 So, the topic I'm going to address tonight is this backgrounding heifers and making management decisions about whether these are replacement heifers or feedlot heifers or can we do both kind of at the same time. So with that, I'm first going to make a comment about Jerry Stucka. We really like to welcome him into NDSU and his job is indeed to look at our livestock industry and talk about the stewardship aspect. He hinted on a little bit of that stewardship aspect in talking about the way that we treat our animals and doing the best by the animals. The other half of that is all the producers telling other people what they do to help their animals and how they manage those animals well. So Tracy, you saw this yesterday. This is one of the North Dakota producers who is speaking out, telling everybody what they think about the beef industry. So if you guys can look at that slide, look at kind of the bottom right hand corner. There's somebody there speaking out well, encouraging people to eat beef. So with that, these are the things I'm going to talk about. So talk about two different systems, the replacement heifers and the feedlot heifers and what the goals of those are. Going on through some nutrient needs, managing gains, and then probably going to run out of time well before I get to the actual impact of technologies, but I know Carl hinted at it. I think John may have hinted at it. So it's probably fine to drop that out for today. So we've got a nice little heifer, right? First thing we're going to talk about, what are the goals of these different systems? Because we all start at the same level. We all start with these heifer calves right about now. Time to get them weaned. A lot of early weaning that's going to happen in the state. So how do we manage that? So when we look at the goals for replacement heifers, we do want to have some growth there. Same focus, if we don't get our cattle pregnant, this is a problem. So we want them to come into heat. We want them to come into heat at a fairly young age. The more times the heifer has the opportunity to come into heat prior to breeding, the better her pregnancy rates are going to be once she's in that breeding season. So we want them to do this at a young age. And then also above all, control costs. You're going to probably see that thing on the next slide too. Moving into the feeder heifers. We want to put on efficient growth prior to feedlot entry. We want to have sufficient gain and also sufficient frame because there's some things that you can do to these feeder heifers that really change the size and shape of that animal as she enters a feedlot. We don't want to sacrifice any carcass characteristics and of course we want to control costs. The thing about these, and actually this is the same for both systems, the specific goals of these different systems really depend on the ownership structure. You can manage heifers differently if you're going to own them from the time they are putting a back running yard until the time they are finished. You can afford to have a little bit fleshier heifer going into the feedlot period whereas if you have that fleshy heifer and you put her in a sales barn, you might get docked pretty significantly for that. Ownership structure pays a big difference in both of these scenarios. The question then is can these goals overlap? Can we have these real nice two-way heifers that you've managed? Somebody can pick them up either as replacements or as feedlot heifers. These are the things to consider and we're going to go through these in detail in the next couple of slides. The first one is growth rate. There are some things that we can do that really influence whether or not these heifers would be able to be sold either as replacements or feeders. The type of gain, and by type of gain I specifically mean when that gain occurs. And then also the actual management of those calves. All right. So first things first, what are your targets? John talked about this a little bit, some different scenarios in there. But what is a target if you're just going to take that heifer and put her into a feedlot? We want to put on some substantial gain. And there's a lot of data out there that looks at gains through backgrounding phases and where your most profitability is if you're just selling those calves right after backgrounding. And time and time again if you've got the feed costs right, it appears that the higher you can get these cattle to gain, the more profitable you are at the end of the day. So get them in there, push them hard. Hard, I'd say we're going to maybe show up here. Two and a quarter to two and a half pounds per day. We can get them to grow faster than that. But then you run into some questions about the flesh on the other end. OK, for replacements, well that really depends. It depends on a lot of different things. So these are just some numbers out there that are pretty representative of our industry. And I don't have a cursor on the screen. Oh, here I do. I'm going to bring it up here. So what we need to do when we're talking about targeting gains in our replacement females is first start out with our mature cow weights. OK, because that's really going to dictate how we manage these heifers coming into the feedlot or the backgrounding phase, rather. So average cow out there in the United States is about 1,300, 13 and a half. So if you don't know what your cows weigh, we can go and we can look at cullery seats from our cull cows. Most likely those are bigger, older cows. So they're probably going to be a bit heavier than your average. The other one that's going to get culled quite often is that one year or two year old cow that didn't get pregnant. It's going to give you a pretty good indication of what that mature weight is. We got to look at the weaning weight and then just some simple math. Say we weaned her now, April-born calf, 180 days, about six months old. OK, what's her breeding age? What should that target be? 420 days, he is about 14 months of age. And we say that because we want to breed these heifers a little bit ahead of the cow herd, get them into production that leaves a little bit longer window for them to come back and get pregnant. So as those two year olds, they have a better chance of becoming pregnant. So we just do a little bit of math. 420 minus 180, and I hope that math is right, takes about 240 days that we have to play with from the time of weaning until we get to the time of breeding. So there's a lot of talk, and I could probably spend an hour talking about the different target breeding weights. So the 65%, this is a historic number. It's been around a long time. Say at the time of breeding, you want that heifer to be 65% of a mature body weight. There's some research out there and quite a lot of it that says, well, maybe we can move that down. OK, so a number that's been researched quite a lot is this 58% of body weight. So is this a reasonable number? And some other work that says, well, maybe even a little bit lower is 53% of body weight. Again, I can talk about that a lot in a different day. For the rest of this slide presentation, I'm going to use the 65% of body weight. That means that heifer needs to get up to about 845 pounds by the time she's ready to breed. Again, simple math. That means we need to put on 345 pounds between now and the time we breed. Daily gain on that animal needs to be about 1.44 pounds. So that's what we need to hit at a target breeding weight. So back to this question, can these goals overlap? This is a study that looked at three different strategies. One strategy was to hold these heifers to a consistent gain over the entire development period. So starting at weaning down in your bottom left-hand corner and moving all the way up through breeding is just one steady straight line. That was our treatment, too. Another study said, well, all three of these treatments wanted to end at the same target breeding weight. This treatment said, well, we're going to restrict these heifers early on. And about halfway through the development phase, we're really going to turn them up. And we're going to have them gain a little bit faster just at the second half of that development period. And the third treatment here, they basically said, I'm going to push the heifers hard and hot right away. And once we get up to that midpoint, I'm going to back them off and just let them coast into breeding. So those are the three treatments. Again, treatment one, we called it late, which means you put on the gain later. Treatment two is even, steady rate. Treatment three was early, pushed them hard early. All right, so this is what it looked like in terms of time of gain. And you can look through all the items on there. We've got aged estrus. How many were actually in puberty when the breeding season began? What was the AI conception rate? And this wasn't a single AI conception rate. This was two consecutive services. So that would be a really nice first service AI rate, but that's not what we're talking about here. And then what also was the weight at breeding? So when we look at that, among all these factors, among all the treatments, there was no difference. So the way I would interpret that is that you've got flexibility. We can do some different things with our heifer development. Depending on your specific scenario. So we could do this. We could have some nice two-way cattle in there. We can push them hard. We can restrict them. Really depends on what you want to do. So the question comes back, what do you really want to do? Is there one of these that's going to be better for you at the end of the day? We really talk about feed testing, right, and the importance of this. So this is a feed test that we got back just the other day. And on here, we've got all these different nutrient characteristics. So this is a grass, alfalfa hay mix. Traditionally, we think maybe this is about a 14% protein mix, something like that. We talk about the value of feed testing. We'll bring up a little bigger picture here. Our crude protein percent, just under nine. So if we thought this was a traditional feed, well, we're wrong. It's a little bit different. But then come down here towards the bottom. And what are all these energy calculations? What are we talking about here? Now, those were addressed earlier in some presentations. But those get to be really important when you decide how you want to manage your heifers. So we've got different gains on the left-hand side. These come straight out of the Beef NRC book. So this talks about requirements of cattle for different gains. So that 550-pound heifer, and I convert all of my nutrients into actual pounds, because we don't feed a percent. I mean, I don't know how to put a percent in a bucket, but I really know how to put a pound in a bucket pretty well, right? So to calculate pounds of TDN, we have the dry matter content of the feed. I take a pound of it, multiply by the percent of TDN. That's what the feed test gives us, a percent of TDN. That'll tell you how many pounds are in that food. So we need 7.6 pounds of TDN with a .64 gain, moving all the way up. If we really want to push these animals hard, 375 gain, that's a feedlot finishing diet. We need 12 pounds of TDN. So this is what these animals need to gain as a total to gain those different weights. But there's this other concept that's really, really important. And one of the numbers that is given there is maintenance energy. So maintenance energy is basically the energy that it takes for an animal just to do its daily stuff. To live, eat, breathe, have good digestive function, all internal organs working the way they're supposed to, and neither gain nor lose weight. And I think maintenance energy, I think, bulls, right? Mature cows. These are animals that we don't want to do a whole lot of weight changing on unless they need to gain condition. Bulls, after breeding, we'd be feeding above maintenance energy unless they were with one cow and they didn't have to walk anywhere, didn't lose body condition at the end of the day. So maintenance energy. This is an equation. I'm not going to go over that a whole lot. But basically, maintenance energy, real important here, this W, that means body weight. Maintenance energy is dictated by body weight. As your animal weight increases, your maintenance energy increases as well. Pretty simple concept. So now we go back. I just made this slide up to represent three different scenarios. Again, we've got the late gainers who we restrict and then put up the early gainers and then something that's kept steady the whole way. So these even gain, we kept them at a pound per day. Late heifers were restricted. The early heifers, these are the heifers that were kept in with the steers and they were backgrounded as a single group. So target gain on all those animals was two and a half. And this is actually a fairly common practice. So we keep our heifers in there, keep with the steers. We want to decide what to do sometime later. So now we compare our growth rates. So we're going to keep these calves now, they're about 500 pounds, and we're going to keep them up until February. Think if I do that math right, that's about 120 days, give or take. And then I've got the different growth rates on the side here. So going from a half a pound. Those animals that I said were going to be restricted, I didn't keep them at a flat gain. I said I'm going to gain a half a pound a day. So just a little bit. Pounds gained is the pounds gained during that 120 day period. The calf weight, that's the calf weight at the end of those 120 days. And then the NEM column. What this talks about is what is the energy required and this is total megacalories. We don't talk about this a whole lot, but that's what that number is. Total megacalories that it takes just to maintain this calf for one day. So I need 4.97 megacalories at a half pound gain, 6.49 megacalories at 2.5 pounds gain. So can we do everybody a favor and translate this into something we can all deal with? I can handle that. How many pounds of hay? This was a hay that we had tested before, right? So a half pound of growth rate. I need 7.6 pounds of that hay just to maintain that animal. Everything above that goes to growth. On this 2.5, I need 10 pounds of hay. So then the question is, how much additional feed does it actually take to raise these heavy calves? I've got this little graph again. Going from that even gain animal up to that early gain animal, every single day that animal is alive now, it needs an extra 1.2 pounds just to live. It's not to gain, not to do anything else, just to live. On the other side, if I restrict those animals, they can deal with 1.2 pounds less just to stay alive. So the difference between these two systems, some type of restricted gain system compared with a system where we've kept these calves in with our steers mixed them together and fed them at 2.5 pounds a day, it's 2.4 pounds of hay additional that it takes just to make that animal live. So the moral of the story is that if we restrict these animals, at the end of the day, we need the same amount of net energy of gain. This is how much energy it actually takes to put on a pound of tissue. We need the same amount of gain to get them to this point, because we're all having the same target weight. But by restricting these heifers, you end up with an extremely lower maintenance energy requirement. So at the end of the day, what that means is that you're retaining these replacement heifers. If you incorporate some type of strategy where you're restricting their gains, your feed costs are going to be much lower. Compared with deciding later, after these calves are backgrounded, whether or not you want to feed them or whether you want to rehab them as replacements. So some other considerations. And again, I know I am over time. So these are the implants and ionophores, right? If you are taking your calves and selling them at a sales barn, this is some data that was collected at sales barns North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, went through the sales barn and looked at all the lots of calves as they came through and looked at whether they had vaccinations, whether they were natural cattle, quote unquote, natural cattle, whether they had implants. This little line down on the bottom that says implants, during the four seasons, ND means no difference. So that told me that people who are buying the calves, they did not discount heifers that were not implanted. So at that point, it's an opportunity cost issue. So by not implanting your low cattle, you were losing some money. Now, I'm not going out and saying everybody should implant their calves, because there are some certain people who, if you're selling private treaty or something like that, really don't want those calves implanted. And if that's the case, you have to know what your market is. And the biggest thing I can encourage people to do in all of the calf marketing is have open lines of communication between you and your marketing outlet. If that's a sales barn, if that's somebody who's coming out to your place to buy private treaty, talk to them well in advance of your sale. Be very specific about what they're looking for and what they'll pay you for. And that's going to help you make the most value for your calf crop. All right, so that's that, implants. Ionophores, basically, these are things that improve feed efficiency, improve weight gain. That big red circle on there says, don't feed it to horses. You'll kill them. So if you've got cattle out there that are managed with your horses or other way around, horses that are managed with your cattle, and you're putting ionophores out in your feed bunks, H-bunks out in pasture, something like that, this could be a big problem. So what do they do at the end of the day? And again, we're running late, so I will just skip to it. They decrease daily feed intake, voluntary feed intake. And they increase your feed, or decrease your feed to gain ratio so your cattle become more efficient. So very good things to do. Implants, we've gone through them. There's a very specific implants for different types of cattle. Go ahead and look at that a lot. For feeder heifers, here's your return on investment. You look at them, a background in calf, return on investments about 12 to 1. That's a pretty good return on investment. Now, breeding cattle. These implants, why they work so well is they contain estrogens and androgens. These are things that cattle have in them naturally, naturally circulating in their body. And these are also things that are responsible for reproductive development. So if you give implants close to birth, within the first two months, a suckling calf, these animals should not be used as replacements. And I don't care what kind of implant that was. There's some real serious consequences in terms of impairing reproductive performance if implants have been given to heifers at birth or within the first two months. Now, after that, when we get out there later, we can have slowed reproductive tract development. We can have delayed time to puberty and also reduce pregnancy rates. There's different claims and different implants. So what I encourage you to do is if you're really serious about wanting to implant replacement heifers, for some reason, study your labels very, very closely. There might be some exceptions, but as a general rule, if you wanna be cautious and you wanna cover your behind, don't do it. Especially if these are gonna be replacement animals. So taking all this stuff together, you can background steers and heifers together. You can manage them for that two and a half pound growth rate. I'm not gonna tell anybody they can't do that. What I am gonna say is that the maintenance energy costs, once you get these heifers up to a certain point, is very, very expensive. So people need to remember that when they're deciding how they're gonna manage these heifers. Ionophores, very viable in almost all cases. Implants, really, really good in feeder heifers. Pretty bad in breeding heifers. And at the end of the day, you've gotta begin with the end in mind. I like the concept of having some flexibility in there. That heifers, you can either manage to sell as replacements or feeders, but you can really cut feed costs and really control things if you know when you start feeding those heifers what their destination is gonna be. So with that, I would encourage you, everybody out there at the locations who are listening over IVN, you've got a great resource in that room with you right now, you've got your counting agents there. They are in your counties to help you. So use them, don't abuse them too much, but certainly call them. And if you have any specific questions about that, my name and contact information is on the bottom and I will open it up to any questions from the audience right now. You showed with the early, late, and even the 2.4 difference caused difference in maintenance energy. So that's at the center point. And then your lines come back together. Yeah, your maintenance cost is gonna be higher, but your gain costs on the other ones are gonna be, isn't it gonna even out in the end? So the question is that slide that we had about the maintenance energy cost where there was a 2.4 pound difference in maintenance energy requirement at the midpoint, but then those lines did come back together at your target breeding weight. The comment was, was that gonna even out at the end of the day? And from a gain standpoint, the net energy of gain is gonna be identical between those. But you just think about it, you're maintaining a heavier heifer longer. You've got her up to almost at that target breeding weight a full three months before you've got that other heifer up to your target breeding weight. So you are gonna have a distinct advantage in just the energy cost. Because that other one, you're maintaining her down here, she needs very, very little net energy for maintenance up until the time you ramp her up. So that's what the differential is. Now, you can't use that 2.4 pounds to calculate a difference in energy of maintenance cost throughout the period. You're very correct in that, that would be wrong. So it would have to do a little bit more math to figure out exactly what the difference in intake would be based on the maintenance energy requirement over that period. And I did not do that for this presentation. But yeah, it's not as simple as taking that 2.4 pounds and multiplying it out there. Carl, this is Carl out of Carrington. Since heifers are usually, breeding heifers are placed out on pasture. How much changing will be going on out on the pasture that will offset what happened in the feeding period? So you're talking about putting them out on pasture that may turn out? Yes, may turn out through August, September. Yeah, if we look at the nutrient contents of the grasses at that time, we get some really good spring flush, some, I'm echoing in the background there, we get some good growth there. So that gain, once you put them out on pasture, is gonna be really, really good. So that kind of goes back to this restricted model where you're holding your heifers back and then they really compensate with the compensatory gain when they're turned out onto grass. Now, the question is if you restrict them all the way through the winter until turnout, will they catch up? And we'd have to sit back and look at those numbers a little bit, but most likely they would need to have some type of feeding during that winter feeding period at a little higher rate gain to make sure that they were primed and ready to get to your target breeding weight on the day that you wanna breed them. Thank you, I see our time slipping away and it's now gonna be about 9.16. Like to say thank you for everything. Question, Carl? Yes, by all means please do. Okay. I just had one question about feeding ionophores and maybe like a coxicrum at the same time when we're starting our cattle. Is that something we can do or is it not supposed to or can you use the two together? Yeah, I'd have to look at the specific labels, but depending on your ionophore, they are labeled for control of coxidiosis. It is now, isn't it? So if you could get sufficient intake of your ionophores during that time, I know it might be a nice insurance to be feeding an ionophore and some type of coxiguard, but probably not necessary because a control would be there from the ionophore standpoint. So again, it comes back to some of the risk questions that were addressed in other presentations. How do you feel about risk? And, you know, by doubling up like that, it may make a guy sleep better at night. Jerry stuck out here at Carrington's got a comment for that. Just a couple of things I guess. This is where creep feeding comes in handy sometimes because you can utilize creep feeds in a pelleted form in which they already carry an ionophore. So if you've got calves that have been on ionophore, you're going into confinement, you're worried about coxidiosis. That's a nice time to have that ionophore in them because there is coxidiosis control associated with those ionophores. So that gives you an advantage of not having to feed an actual coxidio stat as well as the ionophore. That's one thing. The other thing too is there are some dual label clearances on some of these ionophores. If my memory serves me correctly, I think Bovatec, which is another ionophore like remensin, is labeled to be used along with Decox. So if you just starting feeding either an ionophore at the time of weaning, that would be another product you could use along with an ionophore. I think I'm right about that. And if you look at the label for Bovatec, one level is used for feed efficiency, but to control coxidiosis, I believe it's one milligram per kilogram of body weight. But there's different levels in which you need to feed in order to get coxidiosis control. Right, and that's another point that I didn't take the time to go through and talk about the individual ionophores by themselves or the individual implants by themselves. Again, those are conversations that we can certainly have either with myself or extension personnel in your counties. And there's a lot of things for people to consider at the end of the day. We need to go with the label, and if the label's not there, if there's something else that you feel needs to be done that's off-label, that should be approved through your veterinarian.