 Whoa This is a big group. I'm not used to talking to so many people at one time, but We'll get through this Actually, I have fun. This is probably one of the more fun parts of the research that I do and by the way Duane is in some respects is wrong because I'm a graduate of the Montana State University not North Dakota State Well, you know Ruth is in a hurry she probably had to do half your work, too at any rate Let's get going time is limited because I do have quite a few slides here a lot of information lots of pictures You'll notice as we go forward that I use lots of pictures I like pictures because they're worth a thousand words and more so I don't have to do all the talking you can see for yourself The first thing I want to do is to thank these sponsors that are here today for your meeting because they're paying my expenses So I appreciate that. Thank you very much The title of our talk today is grazing synergy and regenerative agriculture Crop grazing microbial soil health and greenhouse gas emissions You probably haven't heard too much about greenhouse gas emissions except that the the sky is falling from all liberals that are on social media and whatever but We're still going to be around Even though they're worried about everything. I think the earth has been warming since the ice age Have you noticed that? Yeah. Well, it's continuing humans are just accelerating it a little bit With that in mind, I am I am Doug Landblum a Animal scientist from Turkey has been working with me for about seven years Larry Chachik a soil scientist out of NDSU and so The three of us and some other folks are working on this particular long-term research. It's a 10-year project Next summer we will or this summer coming. I guess we're already in 2019 We will plant our ninth crop in this 10-year project. So we've been at it for a while I might add that as we as we move forward here Some of the things I want to talk about soil health, but in the beginning. Well, let me not get there yet In terms of soil health, we want to look at these five principles. Now if you're an agronomist You look at these four and you stop here. You don't know that livestock exists But we cattle guys. We know that livestock integration plays a huge role in Soil health and so we want livestock if we can we want to have livestock in the In the equation we want to have of course. We want soil armor. We want to minimize soil disturbance We're doing that by using no-till we want a lot of diversity in our crop So we have wide crop rotations Continual live plant root in the ground we use cover crops to help us do that and when integrate livestock into our system and So we have three points in this triangle the three primary points as you can see there are Crop rotations soil health and livestock grazing and they interact between each other in an integrated Systems work that I'm working on You take a look here We have a study going on and what we have in this piece of research as we have Spring wheat grown continuously year after year after year under no-till and We're comparing that basically to spring wheat grown in a five crop rotation and this rotation includes cover crops after the wheat Which precedes corn? Corn it precedes a field pea barley followed up by sunflowers in that rotation There are the four crop types. There are your two warm season. You have your broadleaf and Grass type warm season crops. You have your broadleaf and grass type cool season crops and so we want those four crop types in there and They're placed in that rotation Intentionally the way they are because In our cover crop. We're trying to use a cover crop that has a carbon nitrogen ratio somewhere in that Let's say 35 to 45 CN ratio which We'll break down more rapidly. Okay, if we have one that is high Let's say corn residue Sunflower residue Those are more lignified those heavy stocks and you can see in your own fields. They break down More slowly. Okay, so we we what we have here is we have these more rapid breakdown crops Here's peas and and barley they break down quite rapidly. So they're preceding The higher nutrient requirement crops such as corn and sunflower in that rotation and the rotation gives us Diversity, okay, I think I'm driving a cameraman nuts, but that's okay so we asked the question why see the cover crop and been lots of discussion about cover crops and We just talked about it earlier, but minimum disturbance using no-till seeding Livestock involved providing crop diversity maintaining a living root So we prevent erosion. We increase soil organic matter. We increase soil nutrient cycling such as nitrogen phosphorus Potassium reduce fertilizer inputs. We produce forage for hanging and or grazing in this situation If you looked if you remember what we had now you have the handout so it isn't in color, but You can see here after we Harvest that spring wheat We come in behind that about the 15th of September and we seed winter triticale hairy vetch It could be winter rye. I happen to have selected winter Triticale at the time and so we continue on through if it were today I would probably in research you can't make quick changes I would change to winter rye, but that's neither here or there today After that winter rye the next spring by about mid-June We swat that down roll it up for hay and come back behind Burn it down seed a cover crop and then we graze that cover crop either with cows or yearling steers in In the in the fall. Okay, so that's what happens in terms of a cover crop Procedure after spring wheat. Okay, so it's a multi cover crop really with the winter crop followed by a summer crop So it's a dual cropping system and it gives us off your amount of tonnage In total with the cover crop hay as well as grazing If you take a look at the amount of tonnage Cover crops seeded in this particular manner in other words not being a full season cover crop But one that follows a spring grain crop in that situation You'll notice that in 2011 here's your years along here 11 through 17. I don't have 18 on the chart, but what you'll notice is you've got a year in 2011 you got 2014 you got 2017 those were very low production years now in 14 We had a tremendous amount of rain Okay, a lot of rain in our area on Unbelievable and so I think that the cover crop species that we had selected a lot of them Don't like wet feet because it was really wet and That's one of the reasons we think that we got such a low response in a real high moisture year because of the crops We have this is drought and this is exceptional drought over here in 17 Otherwise running around four and a quarter three and a quarter two ninety two five Tons of the acre. This is dry matter tons to the acre So on a wet basis you'd have to calculate that up Cover crop mix so a cover crop mix is in this case cover crop mixes can be Oh from five to in this case I think there's 12 or 13 species in there a lot of times I use a small amount Like in this case of these clovers, they're expensive So there's only seven tenths of a percent or a third of a pound per acre Just a small amount and the goal is to get a lot of root Diversity in that cover crop as we as we see that so in this case we're seeding about 43 pounds per acre One of the challenges we have with cover crop is is increasing diversity and a number of species But try to keep the price down and they can get they can get expensive and so you know your challenge with Getting a return on your investment. Okay? after five years of Spring wheat taking a look at the control wheat Versus the wheat grown in rotation if you look at those charts You'll see that there's a trend line here. That's going this way in the control Trend line in the rotation wheat though is going this way and then I'll tell you that At this point in the in the study with the control wheat our soil test said after this year We no longer needed fertilizer nitrogen fertilizer however in our soil tests in the rotation Our so our soil tests said that we no longer needed fertilizer here so from 2013 14 and 15 there was no nitrogen fertilizer applied in this case 14 and 15 no fertilizer applied and as we took fertilizer away Look what happened to the yields? this is a product of the microbial mineral Isation taking place in other words the new trade then microbes in the soil are Mineralizing nitrogen making it available to the plant as plant food and this here we have you know We've got your 14 bushels difference in yield per acre of spring wheat in that situation If I look at all of the crops that were grown and I there's a lot of slides I could have in here this talk I have about a hundred slides and so you only get 35 today This is the five-year net return I have all those numbers that support these things, but you don't have time for that but notice here Between the spring wheat control to the spring rotation in terms of net return is about a $15 per bushel When I took a look at the five years over the five years that of markets and prices and yields and costs, etc in that particular situation And seeing that sunflower is our highest net return crop in this situation if we look at If we look at I have to change hands my I have carpal tunnel and this one goes to sleep So I might drop the microphone, but If you look at these two charts the chart on the left is the control of the wheat and what you have on there are Three lines and the three lines represent if you can see The blue is the cropped area The orange is a a route restricted area and the gray happens to be native pasture under similar range sites The orange line Is a situation where we took eight inch aluminum? Irrigation pipes eight inch by 24 inch and we push them into the ground into the soil with payloader So that there was maybe about this much sticking out of the top of the above the ground, okay, so inside that curbing or that aluminum pipe roots from the growing wheat cannot get in and scavenge nitrogen Okay, so that nitrogen whatever nitrogen was being mineralized Inside that curbing was there and not being released so the difference that you see here between the blue line and the orange line is the amount of nitrogen that was being produced versus that Which the crop had used so we have this difference here and you can see under the rotation Wheat growing in that five crop rotation. We have a larger amount of n Being produced in in the area. Okay, these dates are like the first of June. This is October Here's about time you combine right in here. Okay, those just happen to be calendar dates If we look at this regression and and it's a kind of a scatter regression and don't worry about that part But you can notice the slope of our line is one in which we go from about two and a half percent Organic matter in our soils in the research up to not quite what six and three quarters something of that nature So we have this range. I have an aerial photograph and I did not put it in the in the slide set and I should have but what we have is a gradient of soil as We come from let's say south or north to south across this This experimental area and these are not little plots necessarily. They're about four point three acre fields so they're smaller fields and So they're large enough for me to get in and graze with year-length steers. Okay, so a little bit larger and From south to north if you think of the blocks on this floor That's a lot like our fields are set out and we go from quite a good soil To a V bar sandy type soil with some sandstone In the surface so it's not very good soil as we move up But if you'll notice even those poorer soils are showing somewhere in that two and a half percent soil organic matter our higher and better quality soils are up in this area of the of that a Regression line okay in terms of parts per million of mineralized nitrogen as it contrasts against soil organic matter all right in some laboratory mineralization work that we've been doing with these soils in 2014 to 16 is the time period that three-year period of soils We are finding under ideal conditions. I need to point that out. We're mineralizing about 16 point 18 16.8 pounds of potential mineralized nitrogen per acre as you look at this at this particular situation, so That's in the rotation versus The control okay, so we think we're making some progress We know we're making some progress because this is a significant amount of Nitrogen being mineralized and justifies why you saw that increase in wheat yields In the rotation chart that I previously showed you back here. No That's too far that one This is the effect of mineralized nitrogen that the soil microbes are Are producing I'm going to get into ray ray wards area just a little bit. We've have done some microbial analysis using The laboratory and analysis that ward labs does and ray ward is on the program later this later on I'm just going to make a quick mention that This particular Soil samples were taken in 17 during the exceptional drought in Dickinson and we had very poor yields I'm going to tell you Given that situation I looked at microbial biomass and they they provide a tremendous amount of information And so I've just extracted a little bit of that information for you in three areas that I think are particularly important in In a baseline Evaluation we're going to take some more samples this coming summer and see how they contrast with these in terms of biomass or the abundance of microbial presence based on Phospholipid fatty acid content of cell walls and all living organisms have phospholipids in their cell walls and so it's a it's a very good Indicator to use this is in nanograms Program of soil, but you see and I've got the colors of the different crops here So our highest our highest one happens to be this darker green, which is a pea barley mix Remember we have that in the crop system and and so forth But you look at these well actually this is the highest one which we get over here to the Triticale hairy vetch the point being is that these are up in this range of you know 14 something to 2100 nanograms per gram of soil and we would actually like to see those I think under Under an environment where we had adequate moisture. We will probably see 3500 to 4000 Nanograms per gram of soil, okay This is under a drought situation and when those when that soil is almost bone dry Those organisms are unable to respire and to multiply and reproduce themselves and so as a result they We're not going to have a very large number this particular little chart here in terms of functional group diversity In other words my crew the the structure of the microbial community and some of these words are probably like a foreign language to you That's okay. They kind of are to me as well, but the point being is on a scale of one to two Even though we were dry and the the total abundance or the microbial biomass wasn't was about half of what we'd like it to see under a drought condition the the the complexity of the organisms in That soil is quite good Because from a score of zero to two You see these are up in that one point five to two one point six and so a pretty decent Diversity in the functional groups of those microbes that are in the soil and that's important Okay, because it's a balance of a variety of different things that live in the soil and then they do a soil health Calculation and ray will get into probably all of that stuff, but on a range of zero to fifty We're in that 13 14 something like that In their literature they talk about seven and above being a valuable This is something that you look at year after year after year to see if you're seeing change in your values Okay, we won't say anything more about it than that the other thing that they do and something I just showed you basically based on the The amount of nitrogen that's being mineralized in the soil This is a test that that the laboratory does as well as we take a look at the the NPNK cost per acre that they That they have calculated Then they take a look at the nitrogen available based on Microbial analysis do the difference and then give you a value of savings in dollars per acre of nitrogen that's being Mineralized in that soil okay, and he'll go into that and in effect That's basically what I told you in the previous slide and this sort of validates what they've all that what they are saying as well from Dr. La word's lab greenhouse gases We know they're an issue in society in our environment. They are naturally occurring Some of the things we do we would like to reduce the amount of CO2 if we could we'd like to reduce methane if possible And we'd like to reduce nitrous oxide but there's a balance in nature between the environment the atmosphere and Rains that are loaded with nitrogen as it rains our crops are Fertilized with nitrogen when we get a rainstorm or a thunderstorm, okay? So there's a balance in nature We won't go into those cycles here today in terms of the carbon cycle and the nitrogen cycle etc but the point being One of our question was because we have grazing in our research is what is the impact of grazing on these particular grasses? These crops can we actually? make a difference Does grazing hurt it and cause more does grazing cause less or is there no difference and The way we've studied that is we've taken these little static chambers And we have a cage is notice we had some cattle panel here around some of those chambers and some chambers Have no there's grazing around these and we restrict grazing around these with Livestock cattle panel. I don't know if you could see those but these little chambers are in in there We put some steel posts around them because the cattle play with them and they knock them out of the soil And and we have problems so we use steel posts to keep them from damaging those those chambers and So just let me show you that data quickly and if I take a look at the cumulative or the total amount of Gases from grazed and non grazed sites if you look here at carbon dioxide in terms of measured in kilograms per hectare If we want that a by acre we multiply it by point eight nine three and you got pounds per acre But at any rate notice here under grazed is the green bar the ungrazed is the orange bar We've got less carbon dioxide When under grazing in the case of methane It's about the same really not much difference between those two But in the case of nitrous oxide we have a little bit less nitrous oxide where it's grazed than where it's ungrazed Nitrous oxide is an interesting is an interesting gas When we get a rain event such as a thunderstorm We'll see this nitrous oxide going along as we take you know samples week after week after week and we get a rain event Boom, they just bounce up those organisms just explode in activity Producing a large volume of nitrous oxide After that rain event Here's something you may be interested in I don't know if any of you are seeding winter rye. How many seed winter rye? Oh Not one hand interesting Okay Well, I understand but Okay, okay Anyway, so you're not seeing winter rye But some of our folks are seeing winter rye in fact in North Dakota and areas where they seed a lot of soybeans They're seeding winter rye and then there's a green seeding soybeans into winter rye. Okay So one of our questions was and this is just an extension demo at the Bowman at the Sridee charlay Anga charlay ranch We went in and set up their drill and we seeded single rows of a variety of crops a radish rape turnip soybeans common vetch forage peas millet Triticale flax oats barley and sorghum sedan You can see oats barley and sorghum sedan no growth whatsoever Flax did well Triticale didn't do quite so well Millet was one of our good-growing crops the peas did well vetch did so-so and son the Soybeans did quite well. So they were pretty resistant to the chemical that winter rye Produces it produces a chemical and it's a word about this long. So I won't try to pronounce it, but it inhibits Plant growth around it and as you can see here Certain plants are quite really quite tolerant or not tolerant. They're very sensitive to it the rape These brassicas here actually they germinated and would have done fine except flea beetles wiped them out And as it got high the plants just dried up and Was a total loss, but anyway if you're not seeding winter rye you might Think about that in some cover crop type things, but it depends on what your cropping systems are and how you do things, okay? Grazing move into a little bit of grazing and and beef cattle because we do have We do have some some crops and when I used to feed cattle at one time fed my own cattle or had cattle fed in both Wyoming and Nebraska feed yards and I either made money on futures or occasionally I've made money on the cattle, but I usually made money on the futures You've probably had a lot of experience in doing that too the cattle by themselves didn't make a lot of cash Okay, was what I was trying to say So I thought to myself now how am I that's how I set this whole piece of research up along with some help From from doing back. He helped me design this project Going back in 2009 2010 and As I was feeding cattle and I was trying to think now how am I going to make more money from these cattle? And my thought was I need to own these cattle a lot longer in fact if I could own these cattle all the way to slaughter on the ranch rather than having someone else do my Work for me. I think I could probably make a little bit more money And indeed that's what I tried to do So I began with yearling steers in this particular project to see if I could hold retained ownership on those steers from birth To a carcass hanging on the rail and what kind of Dollars and cents would be involved in vertically integrated business plan plan Okay, I can't give you all of that data, but I can give you a glimpse of it. Okay So what we did as we began with with yearling steers great overwintered to grow a pound pound a half a day pound a quarter a day Okay, and then put them out on native pasture. They're there 108 days Then that feel pee barley we actually swathed it for a period of time Put it into windrows and then graze those windrows for about a month's period of time You can see some dollars tied to those pictures Took those cattle in off of that pee barley when they were done grazing and I use that sort of as a As a link between the native pasture and the corn but the corn wasn't quite ready So then we put them in in the corn and corn of course doesn't stay green all the time and they it ends up to be very dry dry corn we've had a little bit of protein supplement along with that dry corn and Got about $11 per steer invested in in supplement and then those steers Went on to the on to the feed yard and working with Steve Paisley at the University of Wyoming over here at Lingle, but going backwards. Let's look at the performance on those yearling steers they grazed for 211 days through native pasture and these annual forages corn and Pea barley, okay at that time when I was doing this particular work I was doing some stuff with cows and I'll show you that a little bit later Grazing cover crops, but anyway these yearlings grazed for 211 days They had a starting weight of 780 the ending weight of those yearlings coming off of the native Forages with 1275 pounds and you probably said to yourself man alive would never sell an animal that heavy Well, you would if you see the dollars We put on 495 pounds again cost 300 bucks to do that In terms of a gain and cost of gains here the The grazing average daily gain was about 2.3 pounds a day and it cost us 61 cents per pound of gain If I look at a little bit of a cash flow here for the yearlings if we were to sell them at the end of the grazing period Which might be a one of the options and one of the options. We've got about 600 oops 602 dollars invested in annual cow costs a background in cost of 153 The grazing cost per steer of 285 dollars. I adjusted that down and made some changes in some things. I showed you 300 previously Total cost of 1040 The ending gray in grazing steer value of 1593 that was based on On a 1275 pound steer at 125 dollars a hundred weight And grazing net return per steer of 553 dollars Based on the number of acres that those animals you use between native range plus the annual forages 8.24 acres per steer We have a net return of about 70 dollars per acre From from the cattle, okay And those numbers are based off of what I put together Yesterday, so those are those are current dollars and cents and market values if we do not sell those animals at the end of End of the grazing period and carry them on to finish We basically come from the cornfields to the feedlot to the packing plant And in the process those control cattle we put a set of steers when we put cattle in the on the native pastures We put a set of steers in the feedlot at the same time they went down In early may And they were in the feedlot for 211 days It's just circumstance that they grazed for 211 days the other group that wasn't by design. It just happened that way, I guess But these grazing cattle were in the feed yard for 82 days Pretty short period of time if you fed cattle in the feed yard You know you'll get a lot of days in the feed yard and you get you get feed bills every two weeks Yearlings steer feedlot average daily gain you can see that The feedlot control gained about 3.4 pounds a day When these yearlings come to the feed yard, they are not growing out on those grazing fields because of the level of Nutrients is not as high and it doesn't reach their genetic potential for gain and growth Okay Just doesn't Because a lot of these cattle as you know are designed and developed for corn diets And forages are not corn diets even though we've grazed corn we're grazing We're gaining about a pound and eight to 2.2 pounds a day grazing corn Not much more than that you'd think it'd be more but it isn't anyway When these animals get to the feed yard They have a very high Compensatory growth response and so Deficiency is quite good Because when they get there it doesn't take nearly as many days to get them finished and they're heavier to start with So the feed intake is greater If you take a look at their feedlot Feed intake and efficiency are feedlot cattle that were the controls 2.6 26.8 pounds of feed At 7.6 pounds of feed per pound of gain If you look at the the extended graze annual forage type cattle They eat more feed because they're they're larger 29.2 pounds of feed but their feed efficiency is what about a pound in A pound in four tenths less Per pound of gain, okay feed costs 81 cents for the controls of 58 cents for our grazing cattle If we take a look at excuse me if we take a look at the at carcass quality You look here the percent choice Steer percent choice you'll see that there's basically no difference between those that were in the feedlot all the time versus our grazing cattle 93 versus 92 percent Choice grade we'd like to have one of those stakes for lunch if you could bake that work uh Ruth I've done a couple of these experiments and one I did when uh the price of corn was what seven eight dollars a Bushel, which I guess most of your corn growers would like to see again. That ain't going to happen I'm sorry, but it ain't going to happen Anyway during that experiment during the high corn prices Uh when I put the control cattle in the feed yard lost two hundred ninety eight dollars ahead But these annual forage cattle these grazing cattle made nine dollars And uh those that were grazing just on pasture and went through the program lost 30 bucks. So You can see the the The potential here in retaining ownership of those animals all the way through slaughter If that's a business plan you want to get involved in In a second experiment in the one I just showed you Uh Those control cattle bring three hundred and seventy eight dollars ahead versus annual forage cattle brought four hundred and thirty nine dollars net return By retaining ownership all the way through now that Stream of numbers is a little bit different than if you sell those yearlings and turn around and buy them back So if you're buying calves selling calves buying calves selling calves You will get a different stream of numbers If you own those cattle all the way through you don't have those buy sell And rebuy transactions taking place because they never traded hands. They stayed on your farm and just kept grazing So that's why you see a set of numbers here that you swallow hard and say the guy's nuts actually am But not in this case And I think it was you have 750 something like that. It was it was really high It was when that high corn price was high and the cattle price wasn't It hadn't exploded yet the perfect storm occurred a little later on When pork prices were Pork supply it was a protein problem when price of cattle went That was a protein issue And we won't see that again either by the way But there was avian flu There was a swine Reproduction problem and so we had a lot of pigs that didn't survive So we had a small pork crop small chicken crop But we had adequate beef and we were ready to go And so that was uh, it was one of those things where you bought new trailers and shops and pickups And now you're trying to figure out how to pay for them I I can't hear You know I'd have to go to the papers I have to go to the data Reasonably close though reasonably close Okay, it's just that they're in a feedlot so long. You've got all those expenses You're up against a lot of cost of operation Is where it is, but I could get you those numbers if you'd like to see the Fact they're on the internet if we could get on the computer here we could pull them up Is that outsourcing feed to bring an outside feed in or At the feed yard. Yeah. Oh, absolute. Yeah typical Feed yard thing and then a markup. You know, you know that part Markup on everything drugs if they took a nap markup They get paid well At any rate, let's enough goof enough We took a look at these cows now we're working with some cows that are May-June cavers, okay So as I look at May-June cavers and that we could have a whole talk on calving date and all that stuff, but at any rate as we look at forages as a way to Extend the grazing season without feeding quite as much. Hey, that was my my goal here was to Take a look at cattle or basically in a sacrifice area being fed Hey pretty much through most of your winter months compared to grazing either cover crop residue or crop residue And maybe using some stockpile grasses along with some corn residue Okay Some different kinds of things that we would see happen here Because you got a lot of grasses out in this country In this particular part, uh, I looked at cover crop grazing cover crop As well as corn and sunflower residues, okay And you can see here's our flower residue here some of our corn residue Cover crop residue here with little sunflowers about as high as their back. That was when it rained that year And uh, the other one You can see here where we we Uh, basically instead of making hay What I did was set aside those haylands that we would have Swat and baled for grazing Set them as so instead of making bales We just left it in the stand to graze and then graze corn stalks and This just picture of the stalks after we grazed them down and uh So if I take a look at the cover crop mix that was in there and some of the dollars that are involved You can see the the crops here. It's a what about a two four Seven seven crop cover crop mix and they get down here. I got some farm I got some taxes and different expenses along with the crop itself Cost per acre and then the cost per cow for grazing was down at 36 55 Okay, this is what your crop looked like when it was green you saw it earlier when it was frozen and dried Days of winter grazing our control cows that were just on hay, of course none The cover crop and residue cows didn't have as much grazing time 73 days because they ate out the feed The grass and residue I had because I wanted to leave Half and take half of the grasses. So I had twice as much grazing area Consequently that gave me more days of grazing Uh with the with the grass and residue cows there in that blue bar So they grazed for 107 days taking advantage of both both the corn residue and stockpile grasses If I look at the amount of hay that was fed per cow You can see there the red bar is the control cows We fed them 4,724 pounds and those are 15 15 1600 pound cows so some big girls Uh the hay cows these uh these cover crop and residue cows they ate a little under a ton 1824 And our grass and residue cows ate just a little under 900 pounds of of hay If I look at the hay costs for for each cow uh you can Understandable our control cows were 173 dollars down to 68 for our cover crop and residue And then 30 dollars for our grass and residue cows If I put the uh supplements because we did feed uh we did feed some uh some cake to those cows Two to three pounds a day And we add those together we got the taxes we got all that stuff involved in there 209 dollars versus 141 for our cover crop and residue cows 73 dollars for our grass and residue cows so our grass we can take As you can see we can take advantage of that grass And uh stockpile grass save a little expense in in uh in hay production We have to balance that I understand that Cow weight gains you can see here that our our cows Starting weights 1490 versus 1500 pounds on those cover crop and residue cows Compared to grass there's about four so those cows are pretty much about the same At the start as we fed hay or hay cows got heavier Compared to the other two groups of cows and and these grass cows really didn't change weight much They put on 112 pounds And probably and most of that weight is fetal membranes and fluids actually Okay, so these cows put on a little bit more in terms of body weight as well If we look at body condition score or if you want to look at average data gain a pound and a half versus 11 versus 0.8 Excuse me In terms of starting body condition score you see relatively little difference 5 4 to as much as 5 7 but at the end of the body into the Grazing period feed grazing and feeding period you see these these hay cows put on a A little bit as well as the cover crop cows But our grass and corn residue cows really didn't change they didn't change from the time that we started to the end So there's really no change in body condition score Whereas the other ones put on almost 78 tenths of a body condition score If I take a look at reproductive performance of what was effective the grazing under those conditions our first cycle calving was less for the grass and corn residue As you would expect in the second calving cycle They they picked back up along with the the cover crop ones We had a little bit higher number of of Of third cycle cows of course in our Grass and residue group And at the end of the period our percent open Was really no difference between the control cows and the grass cows, so Uh, I'm not sure I understand what's totally going on here. It could just be cows being cows um But you notice at the end of the day our cover crop and our Crop residue cows Did a little bit better And I'm not exactly sure I understand totally what's going on there, but I think Uh It may have something to do with the amount of Sunflower residue that those particular cows ate Sunflower residue is pretty high in oil. It's high in energy sunflower residue is a really really good feed And uh that may have had a long-term effect on these cows, but I think it would take a more detailed study to actually Identify that and and prove it. It's just my thinking out loud So I don't know if that's actually the case in this situation And I think I'm done Okay. Well, thank you for listening