 Hello everybody, I'm Brian Neville, the animal scientist here at the Carrington Research Extension Center. Thanks for joining us this year via this virtual format. We're sorry you can't be here in person but look forward to seeing you next year. Today I'm going to share a little bit of research with you that we've conducted in conjunction with the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center and the North Dakota State University Department of Animal Science looking at mineral programs. The focus of our research was on evaluating the impacts of pre and post weaning trace mineral programs on beef performance. From the standpoint of our research we wanted to compare two extremes in mineral programs for cows nursing calves by offering no access to trace minerals for cows on pasture versus those with free choice access to trace minerals while on pasture. What we found is that liver samples from the calves from these cows had higher copper and slightly higher selenium levels when coming from cows offered free choice mineral. Further when we evaluated the weaning weights of these calves under the two trace mineral programs we found that calves with access to trace mineral weighed eight pounds more at weaning than their contemporary calves without access to mineral. We then coupled those two treatments with two post weaning trace mineral programs in which trace minerals were supplied as either a sulfate form or chelate form of the minerals. If we just focus on copper concentrations of the calves we find that post weaning trace mineral source impacted the rate of accumulation of copper with calves fed the chelated forms of the minerals having greater liver stores than those fed copper as a sulfate source after 53 days on feed or essentially a background in time frame. We were able to further demonstrate that calves fed chelated minerals had greater average daily gain during the backgrounding period however post weaning trace mineral source did not impact average daily gain during finishing. As we continue this line of research we hope to expand our evaluations to include more detailed measures of animal health with the goal of providing information to our North Dakota beef producers that help them choose pre weaning and post weaning mineral programs that improve both on farm and subsequent feedlot performance. As we wrap up this segment I'd like to thank our funding agency North Dakota EPSCORE for the funding provided for this grant as well as the staff at Central Grasslands Research Extension Center and the staff at North Dakota State University Department of Animal Sciences for their cooperation in this project. We hope to see you all here next year.