 Our first speaker is our Extension Veterinarian, located in Fargo. His name is Dr. Charlie Stoltena, and Charlie's been with us for quite a few years now, and we've asked him to talk about some issues that we had last year dealing with environment, both heat and cold stress. So from that, Charlie, if you'd like to enlighten us on your perspective on stresses that occurs in the Cal Heard due to environment. Charlie, good morning. Good morning, Carl. I want to thank everybody for taking the time to come in on what has turned out to be the coldest day of the year, but it's also the first day I think we dipped below zero. So as far as I'm concerned, this has been a wonderful winter. I think we're going to get into it. I just want, there are two handouts that I sent out. One of them is a presentation and it's entitled Temperature Stress. The other one is three pages, and we will cover that or go over that second or last, and these are the actual, this is the actual policy from USDA, FSA, and North Dakota. Each of the local FSA districts or offices actually do their own type of recommendations for cold, hot, LIP payments, and so we'll do that second. So anyway, I'm going to try and switch this over to see the, there we go. Hey, temperature stress. As Dr. Lardy, many of you already know, is the department head, he has a saying. He doesn't exhibit stress, but he is a carrier. And so that's why I like to try and tell my students out there, I don't exhibit stress, but I am a carrier of it. So we're going to focus mainly today on temperature stress. If you have some questions, please feel free at the end to ask them. Now, how many of you have seen these? This actually is on the left, the extremes. This actually is the head. I don't know if you can see my little, yeah, you can see the cursor moved there. Here's the ear tag. But look at that thing. That animal is encased in snow and ice. And on the right-hand side, though, we see that this is open-mouth breathing. And actually, this animal is from North Dakota. And I'll be very honest with you. If you look closely at the ear tag, it says C-R-E-C on that ear tag. And I think a few individuals recognize where that animal comes from. And so that was just taking this past summer in about July. We had a field day, I think it was July about in there, a field day up there. And it was a hot day. Okay, so when we talk about heat stress or cold stress, you have to understand thermal regulation. And that's the body of the, that's the temperature of the body of the animal. And very simply, the two primary ways that we think of modulating temperature in animals, if they're hot, they sweat. If they cold, they're shiver. And staying in, you know, using these two mechanisms is what we call homeostasis. And homeostasis is that animal's temperature should be about 100 and a half, 101, somewhere around there. Also the concept of thermonutrile zone. This is the zone that animals in where it really doesn't have to expend much energy, either to stay warm or to stay cool. And so this is also where the animal uses the least amount of energy for its own, maintaining its own body functions. And so if we can keep an animal in those zones, that's where most efficient cost of gain is or how you look at the efficiency of the animal. So just a little chart here to show you on the bottom is temperature. And on the left-hand side is the amount of calories it takes to that animal to stay in its thermonutrile zone. So you see there's a TNZ, it's the thermonutrile zone. And that as we increase in heat, some of our feed intakes will increase. Sorry, as we look at heat, is the hotter we get, our intakes start to decrease, the amount of calories we have, the amount of maintenance energy required. And at one point in time we're going to cross where we're losing weight. And we also know that on the cold side, if you look on the left side, there comes a point in time where we can't feed these animals enough for them to maintain the weight they have. And so that's just the concept of thermal regulation and the effect of nutrition and trying to keep that animal in condition, not losing weight, becomes really important in the feedlot. And also in our cow calf herds. So we're going to talk about cold stress first. So here's that same slide. The point is, as we get colder, the maintenance requirements for these cattle starts to increase. That's pretty simple. But probably what you weren't aware of, and I forget this from time to time, is how sensitive these animals are to temperature. We view them as being pretty durable out there. They do pretty well. Yeah, they're doing fine. Carl and I were, Dahl and I were just talking this morning about cattle. We have such a, what we look as a mild winter, and yet we've got some cows still out on pasture, but is that the place best for them? And I think Carl might be addressing some of that later. Just because it's a mild winter to us doesn't mean it is to them. So this slide shows what are the critical temperatures. You know, that animal that has a summer coat, or we get an animal that gets wet and we take away the insulating characteristics or capacity of the hide in the hair, the critical temperature now is 59 degrees. As they get a longer hair coat, like the fall coat, the critical temperature when they start moving out of their thermal neutral zone is about 45 degrees. A winter coat, probably what they've had in December this year is we really didn't have a lot of temperature to drive their hair growth. We're about 32 degrees and in the heavy winter coat, the critical temperature resides at about 18 degrees. So if we look at what we're feeding these animals then, so we said 18 degrees was the lowest, it was the critical temperature, so let's just round it to 20. You're at 20 degrees and we have a 0% increase in what we need to feed them. Their total TDN requires about 12.5 pounds. And you can see from the chart there is we start dropping the temperature. And that's a combination of cold and wind. You can see the increase requirements for energy. So the example there is that for every 1 degree below the critical temperature equals about a 1 to 2% increase in TDN. And Carl was reminding me, he helped me a lot with this presentation, so he's sliding a sign over that says really nice slides. Actually, they are much nicer than the ones he had. But the point is, as you drop in temperature, your nutrient requirements increase. So as an example, if you go from an effective temperature of 20 degrees and you drop down to negative 5 degrees Fahrenheit and you have a 10 mile per hour wind, effectively your temperature is negative 22 degrees. Well, if you look on the chart, that means that you need to increase that ration for that animal by about 40%. So that becomes 17.5 pounds of TDN, figure out the calculations. 36.5 pounds dry matter equals about 40.5 pounds as fed. And that's just simply dropping from 20 degrees above to 5 degrees below with a 10 mile an hour wind. Can you imagine really how much energy is sapped out of these cows out there who are gestating and we're moving them along and we want them to maintain condition and we're wondering, you know, are they performing well or not, gives you an idea of just how much energy it takes out there. So when we deal with stress, cold stress, and you know, as we looked at that hair coat, water takes away insulating capabilities and so that poor animal we saw in that title slide with totally encrusted in snow and ice does not have much insulation anymore because that hides wet, the hair is wet and that temperature is going right through. The other thing about cold stress, Carl, we were hopping, we were visiting a little bit before we started this on windbreaks. And in here in North Dakota where we live, wind is a real killer, literally and figuratively. Wind is a real problem for us. And then bedding. I do know that there is some debate on whether people should bed or not. I am a big fan of bedding animals. I think one is, I'm going to show some data that came out of Carrington on performance, but two, I think more than that, we're moving into an era that we really have to be good stewards as an industry of how we take care of these animals. And maybe on a spreadsheet it looks like bedding isn't the best way to go, but that sentiment will not be shared by the people who buy our products. So I really think we need to get really serious about our use of bedding. But what bedding does is it decreases the thermal exchange with the ground because that ground is 20, 30 below that temperature. And what we want to do is give some insulation there. Two, it helps the animals get down, because if there's no bedding, they don't want to lay down. Get them out of the wind. And also, I think I've increased this one, tabbed in one too far. You have to keep water available. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And also, increasing the roughage content of the feed, because what we want to do is use that rumen to generate heat. Use everything we can to help that animal out there. So cold stress. Keep things dry. In the upper left hand, we have a building that's got a roof over it, but as you notice how in a storm or a blizzard, we see that snow curls right around underneath the edge and can deposit up quite a bit of snow or water content within the barns. And so you need to deal with that. If you look at the top right, we've got all those manure tags on. Obviously, they were muddy at one point in time. There wasn't enough area for them to get clean. The lower left hand, that looks like about October weather to me. Maybe on the Stucca operation, I don't know. That's pretty wet up in that Cooperstown area. And then if you look at the lower right, we're trying to keep these animals clean and dry because water, moisture really saps the heat on them. And also, talking about keep things dry, we're not really talking much about environmental. The whole thing about you need plenty of air movement to keep down the possibility of respiratory disease. Two moisture environment just sets up a real pneumonia wreck for us. So they do better in the cold than they do in the warm semi-moist in the wintertime. This research comes out of Carrington, and we looked at these were on the upper left hand. Look at average daily gain in the blue. There's no bedding. The yellow is modest bedding, and the red is generous bedding, and that's two times modest. And they were using growing heifers fed October through March. And if you look at average daily gain, yes, there seemed to be more gain with the bedding. But if you look at net return on the lower right hand, the cost, well, if you didn't bed, there was no cost there. So your costs were, to me, were fairly minimal. And in this year, the year that this was done, the cattle market was good, and it was profitable. So, again, you can also find studies out there that say, well, bedding may not pay, especially in a feedlot type operation. That may be, but again, I think we have to take more into consideration here than just the strict pennies and dimes. Another thing about cold stress, as I said, is to block the wind. And we've seen way too many pictures like we do on the left. That's a cold environment. On the upper right hand, this operation is using round bales in kind of a temporary fashion. Actually, I'm a big fan of this type of windbreak. And one of the reasons is it fits into North Dakota because we have the extremes. We have extreme cold and we have extreme heat. In the extreme cold, we want a windbreak. And in extreme heat, we don't want anything to impede a wind movement. And so anything that we can put a windbreak but also have the ability to take it down or move it so we don't have it in the summer months, I view it as a real positive. On the left hand side, it's a little more durable, made with steel and piping, which is good. However, I think you're going to find, depending on the location, a fence like that could hold so stop and hold a lot of snow right in your operation or right in your pens. And that's real downside to a solid type fence. On the right hand side, this one allows, we break the wind, but we also allow some air to pass through and that actually will carry that snow farther. It slows it down, but not enough that it actually deposits and will keep that snow moving on out of the lots. That's the actually intent of that design. So if you look at the upper left hand picture, the use of the shelter bell. And again, before we started this presentation, there's a little discussion. The question is about how high do you need for a windbreak? And the other way to look at this, this chart shows that the wind is moving from left to right. And so in that purple zone, just before it hits the shelter belt, so if you have trees at a 30 feet high, at about 300 feet high to about 60 feet out away from the shelter belt, that speed of that wind is 65 to 95%. And then it drops to about 35 to, depending on the velocity, all the way up to 95. But as that wind goes up over the trees, you'll notice that there's actually a zone of turbulence from about 5 to 10 times the height of the shelter belt. And if you watch Discovery Channel and how the wings of an airplane, when the air comes over that foil, it creates a circular turbulent zone there that's actually got quite a bit of wind speed. But then there's like a sweet spot from about 10 to 15 times the shelter belt height, where it's the most calm. And then out past 15 to out that 30 times the height of the shelter belt, now we have reduced speed, but they're starting to pick up again. So as you think about designing your shelter belts, about how high to put them, how far away from the fences, this is the type of information that you should take into consideration. I think this comes out of Midwest Planning. There's a title at the bottom of there, where it's call number. So you can, if you want more information on how to do those, or consult with your engineer. So as we looked at cold-temperature stress, we see that there's an increased need for energy. We also see a decreased feed intake. And people think, well, in cold, you don't need much water. That would be wrong. We've run into a couple of cases where we've had people feeding high moisture, like beet pulp, high moisture rations that on paper supply enough water that they don't really need to supply open water. However, when you drop in temperature, feed intakes will drop also. When feed intakes drop, then you're not consuming enough water. And if you don't consume enough water, feed intake drops even more. It becomes a really vicious cycle. It's a downward spiral, and these cows cannot recover. So you need to have, when we move into really cold weather, you really have to have a source of open water for them. And then also with cold associated injuries, like cold frostbite, the hooves, the tails, the ears, there's no real good way to treat these, so it all comes down to prevention. You have got to bed, get them out of the wind. We have to think about these things before they occur, because once they occur, they're just like an open wound. There's no way to sew it up. There's no way to make it heal better. The damage is the damages, and really not much we can do to it. The other one that we see last year we got caught, two years ago we got caught is male sterility. You have to, you know, we're having a lot of bull sales these days, and they're been examined, and they're breeding sound. However, we can have some cold weather, March and April, and that's per monazole. It takes 30 days to mature, and if we have too cold of weather, depending on when that cold snap is, we can have just semen damage, or we can actually have testicular damage, and so it's a good thing. We think these bulls are really tough out there, but again, this is where bedding comes in, so they can get down and get some straw around them and cover up and keep things functioning. Again, we talked about keep things dry, block the wind, and use bedding. Then the other thing we saw, we did have a problem this, the other extreme is heat stress. And to manage heat stress, there's about three, actually USDA out there has a really good site with a lot of information on it, but the first one is identify the animals that are most at risk, and we always think of feedlot animals, right? We've heard of cattle going down the feedlot, so the heaviest feedlot animals. If you look at physiologically, they're overweight. The other thing is that they have decreased lung capacity. It turns out, you know, cattle are big, but if you compare it to humans, cattle have about only 25% the lung capacity that people do, and you're thinking, well, it's hot out, but it's not too bad for me. Well, that's true for you, but if we took away 75% of your lung capacity and made you stand out in the hot humidity, then you get a better idea of what this animal's going through. The other ones are the very young and the very old. You need to think about, and then color. Some work had been done down in Florida using the actually same line of genetics, but they were able to, through the use of breeding, they were able to have a black-hided herd and a white-hided herd with the same genetics, and they came up with about a two-degree core-body temperature difference just in the really hot weather. So color of the animal does make a difference. So if you have a feedlot of 1,000-pound black cattle out there and you know that you're going to be running into 95 degrees and 80% humidity, I think you better be thinking proactive about this. And we also lost a number of cows this last summer out on pasture. And the commonality in those situations this summer was no shade and too limited access to water. And those two combinations are killer. So the action plan is water capacity. The literature says that you need about two inches in hot weather. You need two inches of linear space per animal. So for 200 head, you need 400 inches of, like a water tank, 400 inches. So in the wintertime, you're thinking, I want as little water of it open because I don't want to deal with frozen water lines. But in the summer, you have to think a complete opposite. You need access to water. And so if you can figure out how to have extra water available in the summer or if you've got hot weather coming, getting some plastic tanks or something out there, but you need to spread out the water, they can stand a lot if they've got access to water. The second thing is if we, a lot of people feed in the mornings, that also means that peak ruminal activity occurs about two, three in the afternoon, just when the heat is. So you might want to think about moving during the really hot weather and move your feeding time to the evening. Get rid of the windbreaks or open them up. That's why I said I like the temporary ones or the bales that as we feed them, the windbreak disappears. And you need to have some, some access to any breath of wind you can. That's why another reason we put mounds in our feedlots, not just to get away from the water in the valley, but also to give them a little height there. So if there's any breeze, they can get access to it. Some areas, especially Father South, cool the ground using sprinklers. The point is you want to turn those sprinklers on before we get the cattle stressed. We want to cool the ground. We want to cool the cattle. And at this time, with the really hot weather, water, mud puddles are not a bad idea. And then shade, if you have it, one thing up here is you can provide shade, but then the winter blizzard comes and blows the whole thing away. So what do you do after that? I know that, I can tell you from personal experience, my brother runs a thousand head feedlot. And what they did this past summer was they actually opened the gates and put them under the trees to move them out. And they moved them out early when it was cool. They did not move them. Look at the bottom. Don't work cattle. You don't want to do this at three in the afternoon. So they put up temporary electric fence and they turned them out under the trees and it worked well for them. And the other thing is provide bedding. And I think the stuff I saw said that if you roll out straw bales or round straws on black dirt, you can effectively drop the temperature 15 degrees of what they're laying on just by that simple move. Then you can also wet the straw down. But I think that the octave word here is wet down, not soak. Because if you soak it, then you take away the insulating properties of the straw and you're going to get, you know, that hot heat is going to percolate right out of that ground right through that soaked straw right into the animal again. But the idea is what we want to do is we want to give them as much temperature relief any way we can. And so bedding also is a good way to do that. Again, do not work your cattle. You're too late if you've got to respond at three in the afternoon to something like this. And then the other step three is know when to intervene. And this is driven by temperature and humidity. There's a heat index. And actually I've supplied you with the heat index and also the frost or the cold index for lack of a better term in that other handout. And we're going to talk about that a little bit. However, the heat index, it's cumulative. And the problem is, especially for cattle, this room in it, is they can't cool down. If the temperature doesn't drop enough during the evenings, they can't cool off between hot days. So if you look at the USDA livestock, the LIP program eligibility, the way it works is they will allow a claim if the heat index was greater than or equal to 75 for 72 hours, that's three days prior to death. Or the heat index during the 40 hours prior to death was no lower than 79 during the day and no lower than 75 during the night. Or the heat index was greater than or equal to 84 for two consecutive days. And this is North Dakota FSA policy. The point though here is, rarely do we get surprised by hot weather. We can usually see it coming. And so these are the things you need to get ready for instead of trying to react to at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. We know they're coming. We need to get a game plan together here because prevention, we need to prevent it rather than react to it. So here's some pictures of you seeing this. Heat stress is normal. This animal is in its thermal neutral zone. It's happy. Stage one of heat stress is elevated breathing rate. They can become restless. They increase time standing. At stage two, we have elevated breathing rate. They start to drool. The saliva starts coming out of their mouth. Again, they're standing. They're restless. They can't get comfortable. At stage three, we still have the breathing rate is up. Excessive drooling now, it's no secret. Most of the animals are standing. And it's interesting when they get hot like this, now they want to start standing by each other. They start to group up, which only compounds the problem. At stage four, we have the breathing rate. Now we've got open mouth breathing. They're drooling. The animals group together. Stage five, now we actually have abdominal breathing. The sides back by the rumen beyond the rib cage and the abdomen area, that's moving in and out. They are trying to move air as fast as they can. The mouth is open. The tongue is sticking out. They're drooling. They're standing, restless. And then we're almost to the bitter end. This is stage six. Open mouth, very abdominal breathing, labored. Their head is down. And these animals have gone off by themselves to die. They move away. And we're way too late in the game on these. And you've got to be really careful on these. These are not the ones you want to try and get up and run around at all. These ones are, you know, without spooking them, can you put shade over them? Start blocking that heat on them. But we're too far here. We should have intervened before we got to this stage. So if you want to take out the other handout and just wanted to show you this, this is the heat index. And this is on the last page of that USDA. And these are just copies of the pages out of the USDA book. But notice this is how you figure the heat index. And we looked at 75 or greater. So if you look at a heat index at 75, you could be, the temperature is only 81 degrees, dry bulb. And your relative humidity is 50%. You'll hit that 75 heat index. So if you're at that for three days, this is where USDA says, well, they'll consider eligibility here. And then if you look at the daytime, heat index reaches 84 or higher for two consecutive days. Also, that would be about 92 degrees Fahrenheit at about 55% relative humidity. So that's how you read that chart. And then this other one, the wind chill chart, this is the actual chart on the first page of that handout. The second website is there's a calculator. It says this is that actual chart. This is the chart USDA looks at to determine what the wind chills were in your area. And they have the end on stations are located across the state. So if a producer out there is going to make a claim or anything like that, they can actually go and those end on stations, this is what USDA will access to look up that eligibility criteria. So I think that's the last, no, no, we got one more. Yeah, see, and that's, this is the way Dr. Stucca takes care of his cattle. He has rented some land, some beachfront on Cabo San Lucas. He flies the cattle down. Usually in the beginning of November, they'll come back about May 1st. No, so I'm done with mine. If we have any questions, I'll try and answer them. The thing about my position, I like to really engage others and defer. Basically, I don't know the answer, but I have three others here that really do. So let me, we'll take it back to you, Carl. Thank you, Charlie. I have a question for you when it deals with the heat stress, and we'll, I'll ask this while other people are asking or figuring out if they have any questions to ask and they can ask, how long does it take a calf to go from in North Dakota in some of these hot days that we had last summer? How long does it do you expect to take them to go from stage four heat stress to stage six heat stress? There's going to be, there is no thumb rule of thumb because you have the difference in environmental conditions. So if you have a stage four heat stress at three o'clock in the afternoon, are we going to see stage six, I can't say this. Are we going to see stage six before we get some evening cooling? I mean, that's the risk people have dealt with over the years up here. We rarely get that hot enough to see that much heat, but last year we got caught in a few areas. So I'm trying to get a feeling for, for that. And, and the answer comes back to every animal is going to have a different biological susceptibility. Some are going to be more heat tolerant than others. So no, I can't give you a time because that's the progression. If they have any, I do remember when I was young, we actually had some cattle with Santa Gertrudis in them in our feedlot. We're just trying them out. And in the summertime, man, they handle the street, the heat's so much better. So I can't, you've got too much genetic and biologic variability to give you a rule of thumb. But I will ask Dr. Stucka, since he's got more feedlot, any idea. But Carl Dowlin also mentioned, he says, it also depends on what the previous days were. Because remember, they have to be able to cool down in the evening. And if you've already had two days of this, you've got a big problem versus if it's the first day, you might be able to get away with it. Yeah, Carl, I think that's right. I mean, if the conditions remain what they are when you've got one in those various stages, they will continue to progress if the conditions remain what's causing it in the first place. I mean, if you can possibly get a little cooling in there, if the wind comes up, or if you can somehow cool them off with a little sprinkling, it changes that whole equation. But the progression is in place. And if the animal is unable to dissipate its internal core body temperature, then you will progress. But I have no idea, necessarily, I can't give you a real answer as to how quickly that will occur. And like Charlie says, each animal is going to be a little bit different. Are there any other questions from some of the other locations? I have one here from... My question right now is that once you start seeing that panning, I mean, how do you... I mean, if you haven't got shade available, is your best bet to try to get a water truck with a hose on them? Can you shock them? I mean, how do you try to bring those animals back and pull them back from desk door? I mean, I know that once you get them in that last stage, they're probably already dead, but how do you try to bring them back when you start seeing the panning in those signs? Well, one of the big things is not so much the shock or the cold, but just, you know, they call the fire department up. And what it does is it riles them up more than it helps. And so, like I said, if you can just get more water in the pan, you know, if they can get up on their own and start to consume some water, or if you've got it... Hopefully, you don't have 50 of them laying out there. If you have just a couple of them, you know, some type of temporary winch sunshade just to take the heat off of them, because they're going to be pretty lethargic. I mean, if you approach them and they get up, well, then get some water out there. Give them access, try something there, but don't... I don't know. I'm not a big fan of calling the fire department out on this, because you also get a lot of people who like to get things riled up, and that's the last thing you want to do. We have one other question. Go ahead. Was there another question? No, I was just going to ask Jerry, because he does a lot of work down in Kansas, in Oklahoma, and how they handle it down there. You know, one of the disadvantages that we have compared to some of those high-plains feed yards is that it gets us is the humidity issue. So a lot of those feed yards in western Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas, they can handle greater heat because they don't have the humidity. The thing that gets us is the humidity deal. And, I mean, desperate situations require sometimes desperate solutions. And when Charlie mentioned turning the cattle out, I mean, and I know not everybody can do this, depending on the size of your feedlot, because now you've got pans mixed up and everything, and it's chaos. But you have to start thinking in terms of populations, okay, I'm going to lose some cattle here, but can I save the majority of them and I'm going to lose some efficiency and some gain for a while? I mean, that's the kind of thinking you have to start putting into place, because otherwise you're going to have 50 dead ones or 100 dead ones or more. And so that turn out so that animals can take advantage of just some simple things like shade and or wind can make all the difference in the world. Question. If you're breeding during some of this hot cycle, I'm taking, they're not breeding. You're going to get some open cows. You could exasperate. Imagine your bulls aren't going to feel much like riding those cows. Actually, we saw some of the evidence this past summer is Carl Dahl and I did a little kind of a quick study with some of the local or the veterinary practices out there. And the first breeding cycle went pretty darn well in June. But when we came back and looked at the pregnancy results out of those, the next two cycles in that July, August, they took a real beating. Carl, you any more comments on that? Well, depending on your breeding management too, if you're trying to use an artificial insemination or something like that, and we ran into pretty much a train wreck this year because we had one of our breeding scheduled for those hot days. So in the morning, those cattle that we bred there, they were fine. Those ones that we bred in the afternoon, their pregnancy rates got cut by about half. And you could feel this going into those cows. You could just feel that they were hot and anticipate there was going to be problems. And like Charlie said, that followed all the way through with the bull performance during those peak days. And that's not necessarily just a function of those bulls not doing their job. It's also a function of that embryo developing inside that cow and stress of any kind. If this is somebody standing next to the chute hitting every one of them with a hot shot, if it's running them across the patch or whatever, stress of any kind and heat stress in this particular case really impacts the implantation of those embryos. So all the stuff that Charlie said about shade and water importance with your feedlots that really translates into your cow herds as well, especially if you're breeding during that peak stress.