 managing the system of weaning and backgrounding, and actually it's a process that probably takes a year before you put your calves in the position to perform at their best, to be as healthy as they can be to go through this backgrounding phase and ultimately in the finishing phase. So some of what I'm gonna talk about is a little bit historical, but I think it's important to provide context to this whole issue of weaning and backgrounding. So this is where we're gonna begin, and I know Tim talked about this a little bit, Brian did as well, but I wanna start here just as kind of baseline information. What's the unit cost of production? How much does my feed cost? And we typically think about feed costs as being, and pasture, somewhere to 50 to 70% of the total cost of keeping a cow. And there's lots of different data sets. They have different numbers, but in reality it's the cost of keeping a cow is probably gonna be seven to $900, up to probably easily $1,100 a year. I think those days of keeping a cow for a dollar a day are past this and probably not likely to come back again. So income that we get to offset some of that unit cost of production are live calves to sell. Brian and Tim talked about price per pound and really for what you and I are talking about, we need something to sell and that means live calves, not dead ones, not sick ones, but calves that are saleable, somebody else wants to buy them. Open heifer calves, cows and bulls. Sometimes we talk about live calves per acre, pounds per acre. Those are units that we kinda use to describe the income that we're deriving off the ranch. The subtractors from those incomes, and I'm glad Carl mentioned coccidioces earlier and I added that in because I temporarily forgot about coccidioces even though it's probably one of the more common maladies that we encounter in background calves. But the subtractors from income are open cows. In other words, they didn't have, they're not going to calves, stillbirths, wheat calves and disease that we consider scours, summer nemonias, pink eye, foot rot, post-winning respiratory disease, both sickness and death loss as evidenced by those terms morbidity and mortality. It impacts cost to gain, it impacts the value of gain and then finally output in coccidioces and that pretty much encompasses the disease in cows that our calves can experience when they've been weaned. These are not always, we fall into a trap sometimes, they can always are preventable with either vaccines or some type of product or antibiotics. The truth of it is most of these disease entities and even open cows are management issues and we'll discuss that just a little bit more. That's so helpful a little bit if I put it on full screen. I grabbed this off the, what am I saying? North Dakota Farm Business Management Program. And I just got looking because they do kind of a, they do budgets and they do numbers for just cow-calf operations and then whole herd with backgrounding it. And what I find interesting is when you look at some of these numbers and I'm just going to zero in on a couple, I'm going to see if I can use my little, I don't know if I need a laser pointer or what, how about just a pen? Let's try this one. Pregnancy percentage, 94.5, pregnancy loss, 2.1, very, very understandable, very common that you'll find some of those that are diagnosed pregnant that lose that pregnancy over time. There's a coloring percentage, here's calving percent if you subtract that 2.1 from that 94.5, you'll get this 92.5. Here's what's interesting for me is these numbers, both on both sides of this spreadsheet, 85.3 and 83.4. So what that tells us is that we're losing 15% of those cows, either they should have been pregnant and had a calf or somewhere along the line, whether due to disease or other reasons, we've weaned 85 out of 100 calves, which isn't actually very good. And that's when you look at some of these numbers down here, weaned a 520 pound calf, that's average. When I look at that on a pounds weaned per exposed females, 445 and 446. And actually those numbers haven't, what we would consider improved for some time, they've kind of stayed kind of where they are. As we leave the cow-calf sector and talk about stalker and backgrounding health, and these numbers can be all over the board, I spent a lot of time when I was in Kansas in the stalker industry, and that's where long, high risk, long-haul cattle, high-local mingled cattle are brought to a growing yard, it might be wheat pasture, it might be somewhat confined lots, where you've got 5% plus mortality, and then we've got in our background yards, maybe it's 1% or less. So these mortalities and morbidity, which is death loss and sickness, can vary a great deal depending on where those cattle came from, depending on their history, depending on how they're raised. So it's important to keep in mind that that 85% weaned calf crop, we can lose some on the other hand, on the other hand, coming into these stalker and backgrounder operations. I grabbed a little historical perspective, and I think Carl did and maybe Tim did as well. I thought it was interesting, I usually keep track of this focus on the feedlots that comes from Kansas State University. And one of the ones I grabbed here was in 2005. This would be December 2005 closeout information. And don't get me wrong, you could overinterpret some of these numbers as we'll share in just a little bit. But these cattle were an average of 141 days of feed. It doesn't give me my in-weights, and you'll see the in-weights are usually recorded now in these later years for focus on feedlots. 141 days, feed to gain 6.03. This is in steer, over 16,000 of them. Death loss about 0.7. Heifers were always a little bit higher on death loss, and a lot of that had to do with riding activity and coming in estrus and so on and so forth. It's interesting to note here, $2.26 corn prices. Here's 11 years later. Now we've got these in-weights. This is again, December, 154 days on feed. So that's about five months. You back this up five months, that's what? December, November, October, September, August. So somewhere at the end of July, these are probably yearlings coming in. 1428, final weight, 1312 on the Heifers. As I said earlier, somewhere around five months. Days on feed, 3.83, 3.6. 1.03% death loss, 1.01. Not a great increase, but certainly, as you'll see in a little bit, it's trending up. Corn was $3.32 a bushel. If I jump up about six more years, this is again the same timeframe, December, 2022. 30,000, almost 20,000 here on Heifers, 760 pounds coming in, 1411, 1341, little longer on the days on feed, getting closer to that six-month timeframe. 3.76 daily gain, 3.5 on Heifers, 1.75% death loss, 1.41. And look at corn prices back in 2022, at least in this Kansas feedlots, $8.47. So for most of us looking at this, we're trending in the wrong direction. These are often twice as what we had in the 2005, and they're going in the wrong direction. I don't necessarily have all the answers for these things, but that's where, and I include some of this discussion under what I call stewardship. Are we being good stewards of the animals that we're responsible for? Just one more, and this is the latest one I had, 2023, 2.4% death loss, 2.17. These are probably a little bit different type of calf that finishing at the end of September, 771, 7732, probably more calf feds than they were yearlings. And so we got a little bit higher death loss, 2.4, 2.17. Corn price, $6.49. Gives us a little historical perspective of where this has gone on. And what I found interesting too, and focus on the feedlots, I haven't kept up with this necessarily, but the trend line from January 1990 through January 2011, and we're out here at November 2023, market weights have increased, average daily gains, yes, somewhat. You got some that are up here now and some on the heifer side that are here. Probably have increased somewhat, I wouldn't say feed to gain has increased dramatically, but certainly market weight, average daily gain tended to increase over the years. And so with death loss, as I showed you earlier, one of those last ones in that September was like right in this 2.4%. So there's some things that are in this system that are telling us that we're not doing some things right. And maybe it's because we're trying to manage piecemeal rather than manage the whole system as it is. And I guess that's kind of my focus as we go through this little talk here this evening. So when I think about these things from a system standpoint, there's a whole lot of factors and they may be risk factors, they're certainly management factors, but there's a relationship to calf health and the expression of that genetic potential to a set of these risk management factors and how well we manage these things will make a difference on whether we've got an 85% between calf crop, death loss less than 1% or over 2%. And so I think it's important for us to think about all these risk management areas. It's not that we're going to talk about each one, but this is how you need to think about these things. I've got failure of passive transfer being in this equation and that means failure or partial failure of passive transfer and that's just simply the immune system of the cow being passed to the calf in that early stages of life. Weaning, what kind of weaning stress do I put on those calves? What kind of co-mingling stress do they encounter? What kind of environmental stress are they under? Either during the calving season or during the weaning phase. Are we weaning calves into muddy and wet pens and there's rain every other day? What kind of nutritional stress are they under? And Carl and others have talked about this other and what kind of exposure stress? Is there some things I can do from a management perspective which may include in vaccination to reduce some of that exposure stress that those calves are under? And today, maybe this bottom one is one of the most important ones we've got and that's the fact it's so difficult to find labor and I've said both quantity and quality. So I've got things here that I need to manage that there's not necessarily a product for but I need to do a better job of managing these cattle. I just have used this picture collage a lot. I continue to use it because these are the times in the life of these calves when some of the things that we do can impact the health of those calves not only early in life like this picture up here but also later on in life right here. So this cow down here that's delivering that calf what kind of, did she go through nutritional stress that may have had a cat impact on that fetal development of that calf? Does she have calving difficulty which may impact that calf's ability to absorb passive transfer? When am I calving? What month of the year am I calving? Am I putting more stress in those calves just simply because of when, what the date is for my calving season? Do I practice low stress winning? Do I do something about combingling? Do I have some type of vaccination and biosecurity program that can minimize exposure? And when I handle cattle, do I actually do it in a low stress manner? That's called managing the system and it doesn't all happen at once and it doesn't always necessarily mean a product but it means I'm managing the system. Just a couple of comments about stress. Believe it or not, I took this picture at the beef research unit at Kansas State University that would have been back in the 90s and it was one of those days with snow and it was wet snow and it was a little hard to keep not fresh feed but feed from being covered up. So I think because we don't control the environment very well, we kind of underestimate the impact of environmental stress on these calves. And I've got this image up here that I've shared many times and this was one of the cells that every one of you that are watching and will watch later have in your body. It's called a dendritic cell and what this cell does is that it controls the body of an animal and tries to detect things that are foreign to it. And if there's stress in these animals like environmental stress or combing link stress, this cell here that you all have doesn't work very well. And so the calves ability to fight off disease becomes compromised because this happened and that this cell doesn't perform the way it should. I wanna talk just a little bit about combing link stress. I just, I've used this example here because this is often how we put calves together. I'm not talking about the marketing system, I'm talking about the pasture system that many of us encounter today. We might have our cattle in four different pastures. And the common thing that I see every year is that at weaning time, we're gonna wean all the calves at one time and bring them together into a circumstance that they've never seen each other before. That's combing link stress. Sometimes we don't think it happens at the ranch level, but that's the most common one that I encounter when I'm trying to deal with a bovine respiratory disease outbreak. Here's one that I came across a number of years ago. It's actually a bull test station and it was actually in Georgia. I have sent this email. It says, asked for a vaccination protocol sent to the bull test years ago by someone at the vet school. The incoming bulls must be vaccinated two to three weeks prior to arrival. Good idea, right? With IBR, PI3, BRSV, BVD one and two, manheimia hemolytica, pastoral molotoste, mophosamus, clostridial seven lane. At processing, the boosters are given using whatever vaccines, zoetisin and bearing or angle heim donate. I don't know what's given. I'm not inviting out on that day. Probably a little bit of sarcasm there. So typically processing in is around July 5th and the bulls are sold around December 7th. Within seven to 10 days after arrival, there are numerous cases of BRD which are treated, may be retreated and the process really runs to late November. If the protocol of career arrival and processing was an intranasal vaccine like TSV2, which is IBR, PI3 and an intramuscular subcube manheimia hemolytica, manheimia hemolytica, pastoral molotoste, clostridial, midding, mophosus, would there be less BRD? I think all of you know where I'm going with this. The products make no difference essentially. This is combingling stress. When you bring a bunch of bulls together, I don't care if your pen is five or pen is 10. If it was pen of 100, it'd be worse, but you're gonna put bulls together that have not been together and they're gonna be fooling around and there's a lot of social stress and psychological stress and combingling stress. That's why there's BRD, okay? The product selection will make no difference whatsoever. Just a little bit to follow up with what I just said. Typically, when we have occasions where we encounter this BRD, bovine respiratory disease, we used to call it shipping fever, or pneumonia, the incubation time is somewhat around seven to 10 days. With extreme stresses might be shortened somewhat. But a measurable immune response is gonna take at least three to 10 days and longer with calves that have never been vaccinated and that immune response will peak in two to four weeks, okay? So this is the reason why we talk so much about strategies such as wean back and vaccination ahead of weaning and doing the right things so that when weaning comes, you don't really need to do anything with them. They're already prepared because the BRD incubation time is always gonna be ahead of the immune response when you're doing them on the same day, accompanied by stress. Okay, here's a little bit of three principles that I've tried to follow when I think about designing vaccination programs. Number one, it has to be necessary. In other words, there's a reasonable risk of pathogen exposure. And I would argue that all of those viruses, the BABD, the IBR, BRP, the others are risk of them. So I'm probably gonna include them on my necessary list when we're talking about calves. I need to know whether they're effective or not and most of the, most of those products today have adequate research that gives us an idea of whether they work or not. There are some, sometimes we have to rely on anecdotal evidence and sometimes our observation but most of those vaccines have enough evidence that tells us that they work, that the vaccine is effective or I'd say, or better than nothing. Here's a little bit of a corollary that I've recently, I don't know, thought of or maybe even encountered. And that's the bacteria that are found to be part of the normal respiratory flora. So manheimia hemolytica, pastoralum altosida, estophalosumni, mycoplasma. They're actually difficult to induce protective immunity in animals. They just are. They have found a way to be part of the normal respiratory flora, even though we vaccinate for them, even though we use those vaccines, the evidence is not great in terms of their protective ability. And a lot of that's due to the stress that we're applying to that animals, sometimes at the same time as vaccine, or it could be that they've encountered overwhelming stress in spite of vaccination and break with respiratory disease anyway. And then finally, are they safe to use? I think that should be somewhat expected that these vaccines should be safe. But every time, every once in a while, you'll run into maybe hypersensitivity, systemic reaction. We're using modified live vaccines in pregnant cows. We might encounter some abortions. And sometimes we talk about sweats and catalytic and vaccinated and milk drop in cows that are milking. So necessary, does it work? And is it safe to use? We talk a lot about that second dose being pretty important in naive animals. This is just somewhat of a schematic, just telling us that the response to a booster dose when given at the right time can give us a faster response and the response is larger if I could use that term. Okay, many of you have seen this before and this is kind of an old study, but it's 2003. But I thought I'd bring it up again, but this just gives us an idea of the difference that we can encounter when calves have been properly prepared for the backgrounding phase. So this was cattle that originated in what we call the Southeast United States here in North Dakota. If you're in Missouri, they don't consider themselves to be Southeast, okay? But that was 2003. And for those of you that remember, that was the year we found that cow with bovine sponge form and sauphalopathy, which did impact this trial a little bit. So they were cattle and we had buyers at this stockyard that understood what we were looking for and were able to categorize those cattle into different groups. The cattle were trucked to Decatur County Feed Yard in Oberlin, Kansas, which is a pretty good drive. Within 24 hours of delivery, all calves received the same standard, the Lepfelot arrival. They got a five-way viral respiratory vaccine, which was titanium, seven-way Clostridial Bactrin Toxoid, which was Vision 7, and Paracidicide and Dectocide, which was Ivomec and a growth implant, which at that time, Zach was Revolor S, and then they were shipped to, at that time, XL, I think it's now Cargill in Dodge City for slaughter. So these were the treatments that we started with. There was controls. In other words, those were unwinged calves of unknown health history at the time of sale. We had two different weanback programs, and that's just simply meant that those calves were weaned for at least 45 days. That was T2 and T4. T2 happened to be the Pfizer program at that time, now as a lettuce. T4 was, I think it was Mariel program, if I'm not mistaken, but they both were basically the same in terms of product use, and they had to be weaned for at least 45 days, right? We didn't have enough calves. We had some calves in this pre-vac program, which just means they've received vaccines, but they had not been weaned at all, okay? So we ended up looking at this thing, basically comparing controls with the two weanback programs. This is morbidity. This is sickness. So the calves that were in the unwinged category with unknown health history, 42, almost 43% of them got pulled at least on time, and I'll show you that in a bit, for respiratory disease, 15% and both those other two weanback programs. What's interesting here is that on those, this is the numbers actually, 502 in the unwinged unknown health history, 667 in the weanback, and the other one is 292. Of those, that 43%, 26% were pulled once, another 9% twice, and then another 7% were pulled three times. These were those that once, twice, and three times. A significant difference here with those calves of unwinged unknown health history. I put together this little, what I call a disease curve, and all that simply is that it's looking at the number of pulls over time, and the control calves are in the maroon, and the weanback calves are in the blue, or kind of lavender color. And I suspect, I don't know this for certain, I suspect that the day six here was Sunday, that people weren't paying that much attention because I think this thing would have gone pretty much like this. So we had kind of a nice disease curve with those calves that were unknown health history, unknown vaccination history. We presume they hadn't been vaccinated at all. They had a pretty standard disease curve. Remember when I talked earlier about, about usually it's seven to 10 days, like a patient period. This tells us that the transportation, and sometimes the delay in getting calves to, to their final destination, some of this disease was starting to occur pretty quickly because even by day three, I've got almost five calves, I'm pulling out of those pants, right? The weanback calves didn't have much of a disease curve at all. They had a number of here at five days, and it kind of trickled along and had a little spike here. Here's something that's really interesting if you read the bottom of this slide. Treatment two and treatment four, those were the groups that were vaccinated and weaned. They had six BVD PI animals. If you remember what PI animals are, those are persistently infected BVD animals. And three of them remained healthy, two died and one was railed, and they left them in the pen, which means those calves and those pens of the weanback and the other 45 day wean program were constantly shedding BVD the rest of the animals. And don't forget as well, these weren't one source calves. It's not like all those calves came from one ranch. They did, they're combingled as well. So it's probably a powerful evidence that weaning makes a difference before you ship them. And that in this case, probably vaccination makes a difference as well, particularly BVD vaccination. This thing could have been just a total wreck with that number of PI animals in that group. Interestingly to note that the control of the weaned on vaccinated cattle did not have BVD PI animals in it. It's not to make a statement about vaccine that induces PI animals, because it doesn't. Okay, this is mortality. It's hard to make any distinctions here really, 1.2% mortality in the unweaned with unknown health history, 1.03 and 0.3. What I did, I went into this data set and I looked at those that have been diagnosed as being sick and those that had never been diagnosed as being sick. And we just looked at average daily gain, 3.07 and those that had been pulled at least one time versus those that had never been pulled and a 0.43 pounds per head per day difference across treatments. Here's another case report that I found interesting and it has kind of the same culprits in it and that's my intent here. It's an interesting yard and there are some things done differently this year that had never been done before and it kind of resulted in kind of a wreck in this yard. So this is a picture of the calves. This was the yard. You'll see a bale feeder over here and I got a kind of schematic to give you a little more evidence in a bit. This is five to six weight calves, approximately 400 calves. Spring-born, they were approximately six to eight months of age. These calves have been weaned into a common pen by groups over a time period of four weeks beginning in late September and into the month of October. What's this tell us right here? Highly commingled calves on the same ranch, okay? That's your first red flag in this whole thing. Approximately three to five weeks after initial weaning, clinical signs of respiratory disease were observed during the third week. Number of calves, period yield and the number that died, some veterinarians came and 20 calves of the group were treated. Then they ended up treating the entire group with Dectamax, which is a parasitic and antibiotic and boosted with virus shield and in-force. This would not have been my recommendation but nevertheless it was done. The process appeared to slow the outbreak and two calves have died since the intervention. One calf was exhibiting diarrhea with large amounts of blood in the stool in the manure and second calf succumbed to what may have been aestophalosis. This is this little schematic that I put together. There was a hay feeder over here with grass and big round bales, a feeder over here, hay feeder with alfalfa bales in it. Then they fed whole-shell corn with supplements in. Remember I told you there were 400 calves in here. This bunk space was about 75 feet long, granted they could sit on both sides. And that, this was a stave silo of which there was whole corn in. And so they were feeding whole corn with supplements with, if I remember right now, it was either, no, it was actually a decox. They were feeding decox. So we know, we're pretty well assured that there was cold mangling stress, right? Because they were putting these groups together over time. What was the coccidiosis issue? I don't have enough bunk space to feed all those calves at one time. So some of those more timid, maybe smaller calves, those are the ones that are not getting the decox which is a coccidio stat. So they were begging with coccidiosis. So even sometimes if you include what you think is an anti-coccidiosis drug in the ration, they have to eat it. There has to be enough bunk space so all the calves get the dose they need on a daily basis. So there were several things that happened. The other thing that I found out later was that this is not typically their protocol. Typically they wean groups and then move them out after three to four weeks and then bring in the next group which reduces coccidio stress. But they didn't do it this year because they were busy with corn harvest. We call this corn harvesters disease that induced respiratory disease and coccidiosis in this group of calves. Just going to finish up with a couple of comments here. This is where I want you guys to go to your veterinarian and have him put together a treatment schedule for you. What am I supposed to do? If I've got respiratory disease going on, pneumonia, what do you want me to treat it with? What's the dose? How does it give in subcube or base of the ear like accede? And what's the withdrawal period? I think your veterinarian, if you sit down and visit with him or her, it would be glad to provide this for you. And so sometimes we fall into the trap of while we're going to use Abyssin or maybe we're going to use Draxin or maybe we're going to think we're going to switch to Zaprivo which is basically the same drug. And we kind of put these things together by ourselves. Don't do that. Have your veterinarian design this for you and have him sign it and have some accountability in this whole issue of treating. I just put this together real quickly. This is just pulling and treating sick cattle promptly. Don't wait to see if they get better. Especially with respiratory disease, those cattle can get worse in a hurry. And if there's enough animals that are sick, you may have to treat the whole work. I left this in here for just one reason that you can still use feed-grade antibiotics. Oriamycin is one that's the most commonly used feed-grade antibiotics for those in the background in operations. Need to get your veterinarian to write you a veterinary feed directive. And that's what this is all about. And it's not complicated. There's only basically two different drug concentrations used to treat or control respiratory disease and calves. It's either 350 milligrams per head per day or it's 10 milligrams per pound. And there's different formulations that you can use. Just finish up with this. This was a little bit of a survey that Cattlefax did a number of years ago. And I want to point out a couple here. It says, do you have a vet client-patient relationship? And this is different areas of the country. This is Northern Plains right here. 86% said they did. I don't know why it's not a hundred percent. Do you have a vaccination plan for your cow herd? 62, 79, 55, that should be a hundred percent. Yes, develop with my vet, understand that, okay? You need to sit down with your veterinarian and listen to what he has to say and what he wants you to use in terms of these vaccine. Here's the final one. I'll just, where do you gather information on antibiotics? Advice from a veterinarian familiar with my herd? 55, 52, 54. Why isn't this a hundred percent, okay? Use your veterinarian. They're the ones that are familiar with the research that they're experienced with using these products. And they can be still very vital in their operation. I kind of downplayed products a little bit but antibiotics and the vaccines that you use need to come under the purview of your veterinarian. Just finish with this one, the management equation. You don't manage for backgrounding or weaning on the day of weaning or when you're backgrounding calves. You actually start a year in advance. That's how you limit some of these downsizes or the losses that occur, 85% calf crop and 2% death loss at weaning and then when they go to somebody else, they lose another 2%. So that's my little spiel this evening. I probably went just a little bit over. I always use this statement about what stewardship is. It's a careful and responsible management of things that have been entrusted to you and I. And we deal with lots of different environmental conditions here in North Dakota. I still would argue we have some of the best cattle in the country, maybe probably at the globe actually, but it's our responsibility to manage these creatures that God has given us to care for.