 I want to talk about some developing replacement heifers, though, and a couple issues that I see we may need to consider, both now and the immediate time being when it comes to picking out a replacement heifers, but then also as we near breeding time on these groups of animals. So just three things, you know, the first is making sure we're picking the right heifers, and then we're going to go through defining some of our targets, and then also some breeding soundness exams on heifers, which have been largely overlooked, but become very important when it comes to marketing some of our heifers. So we're going to start with just a blanket question selecting the right heifers. And I see Brian, you were in the audience there in Strater. This is a group of calves that's standing up on the pasture. This is mid-summer, a while ago, but when you look over this group of animals, you know, which heifers have an advantage, okay? So if we've got this group of animals, and it's mainly some straight bread or getting towards straight bread angus calves, how do we go about selecting our heifers out of a group like this? You know, another vision that comes to mind when we get into a group of heifers that looks a little bit different, okay? Are the selection tools the same for these groups of heifers? Are we looking for similar things? And so you can start to go down your laundry list, right? If I've got a heifer that's got a real high birth weight, am I going to keep her? If I've got a heifer that was born extremely late, am I going to keep her? If I have a heifer that, in my eyes, is a dog, am I going to keep her, right? So these things all need to be considered. And these are things that most of us go through every year when we're picking our replacement heifers. So again, the first one, is she physically sound? The second one, is she genetically superior? And genetically superior has a lot of different meanings to different people, okay? Hopefully, if we're retaining our own heifers, we've taken the time to invest it in good quality genetics to give us a superior heifer product. If we have got some straight red cattle, there are several breeds out there that do have genetic tests available to find out, are all heifers created equally, even from the same sire, some have more genetic potential than others. Going down into the birth characteristics, I did mention just straight birth weight. But did we have any other dystocia? Are there physical characteristics about that calf that made birthing difficulty that she would pass on to her offspring? Then a real important one in there is birth date, right? When the calving season was this animal born. And then the final one, which heifers have an advantage, those heifers that are bred to calf early. So I'm going to take those last two items and we're going to kind of expound on some considerations regarding those. So the first one that we're going to talk about is longevity. And this is heifers based on when they actually calved out, okay? And broken into two separate groups. So the blue bar up on top here, these are heifers that calved within the first 21 days of the calving season, okay? Moving down here, the yellow bar on the bottom. These are heifers that calved anytime after that first 21 days. And as we go through basically going from the top of the graph to the bottom of the graph, that means that fewer and fewer heifers are actually still in the herd, okay? So what this tells me is that my average longevity, so the average amount of time that a heifer stays in the herd. If she calved herself within that first 21 days of the calving season, she stayed in the herd about five years, okay, 5.1 years. We moved that to anything that calved any later, right? We kept them in the herd and we tried to rebreat them and everything else. We had an entire year knocked off of their longevity. So what this tells me is that these heifers that are calving early just by selecting those animals, they essentially end up with one extra year in a herd. And again, that you can see on the bottom of the slide. This slide and the next one are courtesy of George Perry down at South Dakota State University. So that's a longevity issue, longevity alone. And of course, it's not that simple. We know that if a heifer calves early compared with something that calves 21 days later, we're probably also going to have an advantage in weaning weight that particular year. What this chart looks at is those heifers, their first calf, this is to be expected by design. So on the far left, this dark blue line, these are heifers that calved from day one to 22 of that calving season and then moving on from day 22 to 42 in the real late cavers. And we see that not only do we have a weight advantage, a weaning weight advantage in this first calf, but that's also present in the second calf and the third calf and the fourth calf, fifth calf, all the way up to the sixth calf that these heifers have, right? So basically, when you have a heifer that calves early, you set her up for a lifetime of heavier weaning weights. And so additional weaning weight advantage, if you add all up from year one out to year six, all these differences, that equivalents out to an additional calf. So we had one calf from just the longevity of that cow being there. We had the equivalent of another calf just because of all the extra accumulated weaning weight. So at the end of the day, how do we capitalize on this two calf advantage? Okay, and this comes back to a question of are we set up to increase the number of heifers retained? Both Tim and John did talk about this in terms of where are we at with our replacement heifers, and it would be interesting to put some economics to some of the scenarios I'm about to present. But if we want to consider this, increasing the number of heifers retained, there's a couple of things that we really need to focus on. The first is, so yet increase the number, what does that mean? What does that target number of replacement heifers need to be? In order to figure that out, we need to know roughly what proportion of our heifers are getting pregnant early. And probably the most important is, what are we going to do with our non-conformers? Do we have a market secured for those animals that don't become pregnant early? So this is just a couple of real simple things. And if we have a target number of replacement heifers, say we want 100 heifers to come back into our herd, right? The next thing I said we need to go through is what proportion of our heifers typically calve early, right within that first 21 days. This particular group, say our past performance was 60%. Then the math is really simple. We divide 100 heifers and add additional 60%. That means we need to retain 167 heifers. We take these 167 heifers, we breed them all. And again, we only keep those heifers that become pregnant to that first, either insemination or the first extra cycle that the bull covers. We go in, say we had a little better reproductive performance, and divide by 68%. We're just shy of 150 heifers that we need in that scenario. Say I only need 25 heifers, a number 60%. That means I need to retain 42 heifers to make this thing work. Now, that's a concept, okay? We definitely have some benefits of keeping more heifers, but there's some mandatory questions that these are kind of like do not pass go, right? So if the answer to these questions is no, this scenario may not be in our best interest. So number one, do we have enough high quality heifers, right? That this is kind of an overarching question. Some people are extremely selective about the heifers that they do keep. And we have extremely high phenotype standards, extremely high genetic standards. And if you need 30 replacement heifers and there are only 30 heifers in your herd that you think are the quality you need. Well, we don't have the heifers. This is also kind of a gut check time for what does it take in your eyes to be replacement quality, okay? And again, the concept of keeping more heifers needs to force that question. Okay, so do we have the feed or pasture resources? This is really straightforward. We're retaining an additional group of cattle that we didn't plan on retaining before. So do we have those feed and pasture resources available for us? Can we accurately identify age of pregnancy? This really comes down to a timing of pregnancy evaluation or just a strategy of making sure we only have those early cattle, early pregnancies kept. A simple strategy is we're going to go ahead and we're only going to have a 21 day breeding season. Or we're going to go ahead and we are only going to artificially inseminate a group of heifers once, okay? That's one extreme that's controlled from the breeding side. The other is we're going to come in and we're going to ultrasound our cattle fairly early. Kind of as soon as we can physically get in there and ultrasound confidently to go in and make sure that we identify those early pregnancies that way. And this one gets really critical. Do we have a solid marketing plan? If we look at when the big rungs of grass calves start to hit our markets, right? There are many, many systems that would essentially be expansive stocker operations where we go in, we have a very short defined breeding season. If we get in and pre-check our heifers early enough, all of those heifers that are open were outside of our window. Those open heifers, they will fit right into that grass market. And those heifers that happen to be bred, but not within the window that we're looking at, those can certainly hit some bred heifer sales later on. And again, that's just kind of, the other option that I do have up here is that if you are set up to retain those heifers through finishing, you would essentially be feeding a real heavy yearling heifer. She's probably 800, 900 pounds by the time you get her pre-check this time of the year. Get her on feed and have her out by New Year's or shortly thereafter. All right, so defining targets, moving on from the concentration on those early bred heifers. We talk about developing replacement heifers, and I've got this on here. It's kind of interesting, maintaining sufficient growth. And the next couple slides are really just focusing on, well, what is sufficient growth? We want our heifers to be pubertal at a fairly young age. We want them to become pregnant early. And we also need to control costs as much as possible. And we've had some previous speakers talk about budgets. Carl Hoppe's gonna talk about some feedstuffs and resources that are available to help control some of our costs. But if we just look at it, a 550 pound heifer on the left side, we've got gain here, so she's six-tenths of a pound. And as we go up to 375, we have a coincident increase in the needs for total digestible nutrients with essentially calories for cows and crude protein. Okay, these are really straightforward concepts. We can track our heifer diets and make sure we hit certain target growth rates. Well, the question comes back as to what should those growth rates be? Here we've got another group of cattle that's just out eating corn stalks, okay? Are corn stalks a proper development location for our replacement heifers? Some people may say, yep, sure. Some people may say, well, absolutely not. And the answer, of course, is it depends on what works for your system. In order to really define where we're at, what we need to start answering some key questions. And number one is, do we have some idea of what our mature cowweights are, right? This group of heifers that we either raise ourselves or that we've purchased, what is our mature cow weight? And this is a real weight. This isn't, well, I think they're 1,200 pound cows, right? This is where our average mature cow weights at. We need to know the weaning weight or at least the weight that we start these heifers at. We need to know how old these heifers are when we breed them. So 180 days, six months, right? Wean them at six months, breeding age 420 that's like 14 months. And then those numbers probably aren't far off. And then just how many days between point A? Heifers came into the lot on this day. We're gonna breed them on this day. What do our weights need to be in that interval? Now, there are several questions that people have in terms of what should my percentage of mature weight, right? So I've got this number up here, 1,300 pounds. What percentage of that should I have for breeding? And this is a topic that's received a lot of different people looking from a research standpoint at this and a lot of discussion in several different sectors of the beef community. And it comes down to a standard recommendation that had been around for years and years is to have this target, have that heifer be at about 65% of her mature body weight at the time of breeding. And there are researchers that have looked at reducing this number down to 58% to 60%, even lower than 55% here. And again, that's a topic that does deserve to be talked about. But it's much bigger than 20 minutes here in this presentation with everything else going on. But essentially, once we have a target identified, then we just do the math and say, all right, if it's 65% of mature body weight, she needs to be 845 pounds, we can go out and calculate what should our daily gains be to hit all of these targets, right? And if we're going for some of these light weights, we want 810 of a pound, upper end is probably about a pound and a half, which is what John had in his break even budget for heifers as replacements. The next thing I'm going to talk about, because I'm running out of time already, I love it, is heifer breeding stymus exams. And heifer breeding stymus exams are something that get to be really, really important in a couple scenarios. Number one is if you are buying up groups of replacement heifers as we go through different sales barns or whatever, if we're trying to package together heifers from a bunch of different sources and we don't necessarily know the background on these animals, these breeding stymus exams can be excellent methods of identifying heifers that will potentially breed and conceive, carry a calf for us, as well that when we come into measuring some of the pelvic areas of these animals, a heifer can have extreme difficulty when we go to come calving time. So this is a chart that I use quite often or a figure that I use quite often when I'm talking about estrosynchronization, but this is essentially a reproductive track of an animal. We've got the cervix here, the uterus, uterine horns. We've got some overdux and then two ovaries. So as we come in and we look at these, the two most important structures, the two structures we focus on, on a reproductive track are a follicle and a follicle essentially contains an egg that comes out and ovulates if we're trying to breed this heifer. We have semen that enters into the reproductive track, floats on down here and as the egg and sperm come, meet at a junction right about here, fertilization takes place. Shortly after ovulation of a follicle in place of this follicle, we have the corpus luteum develop. So the only time a heifer has a corpus luteum is after she has had an ovulation. So that means that these heifers are actively cycling. These are the structures, if I were to take ovaries out and actually look at them. The follicle just looks like a blistered corpus luteum. It's Latin for yellow body. And so this is a yellow glandular type organ that does develop on these ovaries. Our reproductive track score is just to go in and physically palpate these heifers and evaluate two different things. Number one is what are the structures on the ovaries? And number two, what is the diameter of the uterus? And we take that at the external junction of our uterine horns. So we come in here and we take a measurement, what is that diameter? Now if we go from reproductive track score of one to five, we can see uterine diameter less than 10 millimeters. What is less than 10 millimeters? Well, a little less than a pencil, a little less than a number two pencil and diameter. And as we get higher scores, that number moves up. Essentially reproductive track score is a one, is an infantile track, there's no palpable follicles. So we don't have anything there that tells us we've got activity on these ovaries. The other thing that we can find with reproductive track score one, and this is why I said it's important when you're getting groups of bought up heifers that you don't necessarily know the background on, or even in some instances where we know the background, we can still identify some of these heifers. This is a normal reproductive tract, right, we've got uterus, uterine horns, ovaries. This is a reproductive tract of a free martin. So this is an animal that was born twin to a bull. Again, we do not have a normal junction from the cervix into the uterine horns. It kind of looks like a scun out rat, now it's giving us this little tail on it here. This is something that no matter what you do, this animal is not going to get pregnant. Reproductive track score has helped us determine which animals will or will not likely become pregnant. Now we have a general recommendation. So if we're doing these just prior to breeding, so now we are out in, depending on when your breeding season is, after the development phase is complete, we're out into April, maybe May with some of these exams, 45 days prior to breeding, general recommendation is about half of the heifers, a reproductive tract scores four and five. And both of these, you know, see here we've got this word CL, that's corpus luteum. That tells us these heifers are cyclic. And so what, right? We go in and we do all these reproductive tract scores, what does that mean for us? So the first diagram here, this is pregnancy rate. This is from a paper that was published in 2009. And let me tell you, these are the best pregnancy rates to reproductive tract score one heifers that I've ever seen published anywhere. Normally, we get like 5% pregnant, okay? But this is what they found. As we move up, again, these reproductive tract scores four or five, we have very high pregnancy rates to AI. And again, we come out here to final pregnancy rates. At the end of the breeding season, a much larger proportion of these heifers are pregnant with reproductive tract scores four and five compared with these heifers with smaller reproductive tract scores. Moving on from reproductive tract scores and pregnancy, this is actual calving, okay? So this is the time from the start of calving season until the average calf was born and these herds, 53 days, right? These reproductive tract scores one. Let's just say that is a late calving animal. Move up here, these fours or fives, you're averaging from day 15 to 20 of the calving season. And that also shows in calf weaning weights. So as we move into the heavier reproductive tract or the higher reproductive tract scores, we end up with heavier calf weaning weights. Come in here. Now this is the following breeding season, okay? So we got everything through, all the calls were called, everything was out that was going to be removed in terms of non-breeders, things like that. This is a percent of those heifers that were cyclic at the time the next breeding season started, okay? So again, as we move up in reproductive tract scores, higher proportion of those heifers are cycling and this is pregnancy to the next AI the following year after we did these reproductive tract scores and we still see that there is an advantage of these heifers that had a reproductive tract score of four and five. So with that, just kind of summarizing, the concept of keeping more heifers for breeding and selecting those heifers, only those heifers that become pregnant early can certainly impact cow herd longevity. In addition to cow herd longevity, it can impact the overall pounds of calf wean per female in her lifetime. Identifying certain weights, right? We've got our current weight, what is our potential mature weight, what is our target breeding weight? Once we know those things, designing the nutritional strategy is pretty straight forward. Again, there's a lot of considerations that come in in terms of feeds and the actual feeding strategies, but those are going to be covered by other people. And then the final one, reproductive tract scores offer both immediate benefits and some long-term information that can impact, again, lifetime productivity of our females. So with that, I will turn it back over to Carl. Are there any questions for Carl? If I were to have a producer ask me, who can... If I were to have a producer ask me, who can I go to to get one of these scores done? Who would I talk to? The first thing I would do, great question, by the way, the first thing I would do is I would talk to a local veterinarian and see if they are trained in this particular strategy. If not, I do put some veterinarians that are, and also if the veterinarian finds that this is something that can build a practice that would be more than happy to go through a training process with the veterinarians so they can provide this service. And then I guess my second question, would you say as a whole for breeding replacement heifers, would you want to use AI versus a natural service sire? You know, that's a great question. You know, should I use an AI sire? Should I use a natural service sire? And it goes back to, you know, what are your abilities and goals? What are your handling systems, those kind of things? There's something really, really nice about using proven sires in terms of sires that we know are not going to have a wreck from a calving use standpoint, right, that offers certain benefits genetically, but sometimes it's just a whole lot easier to go out there and turn out the bulls. If you are trying to market bred heifers, there are certain advantages of being able to put together packages of AI bred heifers from standpoint too, but really it comes back to what are your goals in, you know, are you going to keep these heifers? Are you going to sell them? And that could really hone in that answer, but certainly a consideration. It's a lot easier to do in heifers than it is cows.