 Hi, I'm Zach Carlson, extension beef cattle specialist here at North Dakota State University. Cattle producers have a lot of challenges this year. Extreme periods of drought led to reduced hay production, reduced pasture production, high feed prices, extreme cold temperatures throughout many parts of the winter, and in April, heavy blizzards and large amounts of precipitation across many parts of the state, while a lot of cattle producers are still within their calving season. What I want to talk about today are amongst all those challenges, getting our cows prepared after calving, going into this coming breeding season. We do know that for a cow to maintain a calving interval of 365 days, so calving each year around the same day, she must rebreed 80 to 85 days after calving. That is not a large period of time or long period of time to make any nutritional changes and make changes to that cow going into that breeding season. We do know body condition scoring is an effective management tool to estimate the energy reserves of a cow. So if we can monitor multiple times a year, say a calving and a breeding, it's a good indicator of direction of body weight change. Now a thin cow at calving would be classified as a mature cow with a body condition score of four or less on a scale of one to nine. The ideal body condition score for a mature cow being that of a five at calving. A large influence on the reproductive success of a cow is the direction and magnitude of body weight change after calving going into the breeding season. Because nutritional demands for lactation after calving can be quite high, it's difficult sometimes for cows to be gaining weight during that period of time. But research has shown that thin cows in a thin body condition, so again four or less, that are gaining weight after calving going into the breeding season and continue gaining weight throughout the breeding season have similar pregnancy rates to those cows of moderate body condition, say a score of five or so, that maintain their weight. And so we can use this information and identify our thin cows that may have issues going into this breeding season if we can sort them off and manage them a little different, possibly bringing in some additional supplemental feed. While pasture turnout will likely be delayed for many, even while on pasture, green grass won't solve all of our winter feeding issues in relative to these thin cows, less spring forage can pose nutritional challenges with that spring pasture being high in crude protein but also in water content. Therefore supplementing thin cows and pasture might be required to keep those thin cows gaining weight and moving in a positive plane of nutrition going into and during the breeding season. Now, past spring pastures are often high in crude protein and so what we really need to be supplementing are energy feed sources. Those can often be considered any grain supplement or what I would call highly fermentable fibers which are often our co-product feeds, soy holes, feed pulp, distillate screens, wheat meds and corn gluten feed are great sources of supplemental feed that we can be providing to these cows. If there's any additional corn silage, that can also be a great supplement while cows are out on pasture. Again, we want to target the supplementation to thin cows so keeping sorting them apart from the rest of the mature cows in your herd will be important to not only reduce the economic costs associated with additional supplementation but we'll also make sure and ensure those thin cows are actually getting that supplement where our other cows won't need that. With high feed prices, it's really critical that you price these supplemental feeds on a price per unit of energy. With that in mind, consider delivery costs and costs associated with feeding, potentially grinding that feed, storing it as well as the potential shrink and make sure you're accounting for that.