 I've been asked to talk a little bit on replacement heifers and we'll see if we can get this on everybody's monitor so we got some slides to go with this. Is it on everybody's monitor right now? I can't tell for some reason. Al, is it on? Yeah, we can see it. So you're viewing the slides that says replacement heifers I assume. Yeah, just up or down. What's going on here? Go ahead. I came over to Carington today to avoid any technical difficulties and it looks like I stepped into some. There we go. There it is. Yeah, it's full speed. Okay, I guess we got her now. Got her at this end so I know what I'm looking at. Typically our heifer is a discounted feeder calf. We know that in the fall to sale barn or for selling some calves off the cow they generally bid us eight to ten bucks back on our heifers. We know our heifers typically have gained a little less on the cow. They'll probably wean off about 50 pounds lighter on average. There's some reasons for that and because when we put them in the finishing feedlot they gain a little less in steers. Their conversion isn't quite as good and they usually have a little lighter finish weight which means they have a higher cost to gain or break even. Today we want to talk about the other alternative with these heifers is to add value with them by developing as replacements to go into the cow herd. Typically we need about 25% of our heifers just to replace cows that have been called out. Right now we got to start questioning if there's room or demand or interest to retain and develop additional heifers to expand numbers. The North Dakota cow herd as of yesterday I heard were down to about 860,000 cows in the state which is fairly low considering we peaked in North Dakota in 1974 at 1.4 million been slowly knocking 10,000 to 15,000 cows off our roster for the last couple years. The high cattle prices we have now and these lower inventories would suggest that maybe people want to rebuild some numbers especially since we got some grass and moisture anticipate some forage for next year. Funny thing is there's some uncertainty whether these prices will will stick around. There's also probably been some loss of some pasture acres and CRP and forage acres in the state and I think for a lot of people who have some mineral income or grain income that's doing quite well their interest in expansion really isn't that high right now. This here was a headline clipping recently taken out of one of our beef magazines. It's suggested nationally prices are not stimulating a lot of retention. We're still selling a lot of cold cows. We're not keeping a lot of heifers. I think maybe in North Dakota, Tim Petrie our livestock economists would suggest that maybe we've started the rebuilding in this state. If we think back to last fall we had five weight six weight heifers that were selling for about a buck twenty to buck twenty-five a pound that were worth six hundred seventy dollars or roughly that right off the cow. At the time it was a decision to we you know put some cash into our operation sell them to somebody who wants to finish them out or do retain them and breed them and try to expand or sell replacement heifers. Since then these prices are about the same except now the weights are two hundred pounds heavier and these six hundred seventy dollar heifers are eight hundred seventy or or plus. Just as Dr. Buchanan said before you go to the bull sale you make the description of what you want the bull to do. I think as we think about what we're going to have a heifer develop to do let's think about what our ultimate job is going to be. I keep it pretty simple. Cow's job is she's got to get bread, she's got to have a calf raise the calf to the fall the calf has to be have some market value. After the calf comes off she needs to go out and get fat and sassy so that she'll come into a calving in the right shape four or five months later and she needs to do that for a lot of years. So in heifer development we want to find the kinds of heifers we want to develop those heifers that can do that. And I would certainly think that sometimes our ideal feeder steer and his sister is not quite the ideal herd replacement for many operations. First step in selection is probably to create a pool of the right kind of heifers. By the right kind I mean the bulls that sire those heifers are strong in maternal traits and they will produce heifers that will mature at a right size for your operation and produce milk in the right quantities that your feed resources will support so they'll continue to get bread and stay in the herd. In this here slide I've just indicated I think cow size is a consideration because as we get bigger and bigger cows what we're really doing is changing how many animal units or cow units we're able to stock on our resources and I think there's some efficiencies in keeping that cow size down maybe in that 1300 pound range and as we get larger our opportunities to do terminal crossing and breeding up for heavier calves diminishes not that we can't make a choice of what size cattle we want to run but that should be a decision as we're breeding cows to make heifers what size we do want. Likewise milk is a trait that there's optimums for in an environment where feed is plentiful and cheap and high quality we know a lot of milk and a cow will make a lot of weaning weight but if that feed is not there what suffers is reproduction so we try to match the amount of milk our cows give with the kinds of feed that we have available at a reasonable cost so we select bulls to sire daughters which will have that optimum or right amount of milk and that's a difficult thing to do we have in the Angus breed on their website a module that you can plug in your cow weight, your feed costs and it will come back and project to you what they think are maybe an optimum or target milk EPD that you should be selecting for in your situation. I ran this little example indicating some feed costs and our feed is kind of variable and suggesting the Angus breed you go buy bulls to save daughters you should try to find bulls from that 16 to 20 pound milk EPD if you similarly have got cows that have been sticking around your herd doing a good job do you know their sires milk EPD that would be another good target for kind of honing in on what's maybe optimal for your situation Doctor McCann just covered a whole lot on selection on bulls we can probably go through this pretty easily we have a number of great tools to identify those bulls that will leave good daughters in a herd EPDs are one of those great tools and I particularly like that dollar wean number that he talked about and that it simultaneously put selection pressure for calving ease weaning weight and also moderation of cow costs through the weight and mature size. That particular EPD or index is only available in the Angus Association we have other good EPDs or traits that we can select for some of the other breeds such as Red Angus and Sematol, Herford such as Heifer Pregnancy maternal calving ease the stability talked about and also those energy values if perchance your cows have gotten a little large and now we're trying to put some downward pressure on mature size and feed inputs. The other tool that's just coming on the scene is now taking a sample and doing a DNA analysis there are some DNA markers for a number of traits that have maternal basis to them. Igenity one of the companies is actually marketing what they call their Heifer profile or your DNA test for markers in your replacement Heifers and included in that are pregnancy rate weaning weight, maternal calving ease and marbling and tenderness. From the genetic side I think we want to keep in mind that there are some advantages in creating Heifers that are mixed breeds or crossbreds the hybrid bigger heterosis that we see for many traits are kind of small when we look on a trait by trait such as calving rate or calf survival or weaning weight but when we sum up a bunch of these small little incremental advantages we end up with cows that stick around the herd considerably longer and produce probably an extra calf or a calf and a half equivalent in their lifetime so particularly in large herds we run on a little bit harsher management run the feed a little tighter to the requirements I think you'll start picking up some significant advantages from focusing on F1 and crossbred Heifers from a managed standpoint I've broken this down into a couple different time periods one is from the breeding of the cows when we wean them we're getting some indication now that we can actually influence the outcome of these heifers or these heifer calves even in utero by insults to the cow during gestation some work in Nebraska said when they didn't properly supplement these cows during winter they actually had some heifers that had delayed puberty had heifers that didn't breed with quite the percentages that heifers that were raised out of cows that were supplemented and take better care of in gestation so this starts way back back in the fall before the heifer or the calves even on the ground once they're on the ground try to avoid implanting heifer calves that are going to be kept for replacement there's a lot of data there's a lot of summary data and shows that if you do one low potency implant you know at two to three months typically a branding vaccinating time the amount of heifers that are damaged so to speak or won't breed is quite small but if we do other interventions like one implant right of birth or a double implant another one at weaning we can start to reduce our conception rates by 10 15 20 percent by that aggressive implanting of these heifer calves similarly typically if we know which pasture's got the heifers that are going to be kept for replacements we probably would find a little economic value to creep feeding them if there is moderate frame or smaller cattle on good grass and we creep feed them and and actually have them deposit fat in their udder and we probably ruin or ruin but diminish some of their future productivity and at added cost so big growth in cattle poor pasture conditions it might not be a big deal but it really doesn't have a lot of economic value to do so then once we get to weaning time i guess it's time to do your first sort on cattle get them vaccinated get their health status right get the extremes and the off types out of there and then we got the pool to work from and further development from weaning up until going to grass and breeding is kind of a not a difficult time to develop heifers but that's when most of the attention's been of what we do we know if we don't put enough input in them we might not get them bred and if we put too much in we might further diminish their breeding results and add costs so we've kind of come up with over time some recommendations for producers of what is just the right amount of growth and some of that's being a guess right now questioned a little bit but we do know that if we have a way to the heifer at weaning or the time she's going into a lot for development and we know we want her to breed by 14 uh get bred by 14 15 months she has to be pure rural by about a year uh and then if we target her gain so she reaches 65 percent of her estimated mature weight at breeding we're going to achieve a fairly high successful uh high success rate in getting heifers bred probably in that 95 percent range and it will be fairly economical and this is the kind of been the target weight concept that's been followed for a number of years in illustrating that uh if we have heifers on November 1 that weigh from 470 to 620 pounds averaging 530 out of a cow herd that averaged 1,300 pounds we can now estimate how much gain they have to make from now till breeding and we have a target heifer weight of 65 percent of the 1,300 pounds is 840 pounds overall the herd would heifers would have to gain about a pound and a half realizing there's both light heifers in that pen and heavy heifers it's probably more economical to sort them probably feed one group a little heavier one group a little lighter uh got a little example of a ration here the light sort heifers that need to gain 1.7 pounds to reach their target weight of 840 we might have to feed about six pounds of grain plus hay the heavy sort probably we could only need to gain 1.4 pounds just a little supplemental concentrate with hay would probably get them there as far as nutritional requirements those uh heifers that do need to gain pound and a half cannot do it on our typical forages alone uh typical tdn requirement for those kind of heifers is probably in the mid upper 60s most of our forages harvest as a state are probably in the upper 50s to around 60 percent so it does take several pounds of grain with forage to get that done if they're particular lightweights small heifers we need to get into the 70 tdn range in our total ration it's more likely that we're going to have to feed six seven pounds of grain to do that protein levels tend to be quite low and these low rates of gain on these heifers we have rations that are 10 to 11 percent usually that's adequate and most of our typical haze and with a little grain we'll do that without a lot of additional supplement the alternative strategy i kind of alluded to earlier is uh maybe we don't need to grow them to 65 percent of their body weight and maybe we can save a little money and do a little more selection on our heifers if we would actually grow them slightly slower to 55 to 60 percent of their estimated mature weight in doing so we know that not all the heifers will probably breed or be puberable at the time of breeding season but what we're going to accomplish in doing this is that we're going to identify the heifers that on lower inputs will breed and will flash and will be reproductive and will save about 25 to 30 dollars a heifern feed cost and this has been documented in both nebraska mile city with some research projects that they've had at those centers and of course we don't quite get the same results we probably back off our pregnancy rates five to ten percent but the open heifers that come out of these programs we're limiting the breeding season and just getting the best doing ones bred early have been a pretty profitable grass open yearling to sell in the fall the other thing it does is by not growing these heifers quite as fast putting quite as much feed input we tend to reduce the mature cow size 70 to 100 pounds versus some of these heifers that are fed a little heavy in the development stage once those lighter heifers go out to grass in the spring they do partially compensate over summer with a little higher gains on pasture but we also have to be aware that they're coming in just a little lighter in the fall and we have to get them maybe separated from the cow herd and at that time might be a good time to make sure that we put a little additional feed into them pre-breeding typically we would give these heifers another vaccination particularly for our reproductive diseases such as the pre-guard series of shots a standard practice has been to breed the heifers a little ahead of the cows doing so we give the heifers a little more time post calving to come back into heat it also means that our calves out of our heifers are a little older at shipping time and so they probably fit in better for marketing as herds have gotten bigger across the state people have gone to later calving seasons i think we see less of that than historically when people were yard and lot calving smaller herds and earlier in the year we do have the opportunity with extra synchronization the tools that Dr. Dolan talked about that we can actually get you know three breeding opportunities for heifers in 45 days by starting them all on a synchronized heat and giving them two subsequent heats which makes a pretty tight grouping on our heifers but we're finding with some of this lower input winter development keeping some additional heifers back that we've got guys down to probably 30 days of breeding on their heifers and just getting an adequate number for their replacement by doing that with a limited breeding season as far as what to breed these heifers to certainly the calving ease EPD and the birth weight EPD are probably our best tools to make sure that we made heifers to bulls that have a high likelihood of not causing calving difficulty for easy calving progeny we did have a trial done at the central grasslands research extension center at Streeter in which they compared calving assistance and performance of calves out of first calf heifers that were made either to low birth weight Angus bulls and they had a minus 3.5 to bound zero birth weight EPD to some real extreme calving ease bulls low line or miniature type Angus cattle and of course either way calving difficulties were quite low heifer calves and either of the mating groups had zero assistance steer calves out of the low birth weight Angus bulls had a couple calves in either assistance but we've got the tools to select bulls to minimize calving problems and high accuracy bulls with calving ease traits make AI one of those things that attractive for particularly mating heifers for the synchronization protocols recovered earlier we'll skip right over them once the heifer comes back in the fall and we pgm and we identify the the keepers and sell off the opens we need to continue develop those heifers typically a heifer needs to gain around a pound a day through the winter so she'll have at the appropriate shape typically that shape would have her weighing somewhere around 80 percent of her expected mature weight and she'd be in a body condition score then of about five and a half to six if we fail to get her there we can expect more calving problems we'll probably can expect more calf sickness and calf death loss and we certainly would expect slower rebreathing so it's pretty critical in that first winter that we gear the heifer in her feed and her ration so she calves that are appropriate condition a lot of times the heifers can be running with the cow for a while if the cow herd is on you know a decent kind of feed supply and there's adequate feeds are not competing with the cows for their fair share and then as we get into the latter 50 60 days of gestation it's probably time to give them a little sort them off and at least give them a little extra at that time a couple of things as far as nutritionally on these bread heifers feeding a ration that has a couple percent added fat prior to calving that last 30 40 days and then up through breeding has shown to increase rebreathing particularly if they're going to be interred out and the breeding season is going to be on marginal spring pasture the other thing is some work showed that sometimes little bypass protein in these young continually growing heifers may increase their rebreathing rate so there's a couple things we can do at heifers a little different the mature cows will probably give us the benefit feeding some sunflowers some flax some soybeans or something like that can add a little fat in the ration or using some distillers or a protein source with a little more bypass nature give us a little advantage far as what it takes for these heifers in the in the wintering with their first gestation probably takes about late gestation close to nine to ten protein if we're going to continue to put weight gain on them it takes about at a pound a day gain it would take about a 58 percent TDN ration to 60 percent and that's pretty high quality forage as they get into the latter months of their gestation not to forget with high quality forages and feeds maybe our calcium and phosphorus and vitamin levels aren't too bad but it's certainly good to give them a little insurance level by feeding them some supplemental probably even free choice trace mineral mix and concluding i'm going to just show a little budget here of some costs that go into heifer development you start with the initial value of the heifer and back in about the first of december and in november i said they were probably worth about 670 bucks a piece certainly if we're doing a budget today i'm going to buy them people are telling me they're going to cost you close to nine hundred dollars to buy the heifer today so that's a you know quite a bit substantial higher cost than i have here but the winter feeding at 225 would probably halfway through that so maybe you could take half of that off of there the other pasture vet breeding interest death loss and overhead costs are costs i obtained from the adult farm management summary from a year ago and when we totaled them up last fall if we made the decision on these heifers it would have been over 1100 dollars now if we put another couple hundred dollars on these heifers that we might have you can see that we're going to need a pretty good heifer market to be trying to add value by doing a breeding program certainly where we're at the cattle cycle with the high fed cattle markets with the high feeder cattle steer markets we would anticipate that the breeding cattle market is coming along maybe been lagging to this point but it's got some potential to be pretty good next fall if we look at where it's been this winter uh this is out of date report certainly they've gotten better than that uh but some of these uh young stock cows you know considering that we were having people sell uh background feeder cattle in january for 900 to a thousand dollars i think they've been lagging people haven't been quite as confident that this market is going to last uh fundamentally we would say that it probably should numbers and i think eventually it will start to strengthen which it seems to have done now is getting later into the wintering period for those guys who uh typically keep their own heifers to replace cows there's lots of good reasons to do that gives you a lot more opportunity to select and make develop the kind you want a lot of years that's a cheaper option than going to buy them but in small herds i think there's particularly reasons maybe think about buying all your heifers rather than making them so you don't have to have a heifer bull you don't have to another special pen just easier to make a nice uh terminal crossing program and bring it in replacement heifers and with that i guess that concludes what i've prepared on heifers if there are any comments or questions let me try to answer them