 Okay, so welcome to our next session of the NDSU Extension Agriculture Challenges webinar. Today we're going to be talking about assessing and stretching forage supplies. This originally was our last session, but we have two more scheduled and four more that we're in the process of lining up. So tomorrow, Bray and Olson is going to be joining us to talk about considerations for crop insurance. On Wednesday, Ken Helvane is going to join us and talk about grain storage and drying. Today, again, we're talking about assessing and stretching forage supplies. This has been a challenging year, as we all know. With all the rain, there's lots of production of forages high in a lot of areas of the state. Here there's challenges with getting that forage up and now with moving it back to our home operations for feeding this winter. So before we get started, just a couple housekeeping items. If you are not speaking, please mute your line. We're going to be holding all questions to the end. If you have any questions and you're figuring to forget it, type it in the chat box. We'll make sure to address them at that time. Or you can wait and ask them live at the end also. I am going to be your first speaker. I'm Miranda Meehan. I'm the Life Second Environmental Stewardship Specialist here at NDSU. And I'm going to be talking how do we inventory those forages that we do have so we can make sure we have enough. So just a recap of the situation. Across the state, we had a long, cold winter. Because of the cold's temperatures and the brutality of the winter, we went through more heat than anticipated and a lot of our producers across the state used up their beach supplies. Then again, moving into this wet summer, while there was a lot of forage in parts of the state and droughts in some parts that made forage production lower, but again, we had a lot of people had problems getting that hay up in a good quality hay up because of that extra moisture. And now with an even wetter fall, we're having issues transporting that hay back to our home operations to be able to feed it for this winter. And also, people are already starting to have to use these forage supplies because pastures that they traditionally graze in the fall are underwater and they're unable to graze them. So to be able to know, we need to inventory all our available forage supplies that includes hay, silage, standing crops, and residues. To be able to do this accurately, you're going to need to determine dry matter content of these forages. So when we inventory our hay, the first thing is to estimate our dry matter content. As a rule of thumb, it's 88% for hay stored inside and 80% for hay that's stored outside. As we know, most of our hay in North Dakota is stored outside. So take that, to determine your dry matter, you're going to take that bale weight times that percent for your storage type. So you're going to take bale weight times 0.8%, or 0.8, sorry, it's a Monday, and that's going to give you dry matter content. Next thing is you're going to estimate hay loss from storage and feeding. This can range anywhere from 5% to 45%, and it's really going to be a function of how you're feeding that hay. If you're feeding it in a bunk in daily, it's going to be pretty low, but if you're rolling it out, you're going to have a higher feeding loss from that hay. So you estimate that, then do the total available forage, you're going to take that dry matter that you previously calculated times the percent loss that you're estimating times the number of bales that you have. And that's going to give you your available forage in terms of, hey, silage is a little trickier. Silage, you're going to determine your dry matter content. The ways that most common way for you to do it at home is going to be a microwave test. We post instructions on how to do that on the website when we post the recording. As a rule of thumb with the microwave test, it's going to smell bad. So if you can try not to do it in your home microwave, if you have another option, also make sure that you put a glass of water in there because it will start on fire. The other method is, one of the other methods is a coaster test. And if you go to some of your RECs, I know Carrington, they have a coaster tester there. They can help you out there. Also they have oven dryers, which is another way to determine your dry matter content. So you're going to take your dry weight divided by your wet weight and take that times 100. And that's going to give you your percent dry matter for your silage. Below here I have a table, an estimate of your silage capacity. All the publications I found assume a certain moisture content, which makes it a little tricky. And so this one assumes 65% moisture given the challenges with our harvest this year. We know that not all of our silage is going to be at 65% moisture. So that is one of the limitations here. But you're going to do your silage depth in feet multiplied by silo width and silo length of your bunker and divide that by 50. And that gives you an estimate, but remember this is assuming that 65% moisture. For your standing forges, we talked about some of those standing grains on corn and wheat previously. So I'm not going to cover those. This is more on the ends of cover crops or some of those residues, where the most accurate way to measure these is the clipping way method. And there's instructions on how to do this and the NDSU extension range and forage per production sample kids publications. We'll put a link to that on the website also to do this. So you're going to clip 5, 1.9, 2 foot square plots, random number, but it makes the math easier. Air dry those forages. And so setting them out somewhere cool and dry in your garage and your basement somewhere has some circulation. During the summer I do dash forward, but that doesn't work well this time of year. Then you're going to, once it's dry, you're going to weigh that forage. Making sure you're subtracting the weight of the bag or whatever you're weighing it in, calculate the average weight in grams, and then you're going to take that times 50 to convert it to pounds per acre. Once you do that, you're going to multiply it by the number of acres you have. And that gives you total forage produced. However, we know animals that are grazing aren't going to utilize 100% of that forage. They're going to trample it and some of it's going to get wasted. So this is where this harvest efficiency factor comes in. For if you're wanting to leave 50% of that residue behind for soil health reasons, or if you're going to pass your setting, you're going to assume 35%, but if you're going to take everything available for grazing in a crop residue setting, you would take it times 0.75%. So your total calculation is going to be, for available forage is going to be that average plot weight in grams times 50 times the acres times your harvest efficiency factor. Once you calculate your available forage for grazing, then you would take that divided by 913, which is how many pounds of forage one AUM is going to require. So one animal requires for a month. And that's based off of a one 1,000 pound animal. So you will have to adjust as needed based on those numbers. Just a couple other considerations to reduce that forage waste. Storage site is really important when I pick a dry, well-drained site. Also make sure to try to do something that's fenced off or restricted because that's going to keep livestock and wildlife out of there. We're supposed to have another hard winter, so we really want to reduce those losses that is any way we can. Also limit access with hay. When you're feeding it, feeding it daily in a bunk significantly reduces losses are if you're feeding it as part of TMR. Also make sure you have a well-designed feeder that is in working order. So you see this feeder in this picture. There's missing some bars and so there's going to be more waste if your feeder is not in good condition. Standing forages, I know a lot of people don't like the hassle of strip raising. It's a little more work, but it makes it more efficient. And if you're not going to use a strip raising, use a high stock density because that's going to reduce that waste to trampling. The issue with using high stock density is a lot of people don't have enough animals to achieve a high stock density without strip grazing. That's all I have. I'm going to turn it over to Jana Block now at the Heddinger Research Extension Center. She's a livestock system specialist, and she is going to be talking about how do we calculate our livestock requirements. OK, good. Alrighty. Thanks, Miranda. All right, so we all know that getting the cows fed is usually the greatest expense on a typical operation, even accounting for up to 70% of your total production costs. So with most rations being highly dependent on forages as the base and knowing that those are extremely variable, it's really important to know what we have and what we're working with in order to get that nutrition program designed correctly. So I'm going to recommend that you're not relying on the whitetails showing you the best bails for calving. So why do we test feed stuffs? Really, this is the only way to truly understand what nutrients are being provided and what the target animal's nutrient requirements are in using those two pieces of information to put together a cost efficient and effective ration. So you also need feed analysis when trying to determine the value of feed, if you're trying to sell forages or other feeds, being able to compare different types of forages or feeds together when you're trying to make a choice, maybe for a purchase or to use an ration, again getting down to a lease cost type of ration, comparing feeds on cost per pound nutrient. And then, of course, being able to determine if you have a potential deficiency or toxicity at you, such as with minerals or nitrates or some of the other contaminants we've talked about in previous webinars and then using that forage analysis to best predict animal performance. So accurate sampling is extremely critical in making sure that you're getting the best information and utilizing that information to make these feeding decisions. So these are just a few factors here that I've listed that can impact nutrient content of forages, kind of the two key ones being variety and maturity at harvest, but you can see here why it's so critical that we are kind of incorporating forage sampling as part of your annual management plan and not trying to rely on previous analyses to represent the forage from this year. If you think back from the differences between last year and this year, we definitely had a lot of different precipitation, different temperatures and things like that. Those can all impact nutrient content. And so I have people ask me all the time, can't I just use my forage analysis from last year or two years ago if those years weren't exactly the same and your fields weren't exactly the same, which they never are, no, it's really best to go ahead and just retest every year. And I think it's really important to remember that a lot of the analyses that we're looking at can take a gram or less of sample. And so getting that really representative sample, we talked about identifying a lot of forage, for example. So that is forage harvested in a 48-hour period. That's the same species coming off the same field. So it's important to know what you have on hand and then collecting bale probes using hay probe from 10% of each of those lots. So I know some lots can get really large. You're talking six or 700 bales or more. Just use common sense here. I would recommend a minimum of 20 cores to represent each lot. So I mentioned that forage maturity in species can really impact nutrient quality. Just wanted to show you a little bit of data here. If you look at grasses, preheading, our crude protein content can be greater than 18%. You go down to postheading and it can be less than 8%. So you can get into a situation where that protein is actually going to limit microbial efficiency in the rumen just based on maturity of those grasses. The other component we're looking at here is NDF or neutral detergent fiber. This is a good predictor of intake because NDF estimates kind of the bulk of the forage or how much fill or space it's going to take up in the rumen. And so the lower the NDF content, the more dry matter intake can be increased because passage rate is increased and intake can increase as well. So we get into the more mature forages, NDF content increases, the soluble carbohydrates and protein go down, and we have issues with digestibility and intake. Kind of the same occurs with legumes. You can get really high protein, low NDF content, and then as those forages mature, you're going to deal with decreasing crude protein and increasing fiber content. So I think this is kind of a stumbling block. When people do get sample sent off for analysis, they don't quite know what to do with them when they get them back. There's a lot of things that we could discuss here. I'm going to try and kind of just summarize this and use some rules of thumb and be sure and follow up with me if you have questions about how exactly to use your nutrient analysis and what those different acronyms might mean. But basically what we want to encourage you to start with is do a livestock inventory and in addition to your hay inventory, look at all the different livestock classes that you need to feed this winter. What stage of production are we looking at? Weight, what are your production goals? Do we need to be increasing body condition score? Are we looking at some really heavy milkers? All these things can change from one operation to another. And then of course, environment is going to really impact the nutrients required by those animals. We have to consider wind chill and things like that when we're looking at energy levels. So once we get our livestock inventory done, we can take a look at our forage analysis and kind of group bails based on livestock requirements at different stages and then we go into formulating our rations. So I'll kind of walk you through just a quick example of how we would do this. So here's just an example herd inventory. Again, there are going to be steps involved with this. You're going to have to get out your pen and paper or your computer, whichever you prefer. So livestock class. We have mature cows in late gestation, mature cows in early lactation. We have our bred heifers, growing heifers and mature bulls. And this might vary. Again, you might have some feeder calves or some other class of livestock on hand. So just figure out what you have, how many head in each category, an average weight and then a start date for each feeding period. And so late gestation and early lactation requirements are going to be different. So I'm breaking that up into those two different periods. So December to March 1, starting calving March 1, they're going to be in late gestation. Then we're going to move into early lactation where requirements are going to be significantly higher. Okay, so this is just a kind of a rule of thumb chart for kind of fitting your different forage quality into those different livestock class requirements. It's important to remember that livestock do not require percentages of nutrients. They require pounds. And so it's going to take additional steps beyond this, but this is a place to start. If you have your forage analyses done, you can kind of start to look and figure out where those forages might best be used based on what these requirements are. We also have some rules of thumb for estimating what intake can be. I mentioned that fiber content is really a driver of digestibility and therefore intake. And so energy content is really reflective of the fiber content. And so we look at some of our lower quality forages, say less than 52% TDN. Intake is going to be lowest on those because they're just not as digestible. They sit in the room for a longer period of time and passage rate is declining. And so then you can see as you move into your higher quality forages, intake is going to increase, intake will also increase as a product of lactation. Those cows will just more rapidly digest those feeds in comparison to a dry cow. All of these estimates are assuming that protein requirements are met. If they are not, microbial efficiency will go down and digestibility and intake will decrease. And so if you're not getting these type of intakes, you could have a protein issue. And again, this is why we have to go through and figure out how to actually balance the ration based on our environmental conditions and specific cow requirements. Okay, so we have just as an example, we have some 8% protein, 52 TDN hay. So if we looked at our nutrient density requirements by stage of livestock, we wouldn't automatically use this forage in this situation. But I'm going to show you why we go through these steps to figure out why that doesn't work. And so again, we're looking at pounds, not percentages of nutrients. So if our lactating cows weigh 1300 pounds, and we're at 18 pounds peak milk in the situation, really need to know kind of where your cows are at in milk production. Not everybody knows an exact estimate, but this would be probably a fairly normal 18 to 20 pounds peak milk. And that will really dictate nutrient requirements. So they're going to need 15 pounds of TDN, two and a half pounds of crude protein. So if we go back to our chart, we know that this is a lower quality forage based on that 52% TDN. And so those lactating cows are going to be able to eat 2.2% of that forage. And so we come out with 28.6 pounds of dry matter intake. And to get that on an amount that you would actually be feeding per head per day, you take the dry matter intake divided by the dry matter content. And you come up with 33.7 pounds as fed. Okay, so when we figure out how much nutrients is actually being supplied by a forage, we're always going to use the dry matter basis. So we use dry matter 28.6, we have 8% protein. That forage is going to give us 2.2 pounds of crude protein. So if we look back up to our requirement, they need two and a half pounds. So we're a little bit deficient in crude protein based on this forage. Not surprising since we know that lactating cows are going to need usually nine to 10% crude protein in a forage. So we're deficient by 0.3 pounds. We have some dry distillers on hands that has 31% crude protein. So we'd need to feed 0.97 pounds on a dry matter basis or a little over a pound on an as fed basis. And that would meet our protein requirement. We have 0.3 pounds from the distillers to 2.2 from the hay gets us up to that 2.5. Going back to our total dry matter intake of the forage times energy content. We're at 14.8 pounds TDN. Slightly deficient might be okay. Again, depends on the condition of the cows. If you're trying to increase or maintain body condition and what the environmental conditions are on your place. But since we're feeding that pound of distillers, the energy is coming along for the ride with the protein supplement. So we're getting around 0.85 pounds of TDN from the distillers. So in total with the hay and the distillers, we're going to exceed the nutrient requirement for energy. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but you definitely want to take a look at your situation. What feed do you have on hand? Compare those on a cost per pound of nutrient basis to choose the best supplement and I know math just makes everyone's head spin. So if you want to walk through your own situation, be sure and contact me or your county agent and we can help you through that. Thank you, Janna. So our next speaker is going to be Carl Hoppe. He is a life sex system specialist at the Carrington Research Extension Center. And he's going to be talking about sourcing co-products. So we have some to help supplement our forages. Good afternoon. Yes, and we have the opportunity to talk about co-product feeds and in following with the previous speaker, we certainly has a need and some of our rations to go find extra protein, even extra energy for rations and co-products or something that we can certainly look forward to in North Dakota. We can raise some protein and energy feeds on farm like field peas. Corn would be an energy source. We have other sources of protein like alfalfa hay. But not all the time do we have access to those. Sometimes it's nice to have both energy and protein in the same feed. In North Dakota, we have lots of that. And I tend to think of them as a supplement to our forage based ration. Not as a total feed, but just as an extra part to the ration that finishes off the ration and makes it a balanced ration for beef cows. North Dakota produces an exceptional amount of co-products. It's located on the eastern part of the state where most of these are, whether it be an ethanol plant or a wheat mid mill or an oil crush or molting facilities or even sugar processing, which could be from both the sugar beets as well as corn or even potato, potato waste. Again, they're available for the whole state. It's just a matter of transportation. Of course, transportation costs need to be figured in these. But they certainly are available in the state. Just to show how much is available in the state, I'd like to point out that North Dakota owns its own state mill and elevator. It's located in Grand Forks. I think it's important to share that it's the single largest wheat, Durham mill in one location in the world. It mills approximately 90,000 bushels of wheat and Durham a day into either flour or semolina. That's quite a few semi loads of product that's being processed every day. Of course, not all of that goes into Durham or into flour or semolina. A percentage, 20, 30% usually ends up as a co-product feed that can be fed to livestock. It's usually high in protein and actually high in fiber content. The fiber content is usually very digestible and it works well in our rations. It's usually either pelleted or loose mill, so it hauls easily and is quite handily used in mixture wagons and that type of thing. Just to give an idea, if we fed 10 pounds of wheat mids to every cow in North Dakota, well, for the amount of product that's produced in the state, if we fed 10 pounds of wheat mids out of this plant, we'd have enough feed for 200,000 head of cattle daily. It's wheat mids are 18% crude protein, so it's fairly high in protein, 83% TDN, note that corn is around 90, 92% TDN. So you can tell it's a high energy feed. So roughly if you add five pounds wheat mids to your ration, you could add, you could increase your diet protein by about one pound of crude protein. We also produce a lot of ethanol. It's huge in North Dakota, it really is. We have five distilleries in North Dakota. They produce somewhere between 3,500 to 4,000 tons daily of dried distilleries grades. Again, a very sizable production in the distilleries that we have in North Dakota. If we had almost a million cows in North Dakota, we could feed seven pounds of distilleries grains every day to every cow. I'm just sharing that with you, we have lots of feed, co-product feed available in North Dakota for our cowards. So how do we utilize this? One way would be to give a cow 12 pounds of distilleries grains daily in the wintertime for seven months. We'd have enough feed to do that. I'm not saying we should feed them 12 pounds. That'd be a heck of an energy and a heck of a protein load. If you're really short on feed, this is an option the person can look at. Distilleries grains is 30% crude protein, 86% TDM. Again, like I said, corn is 90, 91 TDM, 80, 90, 91, and wheat mids are like 83. So you can see the energy content of distilleries grains is at least 86. Sometimes you use 95 when there's a high-level oil in the distilleries grains. It's quite a nice addition of dried distilleries grains into the ration. Whether you want to use dried distilleries grain or modified, which is 50% moisture, they can certainly be added to the diet. Three pounds of the dry or six pounds of the modified would increase the diet crude protein by about one pound. Oops. Again, when we're looking at co-products, pricing is always a big factor, and most of these co-products are really hinged on the price of grain corn. So as the price of grain corn increases, the price of our co-products increase, and that's fairly constant. Distilleries grains is usually priced at par per ton with what the corn price is, or maybe 100%. At certain times of the year, it might be priced higher than that based on demand. Freight is a big factor on the dry product. Of course, you've got, as you're further away from the plant, you have a higher cost of freight modified to basically double the amount of freight because it's half water for the same amount of dry matter. We certainly have other feeds available in our area. Be sure to consider those. Co-products, some of them have some limitations, though. Long-term storage issues because some of them come out wet, so you need to be prepared. Either they might freeze in the wintertime, or in the summertime, they might start molding. Some of these co-products, like distillage grains, modified, or beet pulp would all come out of the plant, or like, according to Luton feed, would all come out of the plant, actually warm. Sometimes, if you put them in a bin, you might have bridging problems. Back when the distillage grains used to be about 12%, 14% fat, putting them into a bin in the wintertime, they would tend to harden up in great problems and flowability, and sludge hammers would be needed to try to get them moved out of your bin. Sometimes, they're low-density, like wheat mids. If you pellet it, you basically increase the density by two-fold, and consequently, your trucking costs would be a lot less. High-moisture products can lead to mold, like your potato waste, everything that has moisture added to it or not removed from it is always susceptible to freezing or mold issues. Here's a list of co-products available in North Dakota, kind of a short list. We've got distillage grains that's dried. We have one plant produces a wet product, which is 60% water. The other plants produce a modified product, which is 40% water. Sometimes, we can buy something called condensis to your solubles. Sometimes, they call it corn syrup. It's flowable, so we can pump it. But it is around 60% water, 40% dry matter, and it actually feeds just like wet distillage grains from a nutrition standpoint. Of course, wheat mids are produced in five locations across the state. Corn gluten feeds down in Wappaton. Unfortunately, I think within the next few days, they'll only be producing a sweet corn gluten feed. There'd be no dry product coming out of that particular plant. Soybean hulls have came on to the production in North Dakota out of the plant out of Enderland. Actually, right now, they're not a very competitive price. There must be quite a high demand because they're $30, $40 a ton higher than some of our other feeds. What's unique about soy hulls is they're high in protein, and they are around 10% crude protein. So, they're not really a high protein feed, but they are very digestible and work quite well, no ration. Beet pulp and beet tailings can be the issue coming out of the valley. Beet pulp can either be fed wet or dried. Most of it's wet, and this year, the price is around $5 a ton for pressed beet pulp. There's going to be some news about beet tailings this year because there's an ethanol plant being built up in Grand Forks. They'll be utilizing the beet tailings for making ethanol. So, for those people that have been relying on beet tailings over the past years, as well as beet pulp, this year there won't be the tailings available for you to just have to look for the beet pulp. And there, of course, might be some rationing going on on whether you're a preferred supplier or not. We do have meals produced in the state, canola meal, sunflower meal, soybean meal, linseed meal, corn glute meal. There's three, four different plants in the state that produces beet product across the border of Minnesota that produces canola meal as well. So, if you need a protein in your feed, you can certainly do that. And again, these are usually priced off the protein market. So, they are considerably higher in their price like proteins. Well, let me just point out if you buy things like distillage grains, it's priced on the corn product market, not necessarily on the protein market. And we do have some other byproduct feeds. If you're close to a potato plant, you might be able to get the product coming out of there. However, they usually like to have you be a year-round consumer of that particular product. So, be careful of that. In Barley-Maltz sprouts, we used to have a large producer in the state. That plant is now closed, but there is a plant over in the Minnesota that might be able to have that available. Well, let's talk a little bit about use of these particular diets. In a 1,400-pound cow, she's mature, late gestation. That's the last three months before having a calf. I just want to maintain her weight. So, if we have grass hay and wheat straw and corn stover this year, let's just use this mill ration that's going to be half grass hay and half wheat straw. That's not a balanced ration. But if we add four pounds of distillers grains and a little bit of mineral, we'll have a fairly balanced ration of that. Be sure to feed test each end of the mill feeds so you know what you have before you add on the supplement. But this gives you an idea for planning purposes. If you need to buy feed, how much it actually needs, and then you can put some costs going with it to find out kind of where it is. I like to point out when you look at cost per day, three different, four different types of rations, fairly similar costs. So it's all kind of tied together. Now let's look at another one. This particular ration deals with 1,400 pound cows that need to gain some weight. I want them to gain one body condition score in 90 days, which is basically just gaining one pound per day. Our feedlot cattle, we like to have them gain three, three and a half pounds a day during the feedlot cows, during the feeding stage, the finishing stage. Here we're just looking at a pound a day gain. So let's look at the rations. This particular first ration, where I looked at last time, where if you use 20 pounds of grass hay and they're about the same amount of wheat stover, please notice that the dried distillers grains now increases from four to five up to nine. It almost doubles the amount of distillers grains that's required in the ration. And again, if you look at the cost, the costs are all somewhat similar to the same. But keep in mind, you're adding more value or more energy and more protein to the ration because you're using dried distillers grains. Well, we do have a numerous supply of co-products available to us in North Dakota. Just be wary of where you need to haul it from, what the freight cost is. I always concerned about people that use beet pulp in the western part of the state that are hauling out of the Red Room Valley. Because when you're dealing with product that's 80% water, 70, 80% water, that's semi-low. It doesn't have very many tons of dry feed. So please do the math and price accordingly. Things like distillers grains work quite well in your rations and check out the price for your local availability and good luck with using co-products in North Dakota. Thank you, Carl. Carl did send me a list of co-products and places to get them in North Dakota that will be posted on the website with the recording. Our next speaker is going to be Brian Parman. He is the egg finance specialist here in Fargo. And he's going to talk about the costs, benefits of some of the different options for stretching your forge resources. Yeah, thanks, Miranda. And it's nice that Carl kind of set me up because it's almost like this was planned that we were going to go from Carl right to me. So I've put together, I'm going to attempt to share some of what I had put together there. All right, is it working there? Everybody see the slide there? So basically... Yeah, it looks good. This is using, when I put this together, it was mainly for drought management. But it's really kind of essentially the same thing because the real comparison in this case, one of the comparisons was putting it together for putting, reducing the stocking rate and putting more animals out on lower AUM forage. But in this case, we're just going to kind of focus on what Carl was alluding to, which is trucking in feed versus hauling animals to where the feed is. So basically dry lotting at home versus sending them to a feed lot somewhere down the road. And these are kind of the hay prices that I used if you look at this first slide as to when these calculations were done. And basically this is talking about... This was put together with South Dakota State. Now, some research has been presented and done on dry lotting cattle by Vern Anderson up at Carrington currently where Carl works. And we can see partial budget for dry lot versus pasture beef cow production. And just exactly how much this dry lot is over pasturing them at the cash rental rates or pasture rental rates that exist. And you can see basically that you're looking at almost $60 plus dollars per head for dry lotting these animals versus putting them out on pasture. I don't think there's any question that pasture is cheaper but this just puts into perspective exactly how much more expensive that is. And the other part of that that you have to consider is if you've got a bunch of people in your area, a lot of these things that happen that would cause somebody to want to dry lot their cattle winds up affecting their neighbors as well. So it's often the case that we think of ourselves in a vacuum but if you've got everyone in an area wanting to haul in feed you can imagine what feed costs are going to do at least regionally for instance hauling in bales or these kind of things. You can imagine what's going to happen that these costs are going to go up especially if it's pretty widespread and you have to go a long ways out to acquire some of the dry lot feed that you need. And you know this is kind of exactly what it was showing here but where I want to go to mainly is this portion right here and I put this together showing pasture versus dry lotting versus buying feed. And what you see here if you wind up buying and shipping feed in for five months you're looking at about $479 per head which is a considerable cost and that's using some pretty conservative hay estimates. I know there are situations where you may bring in something like slew hay or these other kind of things but buying and shipping feed is just extremely expensive if you're talking in from a hay's perspective just because the energy density isn't high enough and the volume is just too great unlike things like corn and soybean meal which has a much higher energy density so the energy per load or TDN per load shipped is a lot less and in this scenario I used $4 per loaded mile which is pretty much the going rate for shipping just about anything across the state. And so this works out to about $479 per head this is the price of feed per ton at $100 so fairly conservative and this is only shipping 50 miles as Karl talked about some of these beet residues and things being shipped all the way to western North Dakota it's greatly in excess of 50 miles so that shipping cost really starts coming into play at that $4 per loaded mile mark and basically for five months if we're shipping hay we're talking about 34 loads at $4 per loaded mile that is that is a considerable cost to consider. Okay but boarding cattle at a feed lot in every scenario that I ran using that $4 per loaded mile and I even gave them a much larger distance that these animals had to be shipped at 250 miles and to tell you the truth it really doesn't make that big a difference that shipping cattle to a dry lot where the feed is almost always is cheaper than shipping the feed back if you're if you're actually having to basically pay retail prices for hay okay it just tends to work out that way because it's you know you ship them there they're already there even with the yardage fee of $0.35 it's still it's still just so much cheaper to ship them away now again there's all kinds of scenarios where you're getting local slew hay or lower quality hay and you're going to bring in grains or things like that and that makes the calculus on this a bit different but just on the surface shipping them to where feed availability is almost always makes the most sense unless there's something with the scenarios that I'm running where it's it's just better off to send them someplace else and some folks would think about a mixed strategy and that's kind of what I talked about in the drought scenario was you had a mixed strategy of you put what you could the the the lower quality animals on on grass the better animals on the dry lot getting better feed and then you did a deep cull and in this case where we're not talking about grass we're talking about buying feed or that those kind of things so the deep cull still comes into play but how deep you call I mean it is always cheaper to raise your own heifers rather than buying heifers so if you intend to stay in the business even though buying feed is expensive you have to weigh that cost benefit of losing the genetic base versus paying a quite a bit of extra money to to ship feed in or send those animals to a to a dry lot in the short term in order to not have to shrink your herd and you know we look at this fall heifers aren't too expensive but at the same time the amount of time and effort and the loss of the genetic base it almost always works out if all things are equal to raise your own heifers and so thinking about a heavy liquidation if you're going to stay in the business is is generally a poor strategy it's it's that mixed strategy that makes the most economic sense and so that's for the most part what I wanted to wanted to cover is just essentially the fact that you're going to have to think about it not in just one strategy going forward or it may be the case you ship some cattle you have some forage at home so you keep some cattle at home and feed them yourself it's hard to find a one-size-fits-all management strategy and unfortunately economics is often murky but at the end of the day we've got to figure out producer by producer what the best what the best options are they're the best of a set of bad options and that's really these numbers are really what it boils down to so with that I will take any questions or stop right there all right thank you Brian so we are wrapping Brian was your last speaker so we will open it up for questions feel free to tap type any questions into the chat box or you can you can also ask live whatever you prefer a couple reminders while people are thinking of of things is that if you do want to view things later or view a session a seminar webinar that you missed you can go to our website and scroll to the bottom and there's a topics tab for the webinar series and all of the webinars are posted here as well as the resources that we just specific resources we discussed during that webinar series also we do have some upcoming webinars scheduled now we have tomorrow again brain also we're talking about crop insurance considerations and Wednesday can hell they will talk you talking about grain drying and storage the survey link apparently is not working I do not know why I've tried to relaunch it so I will try to try to get that out to you guys since I think everybody on is extension and there should be a link to it hate on the the website too if you want to take that later or send me any input you have this would be greatly appreciated we'll see that we don't have any questions and thank everybody for participating and if you do think of any questions later feel free to reach out to any of the speakers our contact information is also on the website and we'd be glad to help you anyway possible right thank you well hopefully talk to you tomorrow