 One of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag, LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations and Davis and County Amplement, Scott Supply, Crop Tech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis and County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota Noctil Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont, so let's give them all a welcome round of applause. We ended up here despite the snow. Thank you. Well, luckily, by the time I got 20 minutes out of Rapid City this morning, I was out of the snow and on bare roads the rest of the way. I'm a little more concerned about getting home this afternoon. Plus, I have a meeting in Scott's Bluff tomorrow and I'm really concerned about getting there, but hell, that's tomorrow. So what's to worry about? Okay, so I apologize for being late. I really wish I would have heard the earlier talks and just told Doug I hope I didn't say anything that contradicts what he said. And Doug said, well, let's stir up some controversy. So we'll see what we can do. So you guys, you know, you got a lot of topics about a lot of different forages here. You know, everything from we just, you just heard about whatever Doug talked about, which I can't address. We just, I caught the tail end of these guys' talking and some great stuff about cover crops. Drop down the list here. We're going to talk about swath grazing and then talk about winter grazing corn. And I don't even know whether you mean corn stocks or whole corn, unharvested corn. Okay, I didn't come prepared to talk about that, but I'll wing it, okay? Here's the issue. We're talking about a wide of a range of forage qualities from cover crops, you know, being highly digestible, very green, high in protein, real high in protein, depending upon the cocktail of course, to, you know, if we're going to talk corn stock, something or dormant winter grass, something that's either totally dead or totally dormant. So about as low in nutritional value as you can get. So I really want to kind of take a two-pronged approach to this talk because the way we need to approach those in terms of nutritional management of cattle is quite a bit different because the nutritional issues, the nutrition they provide to us and any nutritional issues that they create are far different between them. So let's focus on the low quality topic. And I think this, what I'm going to say is going to apply across whether you're talking about dormant winter range, dormant tame pastures or any kind of crop residues, whether it's corn stocks or wheat stubble or anything else you'd consider putting cattle in. Or it could be harvested feeds, could be bailed up wheat straw or bailed up myelo stocks or corn stocks or whatever. I think the dividing point in my mind for where do we cross the line between calling it a medium quality forage and a low quality forage is the protein content. And I'll explain why even though energy is really important in a cow diet as well as minerals and all those other nutrients, the driver of how well the diet works in the cow's system is protein. And I'll explain why. We're going to have a little ruminant nutrition lesson built in here in the next couple slides. So you'll understand why it's 7% and not somewhere else. Another way to look at this, and I'll explain why this is too, is if we look at the ratio of TDN or Total Digestible Nutrients, which is a measure of energy content in the forage to the crude protein. In other words, TDN might be 45% and crude protein might be, let's see, do I have a laser pointer? Yeah, 5%. Well, if you divide 45 by 5, that ratio turns into 9 to 1. If that ratio is above 7, we got a low quality forage. The denominator of that ratio is too small. It's not enough protein to balance with the TDN being provided to the cow. The other thing to know about low quality forages is they are high in fiber. All of the soluble carbohydrates and fats and so forth went away when that annual crop that's now residue died when that perennial grass went dormant. And like Ari said, these can either be grazed or harvested feeds in terms of applying what I'm talking about here. Now obviously this meeting today is a little more grazing oriented, but you can apply these in harvested feeds as well. So here's your ruminant nutrition lessons about why things work different with a low quality forage than a medium or high quality forage. Y'all know that a ruminant, a cow, a sheep, a goat, a deer and elk has a fork compartment stomach. And the key compartments that allow them to go out and eat high forage diets and get enough nutrition out of them, whereas pigs can't do that, dogs and cats can't do that, is that none of us have the first two compartments of the fork compartment stomach. The reticulum in particular, the rumin, where the cow hosts a population of microorganisms, bacteria and protozoa and fungi and yeast that do the digesting for them. So here's a picture. Imagine you're standing on the left side of a cow looking at her broad side. This little tube looking thing here is the esophagus leading up to her mouth. She's going to eat her heads over here on the left end of the screen. She's going to eat. The food's going to fall in this vat. And a 12 to 1300 pound mature cow like, there's a pretty typical size for cows here in South Dakota. That vat is going to have the capacity of about 70 to 75 gallons. And if it's things that are nutritionally balanced so the microbes can function at their top capacity, it will be full. There will be 70 gallons worth of stuff afloat in there with trillions of one-celled organisms, microbiota, digesting that feed for her. And that's the key to digesting fiber. But driving that system means that our first thoughts when we're thinking about meeting nutrient requirements aren't the cow. It's the microorganisms. You've got to think about this. You're feeding for two. And your first thought when you say feeding for two is, well, yeah, it's a pregnant cow. So it's her and the developing fetus. Well, that one's true. But when I say feeding for two, I mean it's her and her tank of microorganisms. And we've got to keep the microorganisms happy to keep mama happy, so to speak. So the value of that fermentation is I just already kind of went over this. Microbes provide the enzymes that we and the cow can't digest fiber. And that releases the energy from the fiber. And then the cow shares that with the microbes. She can't have it all. The microbes have to live. So what they do is they break the fiber down to the original sugars that the plant used to make the fiber. And then the microbes break it down to that, to smaller molecules called volatile fatty acids or VFAs. The microbes get the energy of breaking it down that far and leave the rest in the form of the VFAs. The cow absorbs them. She gets 80% of the energy. The cow gets the bargain of the deal. The microbes share are quite generous and share very nicely. At the same time, a whole bunch of other nutrients that the cow couldn't digest if the fiber wasn't digested first, get digested in the process. The starch, the sugar, the minerals, and the protein that are all encapsulated by fiber at the cellular level in that plant material. So that's part one. The microbes digest the fiber. Now, when you think of that big tank that I showed you a picture of, of what the rumen looks like inside the cow, think of it in more of an abstract sense. It's like this water tank in the top of the picture. And there's a pipe that comes into that water tank. And there's a float valve on it. So when the water tank gets full of float valve, the float rises, closes the tank, the thing. And until cattle either come and drink out of the water tank or water evaporates out of the water tank, nothing more can go in that tank. It's full. Okay? Same thing happens in a rumen. Cow goes out here and she grazes till her rumen is full. There's nerves in the wall of the rumen that give her feedback to her brain and says, they're stretch receptors. They say, hey, we're full down here. Stop. That's the float valve. And she stops. And she can't eat more until the microbes do their job and digest that feed. Then they have to digest it to where the particles are small enough to take and either pass down this pipe, which is the small intestine, and leave her system, or they get digested to the molecular level, to those volatile fatty acids or amino acids, meaning protein at the molecular level, so that they can be absorbed through the rumen wall, end up in the cow's bloodstream and be used as nutrients by her. Okay? This is where that balancing nutrients to meet the microbes needs so they can do that digesting so that the cow's tank empties and she can eat again. Now the problem is the quality of the forage drives how fast that happens. So lower quality forages, because they're high in fiber and fiber digest more slowly, slow the process down. And here's some example data. Lush pasture means early spring, green, leafy growth, three, four, five leaf stage before stems of pasture plants start to elongate. Modern quality pasture means we're getting, in this part of the world, we're getting out into late June, early July, starting to get some stem elongation, starting to see, you know, some flag leaves and heading towards seeding out. Then we get into some various levels of grass haze and it's not just maturity here drives it, but perhaps some hay management. But we see a quality keeps going down until we finally get to wheat straws, a really low quality grass. How much of it will digest decreases, much like what I just said. I mean there's just, there's less and less of the fiber can be digested and nutrients can be released. But because that digestion drives that emptying the room and process, intake goes down as well. Now these intake numbers are represented as percents of body weight. So if you think about a, and I'm going to work in round, nobody owns a thousand pound cow in this part of the world anymore, but just to make it so I can do the arithmetic and my head stand here in front of you. That means that a thousand pound cow on Lush pasture can eat 27 and a half to 35 pounds of dry matter. Now it's not dry when she eats it, but that's just the dry matter, not any of the moisture in it. That's a lot. We drop down by mid June, we've already dropped down to 25 to 32 pounds for that same size cow. And as quality decreases and digestion decreases, we get down to where that poor thousand pound cow is eating less than 10 pounds of dry matter a day. If she's eating, if she's being fed some kind of a crop residue with no supplements to fix the nutritional deficiencies. And as you can imagine, she's going to go backwards pretty rapidly with that little nutrition entering her system. So those are the pluses and minuses of the system of how a ruminant digest feeds. It's a plus because they can eat things we can't. They can thrive on things we can't when nutrition is balanced, but it's a minus when things aren't balanced because not only are there nutrients missing, but then their ability to consume the feed goes down at the same time. So what do we need to do? We need to overcome those nutritional deficiencies. How are we going to do that? Well, the way us animal scientists who study ruminant nutrition think about it as well, we've got to provide them a supplement to give them that additional forage. And that means we're thinking about something that comes in a feed track and we drive out there and give it to them. You guys have a lot of opportunities here in terms of using some of these higher quality forages like the cover crops and so forth to be your source of missing nutrients. And you start thinking about mixtures much like the feed wagon was involved in the previous story in the cover crop grazing that went on this winter. That was partly because of deep snow, but partly because what was going out in that feed wagon was making up for some issues that might exist in the nutritional profile of the cover crop. Okay, so not only do we want to specifically fix the nutrient deficiency as in perhaps there's inadequate protein for the cow, but by fixing that inadequacy for the cow and the microbes, we can improve those limitations on digestion and intake. So once again, think about low quality forages. We've defined it as something lacking in protein, okay? And high in fiber and fiber is going to be a source of energy because of what I just said about microbes digesting it and VFAs are good energy for cows. So not surprisingly, protein is the nutrient you need to be thinking about in your winter supplement. I just said all that and here's why it works if I haven't made it obvious already. We feed the protein, the bacteria in the room and digest the protein. They turn right around and use the protein they digested, break it down to the level of the nitrogen that's in the protein, turn right around and build it back in the brand new protein, but they build it into the protein they need to make more microbes. Remember, these are little one cell organisms, microscopic one cell organisms. The only way you're going to get more digestion is to grow more organisms and if you don't have enough protein for the ones that are living in there at the time you feed, you can turn 10,000 bacteria into 10 million bacteria. If there's adequate protein, they can grow more bacteria every time the cow eats. That'll improve digestion and passage and that'll promote not only more nutrients for every pound she eats, but she can eat more pounds. I'm not going to worry about explaining to you that that's called an associative effect, but it is because we're doing more than just adding nutrients. We're boosting the overall value of her entire diet. On the other hand, you've got a bin of wheat or a bin of corn on the place and the prices have not been very hot for the past year, especially back last summer when you put it in the bin and you're going, crap, why would I go to town and buy some high protein feed that's much more expensive? Why don't I just haul some of that corn out to them? The problem is corn is not a great source of protein. It's a beautiful source of energy, but that energy is in the form of starch. Starch and sugar are the enemies of fiber digestion in the room of the cow. If backfires, we actually decrease fiber digestion, decrease the value of the forage that we expect her to live on at the same rate or a faster rate than we get energy value out of the corn. We actually set up the cow to do more poorly than she'd do if we just left her alone. I'll show you some data to prove that. That's a negative with social effect. Things go backwards. I'm not going to bore you to death with a lot of research data, but I'm a scientist, so I have to show you some numbers. This is a study that was done by a colleague of mine a number of years ago at Kansas State University. The way they did this part of the study is that they had halterbroke steers, they put them in the dairy barn, they went out on their native range winter pastures that they were grazing their cow herd on, and rather than use cows for this, they used steers because it took a lot less feed because they were yearlings and they were smaller. They sent the grad students out and they basically took a swath there and mowed off some native range. Tallgrass Prairie there near Manhattan, Kansas. The 0% group was four steers got each of these levels of a supplement. Four of those poor, unlucky steers didn't get a supplement. They just got that dormant tallgrass prairie forage, which by the way was about 3.5% crude protein, about 80-some% neutral detergent fiber. So if you know how to read your feed report, you know that crude protein is about half of the 7%, I just said, and it is all fiber, okay? And obviously digestion was pretty low at only about 38%, and intake was like I reported earlier, low-quality forage is less than 1% of body weight. Then they mixed three supplements that had equal energy levels, but went from a low to a medium to a high-crude protein content. And they did that by mixing soybean meal and myla grain. Soybean meal and myla grain both have a TDN of somewhere in the 85 to 87 range. So it didn't matter what was mostly soybean meal, half and half are mostly myla grain. All these supplements were equal in energy. But this is, here's your starchy, almost all myla grain-based energy supplement causing a negative effect. Notice that digestion goes down. Intake went down slightly. This is a medium protein with a lot more soybean meal, and this is a high protein that was mostly soybean meal and hardly any myla grain. Notice how our digestion didn't rise much more than a percent or two above this forage, but look at how the intake, here at 27%, intake is nearly half again higher than it was when they were unsupplemented or supplemented with the wrong feed. Now they turned around and on the same pasture that they harvested the feed, defeated these steers in the tie stall barn so that they could measure to the ounce how much they ate every day and they could turn around and go to the back end and measure to the ounce how much feces came out. That's how we measure digestion is what disappears as it passes through the animal. Then they turned around and they had the cow herd out on those same pastures and they fed the same supplements to the cows, pregnant cows gestating, grazing that same dormant winter range, same quality of feed because it was from the same pasture. They didn't have an unsupplement group because they knew that they'd have all kinds of problems. They'd ruin a bunch of cows. They could not afford to ruin a bunch of cows to prove a point, but they did feed their three same supplements. Low protein, myelograin based supplement caused the most weight loss, body condition score loss and then this is the pregnancy rate the next fall. So they fed this through the winter, they bred the cows in May and June, they preg checked them the next October and this is what they got for pregnancy. They hurt these cows nutritionally and as you can see their pregnancy rate is lower than the cows that got a moderate to high level of protein in their supplement. Changed their nutritional status which changed their ability to perform as cows. I like that study because it encapsulates both the negative effects of the grain based supplement and the positive effects of the protein. I think they were feeding like a half a percent of body weight, four tenths of a percent, pretty low level. The first thing is, I want to go back here and you just made me think of a point, Dwayne. All of these cows lost condition. So these cows went into the winter and condition score five and a half to six on the average across the herd. If we're losing nearly two condition scores, these cows have dropped to condition score fours. And if you've heard me or any of my colleagues talk before, we tell you your ideal condition score at calving is a five. We drop these cows from sixes to fours. We set them up to not be set to be cycling and fertile at the beginning of the next breeding season. These cows lost condition. These cows lost less condition. These cows by losing seven tenths were still a little over five. Five point two, five point three when they calved. And you can see that even though they're losing ground through the winter, eating low quality dormant forage, they aren't losing so much ground that it hurts their performance. We don't always have to make them in a positive nutritional status. We just got to make sure that they're at the right nutritional status at critical times of the year. Okay, so as I said, just to sum up, forage quality matters. Your low quality can be standing crop residue, dormant range grazing. Now, is it always true that you turn a cow out in this environment? She's got to have a supplement and it's got to be a protein supplement. No, it's not always true. It depends upon grazing management and other environmental factors. You know, I and most of my colleagues used to come to these committees and say, rotational grazing is important during the growing season, not only for the health of those growing plants, but to keep new nutrition in front of the cow herd all the time. We thought, well, the grass is dormant in there. It doesn't matter. You don't need rotation and graze. Not true. All ruminant animals, all grazing animals are highly selective and they always eat a diet. If they have the opportunity, they eat a diet that's much higher in quality than they average of everything out there. If you turn them out on a section of grass and say, they're there for the winter and that's your grass, they're going to eat the best stuff the first day and by 90 days later, they're not going to have much for good stuff left. Every day that goes by, they're going to have taken whatever the best thing left is and the next day they've got poorer choices. I've seen time and time again where people will rotationally graze to the winter and how often your rotate matters. The cow nutrition, they keep putting new feed in front of the cows and quite often when you first turn into dormant grass or even corn stalks, you're well above 7% crude protein. You can be running 8.5%, 9% crude protein in corn stalks right in the fall after harvest and nothing else has been in there yet. You don't need a protein supplement. Now, if they only have one field of corn stalks and there's no rotational grazing in about two weeks, you're going to have to start supplementing protein and maybe later in the winter as that stuff weathers, you're going to have to start supplementing protein in with rotation but you can reduce how much you need to supplement by keeping giving those cattle a shot at some fresh, unharvested material so they can maintain their level of selectivity. And then, of course, your previous talk talking about what it was like dealing with the snow depths we had this winter is what I mean by environmental factors. Yeah, a mild, open winter and the need for supplements is a lot less than when you have the goodies are buried under there so they can't get at them. Okay, let's switch gears and talk medium and higher quality for you. And I'm going to lump medium to high together. This could be your cover crops are definitely going to usually fall into that high category because a lot of these cover crop cocktails that you guys are using are, you know, stay green in the fall and literally don't go dormant. They just go kind of stop growing rapidly but stay green through the winter under the snow. And then there's also bale and swath grazing is on your agenda today so I'll touch on that. Well, here we are. We're going to switch over. We're now crude protein over 7%. This TD and the crude protein ratio falls under 7. It's kind of interesting. It's just pure coincidence that 7 is where that dividing line falls for both of them. But both rules work to drive the process as I've just been showing you. So let's take 65% TD and 15% protein would just be a good quality hay. Maybe an alfalfa grass mix hay that got put upright. You got a ratio of 4.3. Does that mean it's something's wrong? No, it just means you aren't dealing with a protein deficiency to drive room and function. Now you could try to bring that closer to 7 but there's really no need to because we're over the 7% so we should make the microbes happy. The cow's requirement for a mid gestation cow is about 7.5 to 8.5% based on her size and the expected size of her calf when it's born. We get into late gestation that's going to run up to 9.5 to 10% and just keep creeping up as we get out there to where she's got a late term fetus and is nearing birth and then of course when the calf is born her requirement can jump up into the teens. Low teens for a low milk producing cow and it just keeps going up if you have higher milk producing cows. Why did I go through all that? Well the point is even for a low to moderate milk producing beef cow this stuff is going to meet her protein requirement. It's going to make her so she's going to be able to maintain her own nutritional status and produce milk for her new calf. Now let's think about some kind of a cover crop deal. I made these sets of numbers up yesterday afternoon and then I was reading some stuff trying to get some more information about nutritional value cover crops. I came across some data from a study that Dwayne was involved in a few years ago and surprisingly my numbers aren't bad. Maybe my protein number is a little low on the average because there was some data in there as high as 30% crude protein but then there was a lot of numbers in the mid teens too. Say what? That was the stuff from the grad student that Elaine had down at Beersford. So your name was on the paper so I know you were involved somehow. Yeah, okay. So my computer went to sleep on me. Well it's coming back to life so that ratio gets to where when you start getting to where you got too much protein relative to energy for the cow why aren't we coming back to life? Because I probably need to plug in. Yeah, it didn't just go to sleep. It really went to sleep. I didn't even look to see what the battery meter said before I got started here today. It needs something. Yeah, I think it needs more energy. Okay, so Dan was just talking about managing that carbon and nitrogen balance in the soil and how important it is to not get not enough carbon relative to nitrogen. And I think not being a soil scientist I think that's because you got to have that carbon and nitrogen ratio right to support the soil microbiome, right? All the bacteria and stuff live in the soil. Those soil microorganisms and the rumen microorganisms function exactly the same. Exactly the same. And when we start getting over here to where we got 20% up on protein even when we are, oh I made it really unhappy, didn't I? I don't want to do that, whatever that is. Never seen that message before. When we start getting to where even though we got a lot of energy here our proteins getting so high this is getting out of whack. And now we don't have enough carbohydrates and that's the source of carbon skeletons to support those microbes and it's the same thing that the reason he was worried about carbon and nitrogen ratios in the soil. We got to keep that ratio right. In this case perhaps we need to start, we need to throw out all those rules I just told you about fixing the protein deficiency in the rumen. Now we have to think about, this is where we can start thinking about that bin full of corn grain because we got to bring that carbohydrate level up to balance out, maybe. Unfortunately we know a lot more about supplementing low quality forages than high quality forages. So I'm going to leave that cover crop maybe having an inadequate amount of carbohydrate thing till later because I want to procrastinate on that one. Let's talk about windrow grazing. So did Doug talk about windrow grazing already? Did you guys talk about windrow grazing before I got here? But it's going to be on the program. And Larry, yeah okay. Well the thing about windrow grazing is in my mind from the beef cow side it's a money saving thing. If you cut it and don't put the expense of bailing it and stacking it and bringing it back out of the stack you can save a ton of money. You can meet the cow's nutrient needs by doing that. Well the nice thing is even though we've laid it down in the windrow we haven't really put it in a bail we haven't put it in a stack to really help preserve nutrients. It's amazing how well we preserve nutrients by just putting it in a windrow versus leaving it standing and let it finish maturing all the way to dormancy and then turning the cattle out to graze standing dormant forage. And here's some data to prove that. This chart is from a study that was done in Nebraska by the rain scientists at their experiment station near North Plant. And they went out in the sand hills where they harvest their hay off of those wet meadows in between the sand hills themselves and they did three things. They went into the same meadow and they left a third of the meadow standing and you can see that the crude plant went dormant and the months aren't on the graph here but this is from mid-summer down in the mid-winter. It went dormant and then it continued to weather and lose protein content through the winter. If they bailed it and put the bales in and stacked them in the yard and then they cored bales through the winter it maintained its protein content all winter long. If they windrowed it and left the windrows laying on the meadow and went out and resampled the windrows as the winter went on, ahead of the cows of course so the cows didn't have a chance to pick through the stuff and the windrow maintained its protein content. And other studies have been similar to this that even though you think, well that windrow's out there and it's getting rained on and snowed on and snow's piled on it and it's got to weather in the windrow. Well the protein data suggests it did not. So let's look at acid detergent fiber, a measure of the fiber content. And acid detergent fiber is the component of the fiber that's most resistant to digesting. Having it go up as the winter goes on suggests that we're losing digestibility of the fiber by the room and microorganisms, okay? Once again, open circles or hay stacked in a barn, or stacked in a stack, not necessarily under the roof of a barn. Even though there's some variation, it looks like the line's going up. These error bars suggest that there's a lot of variability from bale to bale and that's pretty much stayed steady. Both the standing dormant forage ADF went up a lot, but so did windrows. Even though this line looks like it's less than that line, once again those error bars suggest there's so much variation in there, it might just be pure luck that there's a difference at all between those lines. So unfortunately there is weathering going on in the windrow that the digestibility is going down as the ADF content goes up. But with adequate protein going into the room, and because the protein level is being maintained, as this is the previous slide I've come back to, we're maintaining 10.5% protein. We're way over that 7% rule. So the room bugs should be very healthy and should be able to deal with this, even though it's obviously not going the direction we want. We still have the capacity in the room in to make things work. So windrow grazing works. These guys did an economic study, included all the additional costs of baling and hauling and stacking and hauling it back out to feed it. Not too surprising. All those, re-eliminating all those costs made windrow grazing very economical. And the nice thing is that when they compared windrow grazing to grazing dormant forage, not needing to haul some distillers grains or something like that out there that's high in protein that uses a protein supplement, also made the windrow grazing the most economical option. Studies have been done all over the U.S., particularly the northern states where we feed hay, and eliminating hay and cost matters, but in Canada as well that have shown windrow grazing to be quite effective. Yeah, those metals are wet metals, so they cut their hay kind of light. To tell you the truth, I'm a little surprised they got 11% crude protein because they're pretty much fully headed before those wet metals get dry enough to go on. Good question. The next, the challenge with windrow grazing is it can get buried. Your windrows can get buried. And got to experience that about 10 years ago, we tried to do a windrow grazing trial up, well, we have an SDSU has an experiment station called the Antelope Range Livestock Research Station in Harding County near Buffalo. And we, it's all, we don't have any cropland there, but we contracted with a farmer to take some of his ground and do windrows for us, and we basically leased his ground. He did the contract with him to put the windrows, and we did a little, we're going to do a swath grazing trial, and we got a blizzard the first week of November with the classic Northern Plains blizzard with a howling wind. And we had, I got a picture of the guy that we had up there in Care of the Kettle we put on there, and he's standing on top of the snowdrift, and he's walked out on there, and it's so hard, and you guys have all walked on these drifts that are like this, and then you make tracks in it, and there's this much of a steel teapot sticking out next to his foot. That's how deep we, we took the cows home. There was no getting at the windrows for the rest of that winter. So the next winter, we had learned from the Canadians about bale grazing. With bale grazing, the only change you make is you don't leave it in the windrow, you do one more step and you go out there and you roll it up in bales. You can either haul the bales in and leave them with enough space that you can ration a few bales every couple, three days with a electric fence, or you just, we just left them in the field. We went back out on the same field with the same farmer, with the same contract, and he went around, baled it up for us. We went back with the same cattle the next year and still got quite a bit of snow, and we just kept right on going because the bales not only stuck up out of the snow so the cattle could always get the forage, but the cattle could see them and find them, and they could even get out of the wind behind them. So even though we increased the cost, we made the system a little less risky by doing that. Okay, let's talk about cover crop forage quality, and this is going to go quick because I'm here to tell you, you guys, the talk we just heard, you guys on the agronomy side are way out ahead of us on the livestock side about knowledge about cover crops. You've got these cocktails figured out, you've got what they do for soil health figured out, and you talk a nice story. What we know about cow nutrition, or you want to put calves out on them, you know, weaned calves or whatever. Some of your producers have some experience and you know what happens, and you've got some positive experiences. But in terms of somebody like me to come here and say, yeah, we did a research study on that, or somebody somewhere did a research study on that, and we can show you what happened nutritionally and why cows are performing the way they do, it ain't there. We don't have, we have virtually no data. And through the years I've looked, I searched the literature, and last night I sat on the couch in front of the TV and kept searching the literature thinking I got, I can't just go down there and say, we don't have anything, because what if something came out in the last year or so, and I'm lying to them, so I looked. I know, based on the thing I just mentioned with Dwayne, that there was a study done down Southeast Research Farm near Beersford with grazing calves on cover crops, and I believe a grad student finished a master's thesis, but obviously sitting on my couch, I was nowhere near campus to go to the library and look at the thesis, and it's not been published beyond that. So it's not readily available yet for us to use, for me to use in a meeting like this. So I can't say a lot about this topic other than I've already touched on it. We got this TDN, the crude protein ratio thing that may be out of whack when we get down, when we get really high protein, and this number gets way below seven, we may be dealing with too much protein, not enough energy in the diet. The other problem is that how degradable the crude protein is in the rumen matters. A lot of these high quality forages, the protein is so soluble that it literally digests in the rumen almost instantaneously. It's happened so fast that the microbes can't capture it to turn it into what we call bacterial protein to grow more microbes. The cows doing this balancing act between the level of the nitrogen is in the form of ammonia once it breaks down in the rumen. It's absorbing it into the bloodstream to maintain safe blood chemistry. It has to turn it into blood urea nitrogen. If there's excess of that, the kidney filters it out and the animal pees it out on the ground before the bacteria ever get a chance to capture it. Now the rumenants have this nice recycling system where they can move that excess nitrogen back into the rumen, but when this ratio gets way out of whack, they can't move it fast enough, and it ends up being really poorly applied fertilizer and little patches all over your pasture. And you get green spots, but it isn't what you want. So the question is, can energy supplements, I said, is this where you use your bin of corn or whether you use some other digestible fiber source of energy such as beet pulp or wheat meds or something like that as a source of energy, that that energy will be rapidly available because that's highly digestible that will match up with this highly degradable protein to help improve that carbon and nitrogen balance and help that animal elevate its plane of nutrition. Well, in terms of cover crops, I find no evidence in the literature to suggest that anybody of an animal nutritionist type like myself has studied that yet. And the problem is, I don't know if it's going to get done because that's not the sexy topics that they like to give us money to do research on, or we'd be doing it because this is an important topic. Okay, that's a campaign for you to all go lobby for us. We can't go to legislature because we work for this day. You guys have to do that for us. I shouldn't even have said that, but I did anyway. The closest I can come to tell you something about that. Oh! I don't have anything here in the slide. I shouldn't show you that slide. I got ahead of myself. Down in the southern plains, they do a lot of grazing winter wheat. And this is winter wheat that they intend to get grain off of, but they plant it in late August or September down in Texas Panhandle and Oklahoma Panhandle up into Southwest Kansas. And the graze cat, as soon as it gets four or five leaf stage, they turn cattle in on it. Quite often, wean calves and they run them on it. And if they want it for grain, before it, they can graze it through the winter while it's vernalizing, but then in spring, when it's time to let the wheat bolt, tiller and bolt and go to grain, they got to get the cattle off. And sometimes, depending upon wheat prices, matter too. If they need cheap gains and wheat's not worth much, they'll just graze out a lot of that winter wheat in the southern plains. You get into this problem. Winter wheat can be around that 70 TDN, can run 25 to 28% crude protein, really highly soluble protein. You get into this problem we're talking about. And there's been research done particularly by Oklahoma State University that shows that an energy supplement and in one particular study I reviewed last night, beet pulp worked extremely well to help capture that excess protein, improve the TDN, the crude protein ratio, and then they measured what we measure protein balance in an animal, my measuring protein intake, nitrogen excretion in both manure and urine, and we determined whether we've improved the protein that's retained in the animal, or whether we've just added protein that ends up coming out the wrong end. And by adding energy in the form of beet pulp, they were able to improve the protein ratio. Unfortunately, the cattle didn't perform any better, so biologically it worked, but economically it's kind of a so what. I think we need to know more about what opportunities to do that with cover crops. Particularly as like a winter growing cattle grazing program, like they use wheat, or winter wheat in the southern plains. Okay, so what conclusions do I want to draw? Well, we got to consider the quality of the forages I just tried to describe. In low quality forages we know we have nutritional deficiencies that are readily evident that need to be fixed, and I hope I made a good case that protein is the first deficiency that's most limiting and the first one to solve in the moderate to high quality forages deficiencies are not necessarily evident. Imbalances may be there in terms of this taty and accrued protein ratio and it may or may not be valuable to supplement to improve those imbalances. And stronger conclusions are hard to draw on high quality forages, especially cover crops. How do we know if it works? These cattle are out there grazing. We can't mix a ration and know that we got a balanced diet by using a ration balancing program and then going out to the haystack or the silage pit or the grain bin and mix a diet in the feed wagon to take it out and know we met our nutrient requirements. In a grazing animal we know that we can't go out and clip plots because we know they're selective. So we clip will be different than what they choose. And even though we've tried to follow those of us that do research try to follow cattle and if she ate that plant let's say it's a radish I go over here and I find a radish and I grab a similar amount. We've compared what they chose using surgically altered animals so we can collect what they eat and we do hand grab samples and they're doing better than us. I mean cows are dumb but not when it comes to figuring out what they're going to choose to eat when they graze. That's where their brain power is. They got a really sensitive system feedback mechanism between between blood metabolites being absorbed from the rumen and nerves back to the brain that's a surprisingly sensitive system to help them sort out what felt good and what improved their life or hurt them among all of the different choices they make as they eat all day every day. So we got monitoring tools that we can indirectly measure body condition scoring is the cow gaining or losing condition. You talked before about are the cows going backwards and worried about that last winter with this cover crop grazing experiment and went out with the feed wagon to help overcome that. I'm going to talk briefly about we can just look at their feces and they tell us a lot about what was going on as those remnants of digestion come out the back end and then many of you I would guess have NRCS contracts and one of your options is the fecal NIRS thing. I'm probably pushing my time limits here so I'm not going to go deep into any of these I'll just briefly touch on condition scoring I hope you can see that obviously this cow has a lot less soft tissue cover meaning condition than this cow. Now if I have a whole herd of these and a whole herd of these I can tell you I took these pictures back to back within minutes of each other in the same cow herd so what that means in terms of the nutritional history of this herd is gets a little complex there but if I had a herd of these these were taken in June when these cows were turned out on their summer pasture if I had a herd of these I'd know that they had a lot their winter nutritional management was not the same as somebody that came out of the winter and we got a cow in early lactation looking like this of course the biology of the cow matters this is an old style lion one herford who really doesn't milk and this is a this is a much more modern angus genetics with a lot more milk capacity certainly not dairy breed capacity but a lot more capacity than this older style herford so why is this cow so darn thin after she's been milking for six weeks versus this cow within the same herd I can't tell you use that tool to say well next winter I need to do things different for both of these cows probably this cow we're wasting money on this cow needs some help manure I don't know if you can see this very well this thing hit the ground and splatted out flat it's about this tall it had quite a lot of moisture in it this one hit the ground and stood there it's about this tall and hard as a rock higher quality forage makes this kind of manure this is a classic pile of TDN the crude protein ratio is much higher than seven and it tells me I should be supplementing protein and I may not want to make it look like a mid-summer pile like this but I need to soften it up I need that that cow that cow manure is telling me what's going on in her digestive function I didn't put anything in here about fecalan IRS and for those of you who are NRCS in the room I don't mean to offend you but I'm here to tell you producers that are using it it doesn't work as well as we'd like it to particularly in low quality forages we've done there's been a number of studies done including one that we just finished a year ago here in South Dakota where in early summer we get pretty good correlation between fecalan IRS and actual diets selected by our ruminally fisculated meaning surgically altered steers but as the forage maturity goes down and the fecalan IRS predictions become inaccurate so you know I'm sorry I think it'd be a great tool but I have a hard time you know thinking it's a valuable tool when I don't see that it provides us an accurate reflection so that was it