be susceptible to this as well as the small grains. So basically the Ergut bodies just replace the seed heads and so the greatest risk is when you're grazing those mature plants. Essentially, we kind of think about the environmental conditions that would contribute to this situation, having a cool, wet spring and a hot early summer, but last year our spring was very cold and cool and we didn't really get much for heat and we still had Ergut showing up. So I think it was just that a lot of those plants were more mature and so there was a lot of moisture and a lot of opportunity for those fungal bodies to develop. So the fungus will produce compounds that basically are vasoactive and they cause those arteries to constrict. So you'll see lameness. A lot of times people think it might be a foot rot, they'll get it in, treat for foot rot and doesn't help. So in extreme cases they can actually slough their hooves, they might slough their tips of their ears or their tail. Because of the vasoconstriction, they can have heat stress, they're just not able to thermoregulate as much as they were before and of course it's painful, so they're offstanding in shade. Origin intake decreases and can see decreases in milk production as well. So Ergut is not a fun one to deal with. Unfortunately, there's not really a lot you can do about it. The important part is to know that you've got it. So examining your pastures and hay prior to grazing and removing animals from infected pastures. There's really no treatment, there's nothing you can do in terms of treating the forage and there's really nothing you can do for those animals except for just get them out of there. They can recover depending on the severity of how severe it has gotten for them and how quickly you get them out of there. And then of course, managing grazing, getting in there and grazing before the seed heads develop or going ahead and clipping those seed heads off before you graze. And it is important to know that you can get this in your hay and your harvested forages. So be sure to look for that when you're cutting hay. Okay, another one, we had our sulfur toxicity or polio. So some of our potential contributing species here, our brassicas, alfalfa can be really high in sulfur. And then of course, some of the same weeds that we think about in terms of nitrate toxicity, kosha, lambs, quarter, things like that. So basically the excess sulfur just causes hydrogen sulfide to build up in the Roman. And again, similar to nitrate, it's absorbed in the bloodstream, causes a lot of neurological issues. You might see animals head-pressing. They definitely have a lot of pain. And so they're pressing up against posts or anything they can get close to. You might see convulsions, they could go blind. So you might see them staggering around blind. And then of course, death. This is a tough one because there again, isn't a lot of things you can do to manage it. You need to do a lot of sampling, understanding that pretty much their maximum tolerable concentration is 0.4% of their diet dry matter. And in our area especially, a major source of sulfates is our water. So we need to get that water tested and know what you're dealing with in terms of sulfur in your water. So brassicas is definitely a major culprit with the sulfur toxicity or polio issue. So limiting to no more than 70% of your cover crop mix. And you should probably consider going lower than that for a couple of other reasons I'll talk about here in a minute. Obviously to avoid polio, you basically just need to get those sulfur containing feeds out of the diet, add in roughage, and then find an alternative water source. They've done a lot of research over the years trying to find a cure or a way to reverse that damage from the sulfate or sulfur. And so far haven't been successful. There is some evidence that it's also related to a thiamine deficiency, which is basically just your vitamin B1, which is produced in the room and by the microbes. So have seen some limited success with supplementing thiamine to affected animals, but it definitely isn't a cure or a magic bullet. Okay, so pressic acid poisoning. Our primary risks in this category are the sorghums, sorghum sedans and sedan grass. Sorghums are probably the highest in the risk category. Can also see pressic acid in flax. So that's one thing to consider if you're using that in your mix. Basically the pressic acid forms during water stress or after a killing frost. And so it kind of has the same mode of action as the nitrate just prevents oxygen transfer in the blood. So you see some of those same symptoms. The pressic acid can be extremely toxic in a short period of time. The time from ingestion to death can be as little as 10 to 15 minutes. So you may not see any symptoms at all. So some ways to manage this, the risk is definitely greatest during the early growth period. So try to wait until the plants are around 24 to 30 inches tall. Really important to not graze for 10 to 14 days after a drought, any rain or a killing frost or even a light frost in some cases can release pressic acid. And then a lot of times you'll see after a killing freeze, if things warm back up, we'll get some regrowth. And that's, that regrowth will be extremely toxic and you do not wanna graze that again until it's at least 18 inches tall. Most of the time that cyanic acid will dissipate within around a week to 10 days, but I always recommend people just give it another couple of days. So I'm usually going out to two weeks, probably airing on the site of caution there. But again, just because of the high level of toxicity, it's probably a smart thing to do. Grazing is definitely the biggest challenge in terms of pressic acid. Most of the time, if the hay is dried down appropriately, it's safe. That can be really challenging when you're looking at sorghums and sudans as many of you might know. So making sure it's dry is definitely important. Can also use it for silage. Typically, if that normal fermentation process occurs in the silage, it will be safe. If you have, for some reason, that fermentation does not occur normally, might want to think about submitting a sample for analysis. And green chop is definitely very toxic, so you don't want to use that with those types of forages. So this one is pretty specific just to sweet clover and more specifically sweet clover hay. Many of you have heard about this. Sweet clover contains coumarin that's converted to dicumeral in moldy hay. And so if the hay was put up and was dried down appropriately, probably not an issue, it is though when we have high moisture conditions, hay put up too wet. And can also occur in hay that is stored where moisture is able to access those bales. So both in harvest and also in storage. Basically prevents normal blood clotting. You see stiffness, lameness, can see some abortions potentially. Again, just making sure hay is dry. If you're feeding some moldy forage, the diagnostic labs in the area do analyze for dicumeral. So you can submit a sample. It's very challenging to get a representative sample for moldy hay. As you guys know, you might have one bale that's perfectly fine and one bale that's really moldy. So it's important to talk to the diagnosticians at the lab and kind of see what their recommendations are. But it's important to know kind of what you're dealing with and then of course alternating with non moldy forage to try to help kind of dilute that out. Cape bloat is another potential issue. When you're looking at high quality forages such as our legumes or brassicas of course, especially canola and then small grains, basically gas from that fermentation just gets trapped in the room and it puts a lot of pressure on the lungs and nerves. You can get just a gas bloat or you can also get a frothy bloat in the case of our legumes. And so that just blocks everything and keeps the animal from respirating. Most of the time with bloat, we see an increased incidence early in the day. And definitely the first few days after a killing frost is a time of concern. So ways to manage that, making sure your cattle are full before turning out, making sure you're delaying turnout until patches are dry after you have a dew or rain. Again, just monitoring, watching those animals and seeing, you're seeing any symptoms of bloat, providing more access to other grazing or hay and then plexiline blocks and or ionophores if you can provide those have shown to be effective in some cases in terms of prevention. So there are a couple of species that have been used in cover crop mixes that could be poisonous to livestock. I don't know how common these are. In your experience, just wanted to mention them. Harryvich is one that is mentioned in our extension pub. And basically they just recommend using it at an extremely low level if they're thinking about incorporating that as a legume because it is recommended for nitrogen fixing. So you can see allergic reactions. They'll get kind of a scale around their neck sometimes. You can see swelling, coughing, diarrhea, abortions, all those kinds of things. And it does ultimately can potentially impact kidney function and result in death. So again, I just have here limiting that to less than 15% of our mixtures as a recommendation. Lupin and amaranth are two other species that can be poisonous to livestock. There's some species, there's multiple species of both of these types of plants. And so some of them are safe and some of them are not. And I can definitely get you more details about those if you'd like. So just going back, quick review, thinking about brassicas. So they're definitely very nutrient dense. They can contain up to 30% crude protein and around 80% TDN or total adjustable nutrients. They're also extremely high in moisture. So it can be difficult for cattle to eat to their full requirement just because of the, just because of how much room they take up in their stomach. So again, there's a lot of potential issues. We talked about polio, nitrate toxicity, bloat. Those are all, the brassicas are all prime candidates for those have also seen some anemia. And then some, they do have some glucosinolates that can cause thyroid issues. So those are possibilities. So just in general limiting the brassicas to around 50 to 70% of the mix is probably a good idea. So again, our small grains, some of the potential issues we see here are the grass, tetany, nitrate toxicity and bloat. The glooms are bloat and we could potentially see some sweet clover poisoning with our moldy hay. I didn't talk too much about oil seeds. There's not a huge amount of issues with those. Does of course require a little bit of grazing management and you have to think about the oil or fat content contributed by those species. So in general, I mean, the fat content of these species will vary from around 20 to 40%. And so when we get greater than that 5% fat in the diet we can have impacts on room infirmation and just their ability to utilize forages. So it's best to limit those to around 10%. There is a potential for prusic acid poisoning with flax that I mentioned earlier. And again, canola can kill livestock in multiple ways. So that's one to kind of just be very careful with. Our sorghum sudans, millets and corn. We talked about the nitrate toxicity. That can occur in all those species and then prusic acid primarily in sorghum and sudan. Millet doesn't seem to be a huge accumulator of prusic acid so not much of a concern there. So just in general, consider the potential for toxicities when you're choosing your cover crop mixes and then observe, test and manage appropriately. So I will stop. And I think we're open for questions. Yeah, okay, awesome. So if you have any questions for either Miranda or Jana, you can type them in the chat pod and we'll make sure those get to them. And you can do that either privately or just to everybody, it's up to you. So if you're feeling a little shy, you can always do it a private question and I'll just ask it for you. And I actually have one that was sent to me and it's for Jana. Can ergot be diluted if hay is processed through a grinder with other better quality hay? The challenges that the ergot bodies, I mean, if you have seed heads in your hay, it's, they're just present. And so in it take their cattle are very susceptible to ergot poisoning. It literally takes just a couple of seed heads. So it would be almost impossible to dilute that out by feeding other non-infected forages. So that's a challenging one. When we get into ergot infested grains, they do have some gravity tables and things like that where they can screen those ergot bodies out. But with forages, it's kind of in the bale and it's the livestock are just gonna have access to it. Other questions, you can go ahead and send them my way. I can get those asked for you. I think Miranda's gonna pop a poll up here and we can get rolling on the polls while questions are coming in. Okay, Jana, while people are filling out the first poll, can several consecutive cloudy days cause nitrate issues? Good question. And yes, it potentially can. So again, anything that, so ideally photosynthesis is going to depend on the ideal temperature for those reactions to take place. It depends on sunlight and adequate moisture. So when we have cloudy days, we don't have that sunlight factor. So photosynthesis might slow down. Now, whether it slows down to the point of building up toxic levels of nitrate or not is kind of hard to predict, but it definitely can contribute. And so things to do in that situation might be to just give that a couple of days after you have some cloudy conditions. And then we typically, we see issues kind of like with bloat. We see most of our nitrate issues in the morning. So avoid turning out in the morning, wait till afternoon, fill them up on hay, things like that. Those are kind of ways that you can manage that if you've had those conditions. And another question came in. Is there a tendency to have ergot repeat year after year in the same areas? So could you manage time of grazing based on that concept if that's true? That would be ideal, but it doesn't seem to be. It seems to be really climate dependent. And so if the conditions are right, it can appear and then the next year you might have totally different conditions and you don't have a problem. That's kind of what we see from people. You know, one year it's massive and they have multiple animals. They're trying to figure out where to go with them because the entire pasture is infected. And next year they don't have a problem. The one thing is that if you do have it in your area, obviously you have the fungal bodies present. And so you are at a higher risk of having it in that same area again. So just to monitor if you knew that. Just a couple of things about the poles. They are anonymous. So we don't know what you're putting in. And I will leave this one open for a couple more seconds and then close it. And well, Miranda's closing that. I have a private question here for Miranda. So Miranda, you had talked about taking a sample and drying it so that we know what the wage of that is or what the dry matter is. How do I do that at home? So I said air drying. It's the preferred method. You can oven dry if you have access to that. But actually your conversions are gonna be a little different if you oven dry. So all the numbers here are based off of air dry. Ideally, one of the things we will do is just, if it's a small enough sample, you can throw it in your dash in the sunlight or just put it somewhere if it's in your shop, somewhere that has good air circulation and let it sit there a few days if it's like something like rye, a cereal base. But it can be if you have something, a brassica is gonna take longer. It could take up to a week. So giving it that time to dry down. Awesome. And there are methods for drying things in microwaves and if you wanna speed up the process. There will definitely be a smell associated with that. So be prepared for that. Yes, don't do it in your house, ideally. And I am gonna launch our second poll right now. So we have another question. Are there any specific testing parameters that have been developed for analyzing standing green forage for nitrate toxicity? Or is the recommendation the same as harvested forage? And I'm gonna throw that over to Jana because she has some tools there. So again, standing forage is the biggest challenge because we don't know exactly what they're going to eat or how much of it they're going to eat. The interesting thing that I kind of forgot to mention when I was talking about the cover crops is that we often see toxic levels of nitrate in many species of cover crops, but yet we don't see that same level of livestock losses that we would expect with the nitrate results that we get back. And so some of the thoughts there are that intake is a little bit slower when grazing on fresh forage. And so also the moisture content and the rate of intake of those fresh forages, for some reason, they're just a little bit different, we think. Also with cover crops, of course, we have a lot of the different energy contents and group protein contents, thing like that. We do have a nitrate quick test that most of the county agents have access to and in fact, many of our surrounding states have the same thing. I know Montana does, South Dakota. I'm not sure about other states. We have used that, it's very sensitive so it will pick up nitrate at very low levels. We have had some issues, it's a color test so it's a color metric response and it will basically turn blue if nitrate is present in that sample. And we have had some kind of different responses when we're using it with corn. So I'm not entirely certain. I'd have to go back and do a little digging to see if it works well with, for example, brassicas, canola or other crops like that. The other thing that there is more use of these days in the extension systems, there are nitrate strips. So basically, you grind your forage and you kind of let it settle in a water solution and then you can use the strip and basically it will just give you a range and you just compare that range of the color reaction that you have with what's on the bottle and then make a decision about whether or not you need to do some additional testing. Again, that doesn't tell you everything so basically the quick test will tell you yes or no and then the nitrate strips will tell you, give you kind of that range of if you're in the dangerous zone or not and then more testing might be recommended. So yeah, I'll put my email address down here and if you'd like to follow up, I will do some checking on how that works with, if you have specific species in mind for a quick test, I'd have to do some more checking on that because it works really well with small grains, cut some different responses in corns, I'm not sure about the other ones, so. Awesome, thanks, Jana. So if you have questions, just keep putting them in there or sending them to Miranda or I, I'm gonna go back here, you can see I'm sharing the screen. So again, if you had any technical difficulty joining us today, we just welcome you to put that in the chat pod for us, that way we kind of know if anything is goofy that we need to look at or try to fix for next time or for any future webinars that we have. You can self-report your CEUs by going to certifiedcropadvisor.org, most likely you know that, but there were a few people that were new, had questions last time and so if you are, you can go ahead and do that. We have a pull up now and this is probably the one that we really, really, really wanna know the most. If these are not useful, we do not wanna do them and so we just really appreciate you filling out if they're useful or not, we appreciate that. Our next webinar is on Thursday, April 16th, so this Thursday at 11 a.m., Central Standard Time again, so we'll join you right back here again. And then the recording as soon as it's ready you'll be found with the rest of them, so it's on the grazing management folder under cover crops of the livestock extension page and so that's where that'll be housed and then we have another webinar series coming up for FSA programs. So those will begin tomorrow. It looks like Miranda. Yes, and another thing with this pull that's up, if you have any additional comments since we can't get those in the poll, capture those in the poll, if you could type any comments regarding the webinar, the series that things you like, didn't like, in the chat box, we'd really appreciate that feedback or if you wanna email it to us privately, that's fine as well. And I'm gonna close this one and open our final poll. Again, if you have any other questions, you can certainly put them in the chat pod for us. Can you send the video link again? Yes, I sure can. Megan, thank you for asking. Let me just put that in the chat pod probably, huh? And the videos, take about a day, give us a day to get them up there. They'll be up there probably sometime tomorrow morning. Okay, so the link is in the chat pod. And Miranda, did you send out last time to the registration list? There was a question about sending that up. Did you do that? I haven't. I thought we'd just wait until we were done with the whole series and mail it out all at once. So we won't mail those to everybody as a follow up. Awesome. So we have another webinar again on Thursday and then next Tuesday and that will conclude our cover crop series. And Thursday is gonna be a fun one. Mary and Marisol are gonna go through cover crop characteristics and identification. And so please join us for that. We'll be interested to see how it goes. Yeah, get ready for some chat polls. They're gonna be fun. And if you do have any follow up questions from today for either Jana or Miranda, you can always email myself. You can email Jana, Miranda, send any of us a note and let us know. Also, you're a local extension agent. I'll know how to get ahold of us. And so you can do that if you're North Dakota and they'll be able to get ahold of us. Thanks everyone for joining us. Have a great day.