 We've done a little research here at NDSU, but a lot of what I'll talk about is kind of some collective things we've done across universities. Again, as I had said, this group that put this on is really and collected all this research is many universities across the U.S. And so the we'll go into some of that and cover a lot of these things. But if everybody's good, stand up, get the blood flowing here. I know I've got the I've got the job, but keeping you all awake now that we've eaten and everybody's full. And so and I'll do my best to do that. And so but really, I think Dan highlighted it best when the things I'm going to show are really not true comparisons of whether you should go and take all your cows off your pasture, sell that and put them into a dry lot. It's really right. It's thinking about, okay, you have limited pasture. You're already probably at full capacity in terms of stocking density and rates on those. And you're looking to bring maybe, you know, maybe you've got somebody coming into the operation. You want to expand it, right? It's it's looking at those. So what I'll show today is is not necessarily comparisons of pasture to dry lot, though, that's what these studies did. It's more or less how your cows going to perform when you take them from a pasture setting, right, and look at some expected outcomes within the dry lot and just things that, excuse me, things that we, we've observed in that in terms of what we, you know, we've covered health, how to, you know, limit feeding diets and things along those lines. I want to start with this. Hopefully you all can see it, but it's a really good diagram by Dr. Dave Smith at Mississippi State. He's veterinarian down there. And I think it does really good at explaining when we talk systems and Dan said this earlier, there's many, many ways. Every single operator here does it different. And so it's hard for us, right, on the research side to replicate that when, you know, we're putting together treatments and looking at these things. It's also really hard because when we think of systems, the research I'm going to show a lot of times it was exactly like what you guys deal with at your, in your operations where we're trying to control all these external variables, weather, right, and pricing of things. And, and we're trying to look at these treatments. We're trying to isolate, okay, pasture and dry lot, but now you've got precipitation differences, right? You've got all these things going on that affect your operation. They affect our projects too. So systems works hard because I'm going to show you research where we did a two-year study and a three-year study and we could get all the, we could get whatever answer you want based on what year we wanted to look at there because each year is so different that you're going to see different outcomes potentially. And so I'll try to go through that, but this diagram really explains well, right? We've got environmental pressure, we've got nutritional pressure, and we've got our breeding programs and decisions to make there. And then we have calf health, cow health all wrapped up. We could come up with probably a few more to throw in there, but it's a dynamic system, no matter what we're looking at. So what do we already kind of know about confinement? Again, I'll say confinement, dry lot. I'll try to be a little more specific as what I'm talking about. Because in my opinion, confinement really narrows in on, you're probably, we're probably talking about a facility and cows underneath a roof in confinement and then dry lot, right? We're out on, you know, what would be thought of as probably a dirt floor pen and in that setting, but maybe not. Maybe it's concrete. Carrington has some concrete, fully concrete pens. And so, but what do we know about these systems? Well, we're going to hopefully you all can see this, but we're going to increase use of right byproduct feeds. Warren did a very good job of talking through that. And so did Dan, in terms of we're going to use crop residues or cheap quality forages. And then we're going to bring in high concentrated feeds, probably going to utilize byproducts. North Dakota has a really tremendous, depending on location, right? Accessibility though to that. And so whether we're talking distillers grains or maybe soy hulls with these soybean crushing plants or wheat mids, right? And then grain byproducts, right? If it's screenings or something like that. So bringing in what we can because we know feed costs are going to be 60, 70, probably close to 80% in these dry lot settings of total costs to the system. But we get an opportunity for more observations on animals, right? Because they're going to be, you can see the back of the pen, right? You've got everybody in one area. You can focus in and evaluate how calf health is, how cow health is and what observations you're seeing there. And you can do that more frequently possibly, right? Then maybe some of your multi pasture systems that you got going out. We can do a little more precision on our breeding techniques, artificial insemination, timed AI, estrus synchronization, right? That there's more opportunity to get those animals through a handling facility at the time you want to do that and really hone in on that. We're also feeding, right? So in that sense, we can feed MGA or some estrus, right? Suppression to try to get those heifers or cows, right? In sync and synchronize there. We get flexibility of weaning, probably going to wean early in these systems, not necessarily, but most likely, right? Because as we think about those calves and the nutritional needs on the cow, we can take that nutrition need off the cow. We can back her down on energy, right? And start targeting that energy to the calves. And so gives us flexibility, depending on your system in that setting. And then just overall flexibility, we're taking away the dependence potentially, right? On precipitation in that sense, right? You're not relying on that forage growth out in your pastures, though, you know, precipitation does affect grain price, right? And around about weighing things. And so in grain price kind of drives everything, all of our byproducts and things, but there's flexibility there and no one system is going to look the exact same. Challenges though, we've got to adopt a more feedlot mentality. We're taking, so as much as we're going to adapt the cows to this system, you have to adapt your mindset to the system too, because now we're talking about a lot more increased labor and equipment, daily feeding, right? In that setting and potentially dealing with some health issues that that pop up, you know, when we get those, you're also going to have to have a manure management plan, right? That's an opportunity and a challenge, right? To just go through that, but then figure out how can you value that manure on your cropland or your neighbor's cropland? Because there's value there in that, right? We've got to have precision when it comes to ration balancing and herd health, right? So this is where I often talk about getting someone on the nutrition side and getting your veterinarian to build a herd health program and protocols for when you have a break, say in your dry lot, your confinement situation and then making sure if we're going to be doing that limit feeding, right? Cows, and I'll show some data that can actually are very efficient when we start restricting nutrients down, but you still need to be careful on that and make sure they're getting adequate. And then of course, environment. That's a challenge no matter what system we're talking about, but it's going to be a big challenge, right? When we're taking animals from pasture, it's going to change what environmental impacts happen, right? We're going to talk mud, right? Probably fly pressure. We're going to have lots of flies. We had lots of flies, no matter what system you had this summer, and then dust and irritation potentially, right? So those are kind of the things we probably already knew. You could have made this list on your own without really needing to look at more data for that. But the research that followed this, so I said we're going to talk about 10, 15 years of data that's been put together across the US. We had a lot of questions. We still have a lot of questions as it comes to this, but we developed a framework about what happens if, right? That's kind of the approach these universities took about what, you know, certainly you all might have been doing some of this already, right? Regardless, but we didn't have data to support those decisions, those management decisions. And so we needed to test that. We were limited by our knowledge from the research side. And so that limitation became the questions we wanted to ask. And there's plenty more questions to ask than what we've answered. That's for sure. I wanted to highlight an existing operation that's been very outspoken about what they're doing. So Cactus Feeders in Syracuse, Kansas. Kelly Jones is one of the feedlot managers down there. He's been very, you know, open with how they've done their operations. So what they did was they took a 40,000 head feed yard that was old by all standards. And instead of, you know, the options were to bulldoze it and put it down or try to resurrect it in some other capacity. Well, they decided to resurrect it and use it as a cow-calf operation. And so they converted that feed yard. They took a lot of fence out, created those bigger pens that we talked about. And they did this in 2012. That coincided, right? In a lot of ways with taking advantage of that drought that was going down 2011-2012, that big drought. And so they brought in a lot of cows that were getting sold anyway, right? And brought them into this facility, resurrected it. And I think they're a success story. And there's many, many more success stories. But this one, they've been very, you know, they talk a lot about it. You could run into, if you just search Cactus Feeders, you'll find these articles where Kelly talks about what they did. And so they're allowing about 700, 800 square feet. This is dry lot, right? We're dry lot cow-calf operation here. And so that's kind of their target. They limit feed and they feed twice a day to try to get around the fact that those cows would eat all their feed, as Dan said, in the first two, three hours. And then they'd sit around the rest of the day. They tried to combat that by feeding twice, right? Spread that same amount of feed across the day to try to kind of combat some of those behaviors that we know exist when you limit feed and cows sit hungry, even though we've met their nutrition needs, right? They have a 67-day breeding season and they utilize artificial insemination, AI, but then they come through a natural service follow-up, right? In a 2% bull-to-cow ratio, right? So you can kind of get, I don't know exactly, their pens' eyes per se, you know, how many cows they have per pen, but it's quite a few. It's big pens that they're dealing with and so they kind of run that 2% ratio and they run it successfully, right? It's 90% or greater pregnancy rates and they front-end load their calving season with 75% of the cows bred in that first 21 days. Wean and then they wean early, right? 120 days. What they do is they take those calves at that four months of age and then they move them over, they wean them and then they let them kind of acclimate to that weaning, give them 30 days and then they kind of start them up on grower and get them to about 600 pounds where then they head out to the feed yard. It works in their system, right? Because they're a multi-site operation and so they've got feed yards all across. It's not just this one feed yard and so these calves go out to there but they work pretty good. We talked about how longevity we had a question yesterday about it. Certainly when you think about adapting those cows from a extensive pasture type system into more intensive dry lot, you're going to deal with some changes, right? It's an adjusting period for those cows. Kelly talks about first, first couple years, they were probably at eight years longevity for those cows staying in there. They've now pushed that to 10, 12 years is what they're getting in their system. But it's a good question to ask because we, to do research for as long as we would need to do to keep cows, it's very, very expensive and it's hard to do but I know next couple slides I'll talk about some of the work Carrington's done and I don't know, Carl, what the longevity of those cows are in the dry lot system. Yeah, yeah, right there. Yeah, so Carl says it's right in there about eight to 10 years. So can we feed limit fed cows intensive systems, right? Of course we can. We talked a lot about doing that. I just want to show some data to support some of this. This is Barbara and others down at Texas A&M did this study and I think it's a pretty good one in terms of being simple. So this was not a full systems approach, right? They brought these cows in and they put them on these feeds. The hay diet was full ad libitum intake so they could eat as much as they'd like of hay and it was just hay. I don't know quality. I've caught my head. I don't quite remember but nonetheless you can see what they ate here is about 32, almost 33 pounds as fed, right? So what they observed which when we take the moisture out and look at it on a dry matter basis, we're talking 26 pounds, right? Okay. Those limit fed diets were right here. Same diet but what this SCP stands for is they actually fed and the diet was 35% wheat straw, 30% corn, 30% distillers grains with some supplement in there for vitamin minerals and feed additives and so but they're the same diet. What they did though was they fed the wheat straw in the morning and then 12 hours later they came back and fed the concentrate corn distillers. The idea there was if equipment is a limitation to these systems and somebody maybe doesn't have a TMR wagon, right, or feed truck. In the case here, I'm sure a lot of you already have that equipment but what they wanted to see is could you do the same thing without that and just feed the concentrate 12 hours after feeding that low quality forage or does it make a difference having it as a TMR? So same diet, they limit fed to 80% their anticipated cow nutrient requirements, 80%. So not 100, that would have been at maintenance. They fed it under that. So they almost they restricted those cows and that's important to point out as I'll show here in a second. Initial body weights, these were about 1100 pound cows. So they were small frame cows in that regard. They were cows not heifers and so you can see percent intake as a percent of body weight here. So they're eating 1% of their body weight right in those limit fed diets. Estimated pounds of TDN if I calculated this right from their paper, half the energy allocated in that limit fed diet compared to the energy assumed to be getting from that hay. So seven pounds of TDN in that limit fed versus 14. So that's a huge difference. Again, they were targeting 80% her maintenance requirements and they were mid gestation into late gestation. They didn't calve on this diet, they moved them out about 45 days before calving. So that's kind of where this study was taking place. And if we look at body weights here, beginning of the study and then 112 days later on that diet, you can kind of see we started at about 1150 almost for that hay diet and we ended a net positive. They gained a bit of weight on all three diets. So again, but that's pretty amazing when we think these two diets on the right here were actually only seven pounds TDN mid-gestation. Again, 1100 pound cows, so it's a smaller requirement for her probably anyway, but they adjusted. And the easy way to look at that is this is the change in body weight from initial, right? So those two diets here on the right, those cows lost weight in the first 56 days. First two months, they were losing weight. That would kind of scary, I'm sure, in a bit right as you're looking at these and saying this is not working. However, those cows made an adjustment months to three and four, they gained weight. Again, this is back from initial body weight. And so changes here, these cows gained 50, 40 to 50 pounds above what where they started on those limit fed diets. Yes. So the question is if the fetal weight was accounted for, it was not in this case. And so this would be fetal growth, right? But I like to think when we look at that, in a restricted setting, they were still, at least to some extent, the nutrient flow was still there for that developing calf in those cows. And so when we think about it, I think that hay diet replicates a lot of what we do, right? And a lot of our extensive systems. And so that would replicate pretty well. When we look at body condition then, as a measure of how much external condition of those cows have, because as we know, looking at weights alone, there's fetal growth in there that kind of gets in the way of us understanding how much was going to the calf versus how much weight was going to the cow. We look at condition, that condition really kind of, you know, I would say all these cows were probably held pretty tight in terms of that body condition. Remember, this was half the energy load, right? That the cows on hay were getting. So I think it's a really good example of we can restrict them. Now, there's other challenges that come with restricting, right? Behavior in the pens and how aggressive are they at the bunk and can that end up causing some calf injury if we're into the lactation stage, right? Postcaving. But it's a really good example of how we can really tightly regulate, at least in mid gestation, right? In late gestation, what we're giving to those cows? And so I know they reported calf birth weights, no difference there. And then they weighed those calves 45 days after having no differences in that growth either. So really good example of what we can do. Okay, if I still got you all here and you haven't fallen asleep on me, how do cows respond to a dry lot system, right? Again, I'm not recommending you take your cows off pasture and put them into a dry lot system. I'm saying if you want to expand an operation, right? Really, that's what we're talking about. You don't have pasture available. It's not an option, right? And so now you're forced into this. What do we need to know about the dry lot setting? Well, Carrington has been doing this for 50 years, right? In some capacity or another. So there's these cows have been maintained in a dry lot at the Carrington Research Extension Center for 50 years. Now it's changed a bit over time. I'm sure is any of you that have already started this type of work and looking at these systems, you're making adjustments to your own operation too. But I wanted to highlight kind of some of the things where we started off in what we know, right? So Vern Anderson, you can find this, these results through the 2013 NDSU North Dakota beef report, I think is what it's called at that time. In 2013, you can find more of what, you know, beyond what I'm going to talk about, you know, agreeing with Dan. And I'm going to show you more data that agrees with Dan. We're not changing conception rates, pregnancy rates of these cows when we go into that system. But we might be influencing, right? As we think about, are we restricting milk production or what access to feed do those cows have in that dry lot setting? We are going to heavily influence weaning weights potentially, right? And so that's what these three years of data from Carrington suggests is when they took 40 cows and put them on pasture compared to 40 cows they put on dry lot, this is what they observe. Vern put some numbers to the diets that they had. And while I don't know Carl what the diets exactly were, I know they were a use of low quality forages and byproduct feeds. When he put those numbers together, you can see that in the lactation period, right, post-caving that that diet for that control or excuse me the dry lot here was, you know, significantly higher, right? Almost double the price, right? That's not news we haven't already discussed today because we know that's our most expensive time point in this system. But when you look at mid-gestation and late-gestation and think about the stuff we just looked at, you can actually be pretty competitive, right? So when we compare on, and this is right, this is 2013 numbers, this pasture rental rate is probably, you know, much higher than that. I don't know what it is in your system, your operations, but maybe it's closer to $1.50, $1.60 probably, maybe, maybe not, but at any rate, you know, we can certainly be competitive during the winter months, right? During gestation, it's in this lactation and summer period, right? That we really need to hone in on and try to understand how to limit our costs. And so that led us to this first study. So this is some of my work, PhD work down at the University of Nebraska, and we did this from 2018 to, but still continues now, but 2018 to 2021. And what we did was we took, again, we wanted to say how would your cows respond when we take them from pasture and put them in, right? So if you are expanding your operation into a building of sorts or something like that, how are those cows, how's going to fare compared to the ones that you'll have out on pasture? Not saying you switch your whole system over, but right? And so we looked at an April to June calving bird down there on the east side of Nebraska, right? Using perineal pasture and corn residue grazing, they can pretty much get away with almost just those two systems, so to speak. A little bit of hay feeding that has to happen in the spring time to get those cows off corn stocks prior to the thaw. But then we called it the alternative system, right? That's our dry lot system, where we're going to move calving, right? We don't necessarily want to be calving in April in muddy pens, right? And I think that'd be true for up here. So we switched that to trying to target drier times a year, right? July to August. And I'll tell you, we weren't successful. 2019, as you all remember, was a wet year. And so we'll talk about some of the health issues that came from that. But again, our emphasis here in this study was honing in on reducing inputs during the summer months, because that's our most expensive time. So we were really trying to restrict intake and look at how is that going to affect the cow, and how is that going to affect the subsequent calf? That's our timeline for the conventional pasture system, right? Hay feeding in April, they turn out and made April, right? So a bit earlier than we do. But then they were calving in that April to June timeframe, breeding in that July to September timeframe, right? And we were using the invasive pastures, right? Smooth brome is a lot of what those pastures are down there. And then we weaned early. And we weaned early so that we could compare same days of age calf from pasture, same days of age calf in confinement system, and then corn residue grazing over the winter months. Alternative system, dry lot from March 15th to October 15th. And then we went out on an annual forage that was stockpiled, right? And we let that grow from wheat harvest, put it in right after wheat, let that grow as much as we possibly could, right? And then go dormant and then raise it. Quality of that oat, even when it looks like wheat straw standing up, right, is actually pretty impressive in those early months, October, November, we don't see that decline as much in that quality, both on an energy and protein basis. When we start stretching it into the January, we really start to dwindle on that protein, but still pretty good use of an annual to get these cows out here. We bred out on on annual forage, right? So we didn't breed in the dry lot, right? We kicked them out because, again, we shifted our whole system for this alternative treatment group. So some, I want to show a few pictures. Hopefully we can see them good with the lighting, but about kind of the setup that we did. We had 30 inches of bunk space per cow. We weren't allowing calves access, right? You'll see usually we try to target maybe 24 to 30 inches for a cow and add another foot of bunk for a calf. If that's where you're going to be, so to speak, creek feeding or feeding those calves at the bunk, you need to provide at least 12 inches for those calves to access. That 12 inches creeps up pretty heavily into costs, right, of a facility if that's the way you're going to be providing access to the calves. But I'll show you where we weren't intending for the calves to have access to the diet, but I'll show you, they're pretty resilient creators and getting up there and fighting with mom to get some access to that feed. We had 900 square feet per cow and then 42 square feet of shade. It's really important when you think about these systems, especially in dry lot, which maybe isn't so much what we do in the Dakotas, maybe probably under a roof of some sort, but it's really important to provide shade in a loafing area for those calves. And I'll show you what we did there. Really hard to see, so I apologize here, but basically what we had here was five pens. And I said this was a two year study. There was four. Yeah, stay awake with me here. Thank you. But what we did was there was four groups on the dry lot and four groups on the pasture system. Each group was 20 cows, right? So fair amount of cows in this study, 160 total. Well, you see here is five shades because we ran an extra group on each system to replace cows as they fell out of the system, if that makes sense. So, but basically you can see here, this would be one pen right there, right? You get the idea, 30 inches of bunk, 20 cows in those groups, and then we had that shade access that we allowed. And you can see it works pretty good, you know, providing 42 square feet of shade. And those cows and calves really utilize that. We had a loafing area right in the back of the pen. I don't condone necessarily. We used big feedlot pens and broke them down, and we used hot wire to do that. I don't think you guys would be doing that probably in your systems, but that's what we had to do here for this research. You can tell cows didn't get back here, right? Because there's grass. And so, but those calves could slip under that wire. They could go back there. I will say I never caught more than a couple calves ever back there. They did use it, but it was mostly in that first 30 days, the life that they were back there. And then beyond that, they basically were right there. See that calf could have easily been right over there, but they kind of adjust to that. We did not provide bedding only when necessary. So we tried to really keep this low inputs as much as we could and see what we could get away with. But we did bed when we needed to. And this was in mid-October, right before they were going out to cover crops. We had a whole bunch of rain come down here and certainly needed to at that time provide some bedding to keep those calves dry. So one thing I want to point out, right? We didn't allocate bunk space for those calves, but these calves would have been four to six weeks old. And we certainly, those older calves got into that bunking and got access to that feed. We were feeding lactation at this point. And I'll show you intakes here in just a second. So we're actually feeding 22, 24 pounds dry matter at this point in time to those cows. And so that provided enough, you know, feed in the bunk at that morning time point, we just fed once a day, that those calves could actually come in and get a little bit to eat. Water, right? It's critical that you think about access to water and how those calves can get at it along with those cows. If you're wondering what 28 to 30 inches of bunk space looks like, this was at a time point. This was early spring. So these cows were just early gestation, or probably mid-gestation at this point. But these bunks were 24 feet. And then at this point in time, we'd split our 20 head groups up into 10 and 10. So this is 10 cows. Don't check me on it. I think that's 10 cows that I tried to count them, but there's not a lot of space here. Right? And so again, we would have been at this point in time feeding low input, would have been low intakes, 14, 15 pounds dry matter of our diet. And so really, you can see here, there's a bit of space on the one end and a bit of space on the other end, but it's pretty tight in that regard. And so not a lot of room for those calves, if there were any. At this point in time, though, there wasn't, right? They were in mid-gestation. And then at the end here, what we did was, right, those cows went from the dry lot onto annual forage. And this is a week apart same group, right? And so I'll show you what we ended up happening as an effect of this. We didn't anticipate, but I think we had some effect when these cows changed diet so quickly and some outcomes we didn't anticipate. So to kind of get into intakes then and kind of what we provided for a diet, you can see here, 55% of that diet was modified to silage grains. The other half was low quality forage. At times, most of the time that was wheat straw, we did switch over to corn stocks at points and then did use some low quality haze when needed to fill that in, but low quality forage is nonetheless. Two-thirds of the year, those cows were in the dry lot. That March to October time point about two-thirds of the year. And you can see this is an overall dry matter intake. 16 pounds is all we're providing of that. And so if you think about kind of what we're providing these cows, we're about 1350, so moderately sized in that regard. And we're feeding about 1.25% body weight. So again, trying to be restrictive, think about that first study we looked at pretty close to those, considering that these cows were 1300, 1350. Okay, so managing body condition. Dan talked a lot about that and how we can really get control of that. I just wanted to show you data from that. So here's weaning in these systems. So October for the excuse me, these are backwards here, apologize for that, but this would have been actually these are breeding, sorry, breeding scores. And you can see here when those cows went out onto the residue here, you can kind of see we had about 60%, if you have the five and the five and a half scores, we're at about 60, 65% at that in that target. So we can really get pretty good at narrowing down how much condition those cows have because we're not relying on that fluctuation from a six, six and a half during pasture, coming into the winter and then losing some condition. We don't have to so much build reserve. That's why a lot of times we buffer ourselves and say, at breeding time, you want a five and a half to a six, because you're trying to account for anticipated insurance on that condition. We don't have to do so much of that when we're providing groceries every single day and we're dictating how much energy they're getting. Looking at the response then, when you take your cows and put them into a dry lot setting what you could expect, no difference in pregnancy rates, no difference in calving rates. This was two years of data. The third year was still no difference, but right in there, alongside those pasture treatments for that alternate system in the dry lot. And that calving distribution, if we look at that, right, so really not much difference here. We're at 68% for our alternate group, 75% for that pasture based system, still front end loading, you know, close to that 70% mark for both of those treatments. Had a few more cows in the alternate system get bred in that second 21 days. It was a 60 day, 63 day breeding season that we had. Here's that unanticipated outcome, twinning. We had three times as many twins born in this alternate system when we look at how we were doing our breeding, going from that really restricted, even though we were starting to climb for lactation, that really restricted diet in the dry lot. And then boom, they could have as much access as they could walk around and get by grazing that forage. We didn't anticipate this. We were also breeding in the fall. And there's good data that shows twinning and ovulation are correlated. They're kind of highly bound together. And we know fall breeding can increase ovulation rates. And so I don't have the exact answer. I'm a nutritionist, not a reproductive physiologist. So this was a bit tough for me to try to explain in my defense. But nonetheless, we saw a high number of twins. I will say for the data we're going to go through now on post-weening, we pulled all those twins at birth and separated that. So that wouldn't necessarily entirely be what you would do. But that was what we tried to do in order to compare calves and make sure that that calf had access to the milk produced and that calf had access. So I will say that, you know, when we talk about these systems, there's a lot of milk sharing going on in our dry lot systems, right? You've got cows close together. There's a lot of that going on. That may be not as desirable as what we would like, but a potential, you know, it could see keeping twins in that system as viable. But we didn't test for that because we weren't expecting to get the results that we got. But nonetheless, when you look at that, if we were to try to include those twins in pounds weaned for cow exposed, certainly would be beneficial, right? If the cows could manage themselves and produce those two calves through weaning. Weaning rates were a bit different. Now, not statistically, but numerically that's 5% and that would be enough to hurt your bottom line. That numerical difference really comes from calf health. And we had some outbreaks. I mentioned some wet summers that we had in birth. We had a clostridial outbreak in year one that really that threw us for a loop in that alternate, that dry lot system. And so there's certainly going to be challenges there, though not numerically different here in these two years of calf crops. Morbidity for cows and mortality, not really different. A replacement rate was right at 10% for both treatments. So again, two years of data, not enough to really dive in hard and cow longevity and look at how it was impacting cows. We didn't generate replacements in this system either. I said our replacements were already mature cows that we brought back in. They were already being in that system, but they just came in to fill in for those open cows that we had. So not truly generating and developing heifers in this system. That wasn't really our goal with here, but I think it's a needed question to answer. Wean calves, right? 168 days. And then birth weights weren't any different between the two systems. But birth weaning weights were. Now, this goes back to Dan's discussion, milk production. We restricted those cows really heavily and we didn't provide a creep feed. They could try to get what they could from the bunk, but we didn't provide any inputs in that system for those calves. And I think you can get that in looking at our wean weights then. So I think you got to think about what Dan said this morning and how that could be applied into some of our observations in our research, because certainly we don't want to be weaning a calf at that light of a weight, right? Same days of age. I think we affected milk production and how much milk those cows were provided. We should have filled that back in with creep feed or some possible feeds to those calves in that system. So pounds weaned per cow exposed was, of course, more than 100-pound difference when we look, because we didn't really have any pregnancy differences or anything like that. That difference isn't really all that great, but we did have that numerical shift in how many calves we weaned in that alternate system. So I think it's important to look at pounds weaned per cow exposed because that accounts for your reproductive success, your calf health management, your nutrition, kind of lumps it all together. And so I encourage everybody to look at their performance to their own operations regardless of system on pounds weaned per cow exposed to a bull that is, right? Cows exposed at breeding. Calf morbidity. There we are with our increase rate, right? With more treatments. This was percent of calves treated at least once. And so in that system, again, I'll show you a little bit that breakdown of morbidity. Calf mortality, not statistically different between those treatments, but we did have a little bit more as we experienced that clostridial outbreak. Yes, not not. So the question was coxidiosis issues, not during the pre weaning phase. We were providing remits into the cows through that diet, but nothing accessible to the calves unless they were able to get up and eat a little bit, which we did observe. So nothing intentionally in that way. I say that because post weaning, we had a couple breaks of coxidiosis, but that wasn't necessarily bound by treatment. In fact, the coxidiosis outbreak was in the conventional system calves coming from pasture. Hard to see probably from the back of the room, but this is the breakdown of treatments. The oranges, the conventional bluesy alternate points to look at, right? Or we had higher respiratory rates, though we still had 20% of our treatments in the conventional system. Again, this is as a percent of calves we treated. So the number here is a lot higher in the alternates because there was 30% treatment compared to the 8% treatment on the conventional system. We treated a lot of navels. We had a lot of navel infections. Again, we didn't bed a lot. Those calves came out on dirt. So we had a lot of navel infections that we tried to prevent with navel drips and treat them that way, but I'm not a veterinarian and I don't know if that was beneficial or if we were actually, you know, because you really got to get up there with that drip. And so I don't know if we were pushing that bacteria up in that system, but we had a lot of navel infections, which of course we know can lead to joint infections in the legs usually if prolonged and not treated. Foot rot wasn't an issue in our dry lot system. That was something Dan observed in his cows, and we didn't observe, this is calves of course, but we didn't observe as much. We had some pastures that were prone to producing foot rot, especially when they got wet enough in the spring. And so we did see a little bit of that in that alternate era in the conventional system. You're going to switch gears and try to kind of get us through the end of this with looking at impacts on post-sweening then of these calves. We followed them out. We put them on a grower for 117 days and then we finished them out. Just see are we really impacting outcomes. And so again, lighter initial body weights for that alternate treatment, that was statistically different. And ending body weights then too. But if we look at gain, those calves, Dan mentioned compensatory gain on his creep fed treatments. We had compensatory gain in those calves from the dry lot alternate system. That's expected. You know, when you've restricted calves by not providing that creep or not providing much for feed other than that milk, and then they come into the feedlot, they're probably going to compensate for some of that. So we had 55% compensation, right? Because we kind of, we narrowed the gap here to almost just 50 pounds in that regard from 100. So they can compensate about 55%, but still came out lighter at the end of it. I want to point something out by looking at this health data because now it tells a different story. It's important to consider we weren't feeding these calves at the exact same time. They were fed the same diet for the same amount of time, but we weaned the conventional system in October. We weaned the alternate system in February. So these calves would have started on that alternate system right now, this time of year on that grower diet. The conventional system would have started this diet in October. When you talk about trying to compare apples to apples, the season affects so much more than what we can account for. And I think that's observed here with our health data and some of our finishing data as I'll show in a second, because we had a significantly more higher morbidity in that pasture system. I don't think that's a treatment effect because of how these calves were. They came into a really wet fall and had a really tough time getting in. We had a lot of breaks and respiratory about seven to 10 days. And so that's kind of classical for bringing calves in to a feed yard. And so this isn't by any means something that I think would be observed if we repeated this, matching up calving seasons. It's more effective feeding those calves at different times of year and the outcomes that happen there. So if we switch over to the feedlot portion then right? So we're going to start lighter weights on the alternate system than the conventional, but we're trying to end, we shifted days on feed so that we could try to get this carcass composition on the alternate calves to match up with the carcass composition of the conventional and try to match those up. We did okay ending body weights, right? They're not different, but we had to go more days on feed, right? So we had to go 25, 27 more days on feed another month for that alternate system. Our target was equal back fat. That's kind of how we tried to pinpoint how many days on feed were we going to go. And you can see average daily gains that was different between these treatments. We almost have four pounds here and we add just three and three and a third there for the alternate system. I will say again, I go back to remember when I said systems work is hard because each year is so different as you all know. Year one, those treatments weren't any different and they were almost equal days on feed. Year two, these calves had in a tremendous spring to eat and grow and they did just that. We had to send them 35, I forget the exact number, 35 or 40 days earlier, the second year then the same groups the last calf crop the year before. And so it was, they way outpaced our expectations. And so I'll say this difference in getting four pound average daily gain and that we weren't expecting that. And I think a lot of that had to do with an ideal spring with warm temperatures fairly dry. Those calves really did well. But you can see they eat the same, right? There's a little bit numerical there, but they really don't eat any different, but they certainly converted better, right? Lower number on feed conversions better. And so, but again, I attribute that I think more to our season than our treatments that we were trying to look at. Morbidity, mortality, while not different, still a high rate, right? Of morbidity in that system. And when you have calves growing as well as they can in that system, you sometimes push the limits on health. Yes? Thank you. Yeah. So males were banded at birth and then these pens, I should have clarified, were mixed pens, heifers and steers. And so we did look at that on the statistical side. If that influenced our performance at all, and it wasn't significant, but yes. So these were steer calves banded at birth and then heifers as well in those. So we weren't suppressing estrus because we couldn't feed MGA or anything because they were mixed pens of steers and heifers in that regard. So good question there. So hot carcass weights, not different, but because we had those calves on feed a little bit longer, we pushed that hot carcass weight on that alternate a little higher than maybe what we wanted. Pounds of hot carcass weight per cow exposed, no difference, but still you can see that, that numerical decrease for that alternate system. We had a bit bigger ribeye and this kind of goes back to what Dan showed with ultrasound. I wish we would have had ultrasound data on these calves throughout their life to know kind of what was going on during treatment, but unfortunately we didn't. But these calves were just, we just had pushed, you know, they had just gone and grown a little bit more. They started at a lighter weight in that regard and so they had a little bit bigger ribeye and then fat composition while we were trying to target back fat is equal. We missed the mark a bit. Again, back to that conventional system outgrew our expectations. And so they kind of beat us to we're targeting .6 inches of back fat. We got close with that alternate system, but that conventional group got ahead of us in that regard. Because of that growth and how fast those calves grew in that conventional system, I think that's why we saw some of the differences in hot carcass weight. They just got to their finished level a little bit quicker than that alternate treatment. Okay, so I wanted to show just some cost breakdowns here, right? And so looking at, again, these are time stamped, you know, in terms of 2021 Nebraska values. So again, application appears going to be different based on your operation. But I think it's good to just point out, again, if you're going to expand your operation into a confinement setting, kind of what to expect for costs relative to your pasture herd. Feed costs accounted for about 70% of total feed pasture, the conventional system about 60%. That's kind of right on the mark. I break that down over here on the right side. So the alternate treatment or limit fed out was pretty close to what Bernad reported years prior. But again, completely different system in that regard. But we had about $1.75 in feed costs per cow per day during that 200 days that they were in the dry lot and corn socks and cover crop. Now I'll say our cover crop was so high, because when you do these systems, how much do you count for the cover crop going towards your farming operation and how much goes to the cow cap? In this system, we didn't have a farm enterprise. And so we put all costs to the cat, the cows. That wouldn't be how you would do it. It's just the only way we could incorporate costs into that system. It's a challenging thing of how much benefit did it go to soil health as Kaylee talked about in those things. I will say we grazed it until there was absolutely nothing left, right? So cover probably wasn't there as much as it should have been for the farming side of the operation, but we wanted to maximize our ford utilization. But you can see here, pasture is probably a little low. Nebraska usually puts out about $1.60, $1.65. So I probably didn't get this quite right when I did my calculations in my PhD. That's not a surprise, right? But $1.60, $1.65 pasture, if that's close to your cost or what you might think, gets us pretty close to that limit fed diet. But again, remember, we weren't bringing creep feed into this system. So you got to think back to Dan's talk about that. We weren't putting anything in and we shortchanged ourselves 100 pounds on wean weights. So this number, while maybe it's close to some pasture rental rates or what you might charge for pasture rental rates, I think it probably needs to be adjusted according to trying to get those wean weights up higher in that system. Okay, I'm just going to go really quick. I only have a few slides here on a second study, a three-year study doing very, very similar work to what we did. It was in Clay Center, so same area of the world. But they lined up calving now, right? So they took out our seasonality influence and came up with a fall calving conventional pasture system and compared that to a fall calving dry lot system. Very similar in the function that the conventional system used pasture. Then they had fed forages, dry lot year two, a little bit differences between year one and three, and then corn residue grazing. Very similar, but they're calving in August, not in our early late spring, and then breeding in that same time frame. So trying to reduce variation there. Dry lot, very much similar to how we had our timeline, right? Again, October, November breeding out on cover crop corn residue. So this is three more years different study looking at the outcomes there. Gestation diets changed from years one and two to three. You can see them there as mostly corn stalks and wet distillers grains in years one and two. And then year three, they used a 50-50 of cornstarch alpha-hay with some supplement. You can see the intakes, right? Mind you, the intakes that I had were 16 pounds. They went above that, right? And so they weren't as restricting in trying to limit those input costs as maybe we were trying to do, but I think their wean weights and things like that that we'll touch on in a second reflect that. And so again, 25 pounds here, they shifted that over here. And you look at pounds of crude protein per day for each cow, you know, at three thereabouts and then energy bit different in those years, but you'll kind of see that I think they were trying to back off the condition of those cows because I honestly think the cows and that dry lot system got to be quite efficient. And so they were trying to account for that by changing diet here maybe and also adjusting how much energy they were actually getting because those cows got more efficient throughout the system. And then lactation diets, again, you can kind of see the differences. They brought dry rolled corn in here, replaced some corn stalks and then pounds. They up their intakes, right? And then you can see pounds of TDN at that 19, the first couple years, they backed that off to 13 in year three. And again, I think that's reflective of adjusting to this system, both the cows and probably the scientists figuring out how this works. Body condition score at weaning, this was all the way through, right? The, both the confinement dry lot period and then that cover crop period in there too. And so red is the pasture system, blue is the dry lot system. And you can kind of see first year there at five and then they kind of got up to a six and they even got up in that dry lot again up to a seven. So I think these cows, you can kind of see we're adjusting throughout those years, right? And adapting to that, into that system. And I think that's reflective in how they're trying to control that condition because that's a seven. That's a pretty heavily on average, right? That's a pretty heavily conditioned group of cows coming at weaning time. And so I think there's, there's some things there that cows were adjusting to it, that maybe they didn't get it exactly under control as they like, but, but nonetheless, no difference in pregnancy rates. You can see the numbers at the bottom and the graph changes over time, right? Again, capitalizing on each year is different, but, but regardless, the blue line being that pasture system and the red line being dry lot, no differences observed there for those systems were not impacting pregnancy. Caving rates were a bit different. So blue line is conventional red lines alternative. And you can see the numbers here years in this year three. I don't know exactly what was going on with cabin rates, but they had more success in that alternate system. They must have had something that I couldn't find through the paper, the paper on what happened or maybe I just didn't read it, but they had a bit of a difference in that. But again, not suggesting that alternate system is going to improve. I think this is just a demonstration that it's not going to decrease your calving rates unless you again, you have those situations where you have health outbreaks and you lose calves that way, but you're not losing calves born alive, so to speak in these systems. Weaning weights right in line with each other. So again, I go back to seasonality and how restricted we did our study. The last one we looked at, this one didn't affect really anything in terms of weaning weights at all. There's no statistical difference in there. And so when you look at pounds weaned per cow exposed, because they did have more calves born alive, it's a bit different. But again, I'm not saying that alternate systems dry lots going to be better than pasture. I think this data really just suggests you can expect similar outcomes between these systems as Dan alluded to. We're kind of getting to understand that that's really the case. Okay, I'm just about done. So thanks for hanging in with me here. All I've got left is just there's some producers that have been utilizing, you know, these again, this is where I go back to a lot of our data has been on dry lot functions. We need more data on confined systems where we're not providing 700 square feet in a pen, right? We're providing 100 to 200 square feet maybe for a cow. And and we're talking about a completely different system here, in my opinion, it's hard to do this research because you got to put the barns up and then put the cows into it. And that's something universities we just don't have a lot of those barns going up. Now we'll say Nebraska has some, but I don't know what, you know, their thoughts on if it's going to be cows or finishing work there, we need we have way more questions here, which I think applies to all of you here, then those dry lot systems. One thing I do know is this producer is south of Fargo was was brought in cows and had them all throughout this barn. And what they were doing is they weren't necessarily limit feeding a high energy diet was a lot of forage. If you can kind of see that in the bunk, but they were providing those loafing areas that calves need to get away from those cows. And but they were allowing cows to come eat at the bunk. And so there's a lot more questions we have here on what's bunk space allocation in this system? How many times a day do you need to feed if you're going to start limit feeding? And then what are the behavior outcomes? Because one thing I didn't talk about was we had a lot of cows. If you put a salt block in that bunk, it was gone in three days, right? Because you're limit feeding. And so they have enough, they go to it, right? In that way. And so I think there's, we had a lot of cows consuming dirt out of the floor pen. Because again, we weren't utilizing what Byrne was doing where they had a, they had wheat straw on the back of the pen where they could chew on that and use that as bedding as Warren was talking about. We weren't doing that. And I think we saw some of the, the effects of that. But again, a lot more questions and answers when it comes to these barns and what to do. So real quick, like, you know, what are our tradeoffs? Limit feeding probably need to feed more than once maybe in that system to keep cows happy. We talked about bunk space, we talked about square footage, access water and bunk space to calves. If that's the way you're going to provide the feed for those calves, expect to wean earlier. And then tradeoffs and priorities need to be calf health, calf comfort, closely monitor those feed costs, cows need time to adjust. And one thing I didn't mention, but I should is, unintentionally, we did a social experiment when we did that, that switching, comparing pasture to dry lot, because our cow manager had to take what he had done for the last 15 years on pasture. And he now had to manage cows on that same pasture and now manage cows in dry lot. And I can say he had some stressful days because he was a cow guy. He wasn't a feedlot guy. And so while cows need time to adjust, and we kind of saw that through the data, managers, you all will need time to adjust. It's a different system. There's a lot more feedlot mentality that goes into it that creates its own issues. And so I think as much as cows and the system needs to change, it's also a paradigm shift moving from ranching into thinking more in the feedlot setting. Again, this is thinking about right the idea that there's no more pasture anyway. The only way to do this is to expand in that way. And so I hope today was helpful. I hope you got a lot out of it. And certainly want to thank you all for coming and spending the day with us. It's really nice to have folks show up and participate in this. And it's been a great two days, Warren. We've had a lot of good discussions. And so thank you all.