 Hi, my name is Carl Hoppe, I'm an Extension Livestock Specialist here at the NDSU Carrington Research Extension Center. Today I'm a beef cattle nutritionist and beef cattle management specialist and today I'd like to talk about field peas and distillage grains. This summer we had a unique pricing opportunity with the COVID virus issues and the lack of gasoline demand and ethanol demand go along with it. We had ethanol plants that reduced their production of distillage grains and consequently distillage grains was getting to be difficult to obtain. If you wanted wet or dry distillers you might have to choose between one or the other. Well, if you're dealing with dry distillers there might be other feed grains that are available. One of them is field peas. I'll take a look at this right here. We've got this, it's a round pea, it's green, some are yellow, you can see some yellows in there. Field peas are between 25 and 23 to 27% crude protein. Well distillage grains is about 30 so it's a high protein feed and we fed cattle here at the Research Extension Center using field peas as a replacement for corn. So while it's a protein source it's actually an energy source as well. The energy content is around 90% TDN, corn is 89%. How much field peas can you feed? We fed rations up to 85% field peas in the ration so we can feed a high level of field peas if they're cost competitive. Usually these field peas are utilized for human consumption. So they're priced at $6 to $7 a bushel. This year the price is around $5 a bushel which means it's around $200 a ton. Distillage grain, the spring, we're running for $200 a ton. When you include freight issues and transportation, field peas become an alternative to using distillage grains. Now distillage grains is a highly palatable feed. It works quite well in rations. It's gold, this is dried, it's very yeasty, has a great smell to it. Cattle just go after it, hits around 30% crude protein. The TDN value ranges depending upon how much fat is in the distillage grains but it could be, we roughly use 89% TDN for that. So with that priced at $200 a ton, if you include the freight on top of it, field peas work into a ration quite well. However, times have changed, now it's June-July of 2020 and the price of distillage grains have gone down to $140 a ton and field peas are still at $200 a ton. So there was a pricing opportunity, field peas worked quite well in rations but now distillage grains are back to a normal price and work quite well in a background finishing. Lactating, gestating, cow ration almost any way into the ration, you just have to limit the amount of distillage grains in the ration because of perhaps sulfur content and negative associated effects when feeding it.