 Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I certainly want to thank Zach and Warren for organizing this, putting this together. As Zach said, we work together on the multi-state group and certainly have had some conversations, but this really our first opportunity we've had to get together and present some of this work that we're doing at the same site. So obviously as the outsider, I didn't have anything to do with the planning or preparations. I just got to come out here and enjoy the hospitality and enjoyed my time yesterday and look forward here today sharing with you a little bit about what we've been doing. So obviously this is about alternative systems. Zach mentioned several different things and really in Illinois, we've done work in a variety of the same areas. I am going to hone in specifically on the calf and creep feeding, but that's similar to here. We've done a lot of work with corn stock grazing, crop residue grazing, basically anything that we can do alternatively to grazing as our grazing days and our grazing acres are limited in many of our operations. So like I said, alternative system is pretty difficult to define. I could probably say a traditional system might be as well, but I think when you hear about traditional system, hopefully we're thinking about cows out on grass, which is a good thing, right? Cows utilize that forage in many cases. It's acres that we can't use for anything else. And I always like to start by saying, I'm not suggesting that we don't do that, right? Every acre of forage that we have, we should figure out how to use it the best that we can, and that is a great place for cows. But the reality is we don't have enough acres of grass to support the cows that we we won't want to have in many places. Number of reasons, I think many of you can relate to this, certainly where I'm from can relate to this. It started when I was with the boy and saw fences started coming out, you know, get a couple more rows of corn in the ditch and that trend has continued. I didn't think it was possible to pull any more acres out of pasture, but every time corn gets to six or seven dollars, we figure out how to add a few more acres of crop production. And we just continue to have less and less grass. Obviously urbanization has added to that as well. There used to be a lot of cattle fed what is now the suburbs of Chicago, right? And that sprawl just continues to happen. In result, we have less grass. And so that really led us to, you know, what are we going to do? What are these different options? What are some alternatives? And we had a lot of producers that were considering some form. And Zach mentioned this yesterday and I would agree. We probably need to get together and work on our terminology, confinement, dry lot, you know, what, what are, there's a lot of things that we sometimes lump together that are actually pretty different. And what is a dry lot? Is dry lot actually a dirt lot or is it concrete? And how much space are we talking about that? There's a huge umbrella there. What I'm going to talk about in this facility, the blue sign there, the Orbeef Research Center sits in Western Illinois, one of our three beef cow-calf research stations we have. And what we use there is what was our winter feeding facility. Concrete lots, open front buildings, right? Each, and they're small lots, small pens. So we could do kind of small pen studies. So each of, each of these pins that we used historically for wintering our cows and doing a lot of our winter cow-calf feeding work, there are these 36 by 36 foot concrete lots with 24 by 24 open front building that sits at the back of that. And then we bed those. So obviously small, but again, we have 12 of those, allows us to do some replicated work. So this first project that I'm just going to highlight, some of our findings, I'm not going to go into detail this, but this is where we kind of started. Actually, I don't know, probably half a dozen years ago or more, we did it more as a demonstration. We use that same winter cow feeding facility, but instead of going to grass at breeding in April, we just kept them in. Kept them in in the summer and just tried to understand how would that facility work and more of an extended housing through the summer months, what would be the challenges there. And then we decided to go ahead and do that as a research project. And obviously, comparing it to grass and a traditional system made sense. So that's what we did. That project was funded by Iowa Beef. I'm not going to go through any of the details, but I'm going to highlight a few of the conclusions. And I think most of them will make sense. Some of them also hopefully will lead to some ideas for where we need to continue to do work. And I apologize, I know this screen and with the lighting, it may be difficult. Can you read any of that from the back? Okay, good. Obviously, I'll talk about what's on there. In the dry lot or confinement or any of this, this would be true. We decide what we're going to feed them. Right? So it should not surprise you that we are better able to maintain body weight and BCS. And we've proven that time and time again. Not that you can't maintain body weight and BCS on grass, you absolutely can. But we're at the mercy of Mother Nature. In some years, that's a little harder to do than others. And are we on top of things to be able to adjust our stocking density or our rotational, if we're using rotational grazing or a rotational strategy, are we going to offer in some supplementation? What are we going to do in that year where it hasn't rained for six weeks and pastures are getting dry and burn up? And certainly when we rely on primarily cool season forages in Illinois, that's a real issue as we get into July and August. So we can maintain body weight and BCS in the dry lot because we decide what to feed them. Repro wasn't different. And again, that's a good thing and not surprising. You know, we would have to have an issue with body weight and BCS, or BCS primarily for there to be a challenge there. So that's a good thing. One of the not so good things that we observed was we had more foot problems. And again, if you've talked to anybody that raises pigs or raises dairy cows, they'd probably tell you, well, yeah, we could have predicted that if you put them into a more concentrated setting, confinement, you're likely going to deal with some challenges there. Our primary issue was perihelework, digital dermatitis. We do have some foot rot, but we definitely have more issues. I think this is an area where we're going to have to work is whether it's in the building on a bedded pack or more of a lot, you know, you concentrate and you get something in there, it's going to be hard to get out. And we don't typically think about trying to get beef cows through a foot bath like a dairy. So what's our intervention going to be? How are we going to manage that? We got some work to do. Our dry lot calves had increased performance pre-weaning. I think as you look at some of these, and there'll be some data shared later today, as you look at a conventional system compared to an alternative system, you will see differences there. That's because there's a whole lot of different conventional systems and a whole lot of different alternative systems. And so I think it'd be pretty difficult to just say the calves will always do better in one or the other. In our system, when we're on cool season pastures and we're spring calving in, you know, February, March, those calves are out on pasture, July, August, alongside mother that they don't do as well as the calves that were in the dry lot. And also it depends on what are you going to do with the calves in the dry lot, which a lot of my presentation today will focus on. Are you letting the calves get up to the bunk and eat the same TMR the cows are? If you are, they should probably do pretty well. Are you offering supplemental creep feed? If you are, they should probably outperform calves out on grass. If you're not providing any supplemental feed and you're limit feeding cows in limited bunk space and they're cleaning it up in two or three hours, well then now maybe those calves wouldn't do as well as if you're out on pasture. And also if you're on a little better quality and availability of grass, you may not see the same decline in performance that we might in our system. Yes, AI, so we do synchronize and we do timed AI on everything once and then we put bulls in. Yep, and then this last bullet really will depend on the pre-weening performance. Whichever group has poor pre-weening performance, you probably could anticipate they'll have better performance after weaning. It's called compensatory gain, right? So if they're restricted and they're behind a little bit, you get them on equal playing field offer, high playing nutrition to both, the group that was previously restricted should bounce back. And I'll show you some data where that continues to happen. So also at this same time of doing this study, we also, we had a lot of producers that were coming to us with more specific questions about their system, right? And I think this just shows the innovation of producers. They weren't waiting for research to tell them what to do. They're like, oh, we're already doing this, right? We need to figure out a way to raise cows, not on grass. And so we either put up a hoop building or we put up a monosloop, or some people are doing like we did, use their winter feeding facilities, whether it's a dry lot or an open front building, they were doing this. They're trying to figure out how to run more cows on less acres. Because they'd lost grass or whatever, or maybe next generation wanted to come back to the operation. Had to figure out how to diversify and expand. Let's add more cows and do it more in a confinement setting. We did a survey among cow-calf producers in our state that were using some alternative systems. And we got about 20-some respondents, which isn't a lot, but to have 20 people that are doing some sort of confinement cow-calf, we also thought that's probably pretty good little cross-section. No surprise, we saw about every possible way of doing it. There's multiple building types, multiple calving seasons, multiple weaning ages, multiple ways of managing this calf. And so, again, we expected that, but it also really shed some light on the fact that we need to hone in on best management practices in these systems. If you maybe noticed, I did not tell you on the last slide which one was more economical. I usually get asked that. And I know it's a bad answer, but I always just say it depends. And sometimes it really doesn't matter. And I'll define both of those. It depends because it depends on what you have to pay for grass. And it depends on what your availability is on alternative feedstuffs. If you're right next to an ethanol plant and you can get modified distillers out of there pretty cheap, or if you have access to a lot of crop residue, you might be able to put together a TMR that's pretty low cost. And if all the ground around you is selling for $15,000 an acre and can grow 280 bushel corn, the cost of seeding that to grass and trying to graze cows on that is probably pretty high. That's why it depends. And then the reason I say sometimes it really doesn't matter is is because some people say, I don't have a grass option. So I don't really care to see your comparison to somebody else's opportunity cost on grass because I don't have that option. My only option is to go to one of these alternative systems. So please help me figure out how to do it best because that's my only option. We probably had more variability and more questions on the calf side. So what are we going to do with these calves? We wean them at a more traditional age, or we wean them earlier, we creep feed them, we let them up to the bunk, or put up a building. Space is a huge thing. Bunk space is a huge thing. We can't maybe really afford to add that bunk space for the calf. Adds a lot for the construction costs. So what do we do there? Do we add a special creep area for them to loaf and eat? How are you doing that? So we did a little dig and tried to find some creep feeding work in a dry lot setting. Grad students did come across this study. It was published in 1978. Obviously done prior to that. And I know those numbers may be a little small, but they'll draw your attention there. Those are final body weights. Slotter weights, 800, 900 pounds. That's not very applicable. Right? Those are not the kind of cows we're running. I'm guessing those aren't the, you know, someone's like, sure those aren't hot carcass weights. Right? That would be more in line with our hot carcass weights. So even though they saw some differences there, this information was not helpful to our current producers, right? These were different genetics, different systems. So in no offense to that work, I'm sure somebody 30 years from now, hopefully not sooner than that, will say what we're doing is outdated and irrelevant. So not a lot of data. So what do we know? Well, there's a lot of other creep feeding work that's been done. So, you know, we kind of made sure we reviewed some of that literature. I just struggle to convince myself that that's very applicable though, because those cattle are on grass. And so those calves have something to eat. And if we creep feed, that creep is substituting and replacing that forage base. And a dry lot, they don't have that. It's a pretty different system. So I'm not really sure that that information is super relevant to our dry lot or confinement systems. So this graph here shows as, you know, calf weight goes up. Basically, this is the requirement to meet their needs. And this is the assumed beef cow lactation curve. So neither of those curves I really like, right? Because we know that we don't have a cow that's going to, beef cow, that's going to make 50, 60 pounds of milk, nor would we want that. But I also think that I don't have a tremendous amount of faith in what we currently believe the beef cow's lactation curve to look like. Because we don't have a ton of data on that. All right? We have a few snapshots in time. I believe some of those aren't necessarily measuring the genetic potential of that cow, but they're measuring what environment she was in. So again, if we think about one of our systems, if someone did do an estimate of milk production on a spring calving cow and a cool season pasture in August, well, I think you're probably testing how good the forage quality and availability was, not her genetic potential, right? She has to have the nutrition to sustain that milk production. But regardless, we know that there's a gap, right? Calf requirement is, it's not going to be met by milk production. So what are we going to do? Or are we going to do anything? What happens if we don't meet that gap? Well, they're restricted. They're going to be behind. But if they can catch up later, maybe it's okay. But if they're so far behind that we've stunted them or maybe predisposed them to future problems, whether it's health-wise or compromise, grading potential, that would be a problem. If they're just behind and thin and they're going to bounce back, we could probably deal with that. So we set out, and this is the study that I'm going to go through, obviously, in more detail here, to determine what are the effects of creep feed duration on primary focus was the calf, but obviously we wanted to collect the data on the cow side, too, to make sure there wasn't any differences, even though you wouldn't really expect that. And we did follow at least the steer calves all the way through to slaughter. We used that facility that I told you about with those concrete lots and open-front buildings. We had 72 Simangus cows. You'll see here later I have their, by the way, but they're pretty good-sized cows. And I would say averaged above average milk production for that kind of cross. And we put six pairs in each of those pins. And there were three heifer calves and three bull calves at the start of the study at each of those pins. Bulls were castrated shortly thereafter. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on what we fed these cows. So that's not really the focus of this. What we found is you can feed them a lot of different things. You just need to formulate it to meet their energy and protein needs. Warren's going to share some different options. You should go with the least cost option. And it'll depend on what co-products or byproducts are regionally available to you, what you have access to, what you can get bought in. Right now probably feed some corn. Feed some corn silage. There's plenty of times where corn stocks and a co-product like distillers is what a lot of our producers will find to be least cost. But it's going to vary. And I think you can get cows to perform on any of those. So cows were fed the same on this. Our focus was the caps. And what we did was we fed them a commercial creep feed for either 105 days or the final 21 days prior to weaning. We started this project when we time AI'd the cows for the next cap. So these calves were 83 days of age when we started. And we weaned at 188 days of age plus or minus whatever there. And so that's where we get the 105 day creep feeding period. So that was summer. And then on the short term duration as I'll sometimes refer to it final three weeks. Those grad students in the room you probably have experienced this. Always want to maybe have another treatment or you can always think of a couple more things. We debated it on whether or not we should have a no creep negative control. But to be honest I didn't really think that that's what I would recommend. I think there's plenty of work to show that getting caps started on feed prior to weaning and going to the feed lots advantageous three weeks two to three weeks a fairly common recommendation. And I think that's especially important in a dry lot for a confinement because they're not eating anything else. Maybe nibble at some bedding. Right. A few of the crumbs in the bunk. But if we don't have any feed exposure prior to weaning I think that's probably setting those cattle up for potential issues. So we went with three weeks. A little bit of timeline here. Again kind of outlined this but you'll hear me refer to the pre weaning phase as those first hundred and five days. Well I'll call the kind of receiving or growing phase was we shipped these from that unit to our feedlot on campus and the first 42 days we kind of separate that out as that receiving growing phase. And then the final 150 some days whatever there would have been the finishing phase and then those cattle the steers were then sent to Tyson. Again 12 of those pins six pairs in each pin. Square footage under the building works out to less than 100 square foot per pair. Square footage on the concrete works out to about 200. And so you know there's obviously a lot of differences in what people use there. One thing that not to get in the weeds too much here we're talking about small spaces small pins. I think that those square footage allotments are different. And I say that because they're the effective space is challenging right. We have if you would have made all of our facility one pin there would have been four corners. But every pin has four corners. And those you know cows don't fit perfectly in those corners. So when you use the same square footage a lot of them but break it into small pieces it feels tighter. And it is tighter. So I think it's obviously we report it that way. And a lot of times comparing people say well that's more allotment than what people are using. I'm like I understand that but I think if you if you change this to a big pin it would look a little different. But that's what it was. If you can tell in this picture here this is where we fed the creep feed. That's not what I would recommend. Right I would use some sort of cell feeder or something if you're going to do it. We did it this way so we could weigh it out and feed it every day. Get the warts back. It's obviously exposed to the elements there again. That was kind of a retrofit to this facility that typically had only ever been used in the winter. And up until those calves were this 80 some days of age then went to the pasture. So that's that's how we set that up. To creep feed. So again pre-weaning phase we weighed several times throughout there started the creep at 105. We came in day 42 and did our first ultrasound to determine the AI conception rate from that timed AI. We did do a way suck away to determine milk production at this day 76. So again that'd be 160 days into lactation there. Then started the creep the end final prey check right there. And then we did do ultrasound for carcass composition. So on the gist of this muscle area 12th rib fat, rump fat. So for creep feeding obviously one of the questions always there well were they fleshy was there going to be a fleshy discount we want to make sure we could assess that. Track the cows as I told you I know there's a lot of numbers on there the take home from that is is the cows were similar. No differences in cow body weight no differences in cow BCS between those two treatments we would expect that for the most part we were able to maintain cow body weight cow BCS. I'm not going to tell you that six twos the ideal body condition score but that's probably a little a little fatter than they need to be but that's where those cows were. We have seen as we've kept these cows in more and more and we don't really have a period where they're going into negative energy balance that they will kind of drift just a little fatter over time because we're never really getting a reset if you will. Milk production not different. And again this was kind of late into lactation there. No difference we wouldn't really expect that. I will back up. The only reason we thought there could have been a difference in cow body weight was we thought that the calves that didn't have creep peak if they were hungry enough and tough enough they may try to get up to the bunk and eat alongside the cow. We provided 30 inches of bunk space per cow and that was a fairly energy dense limit-fed ration that they were cleaning up in about three hours. The opportunity for those calves to get to the bunk at 30 inches per cow and three hours of them cleaning up pretty limited. They would have had to have been pretty tough and pretty hungry to try and squeeze in there. You saw them try every once while they might sneak a nibble but if they had eaten a significant amount that would have meant there would have been less feed for their mother which may have shown up as those cows being different in weight and BCS. But they weren't so it's kind of an indirect measure that the calves probably weren't eaten much which is what we observed. Commented on the what was the breeding plan here and so these cows were synchronized seven-day cedar time-day I-75 percent first service conception which we considered to be exceptional as good as we've ever had that is not the norm. This unit, this manager and these cows they always do well. It's rare they're under 60 75 would have been a record there. So we'll take that every time because it doesn't always go that way. Overall pregnancy in the 90s so again both were good no problem at all. Can you explain why it shows the way so far way later? Yeah and so we wanted in a perfect world and especially now as I've gotten more into this questioning or current knowledge of the lactation curve I would love to have had somebody do it every week I might have had all my grad students quit but wanted to kind of see if later in time there when again some had had creep the whole time and some hadn't was there any difference in milk production or sustained milk production to kind of accommodate that the creep feeding data on pasture suggests that it doesn't do anything to milk production and I think ours kind of supports that. I wish we would have had lots and way suck away is it's a crude measurement if you're not familiar with it we separate the cows and calves the kind of midday we let them nurse for 15 minutes that evening at say seven o'clock separate them again the next morning we come in we weigh the calves empty we let them nurse we weigh them again their difference in weight change is considered to be 12 hours of milk production. It's it gets us close it beats the heck out of putting a milk machine on beef cow which I had to do as a graduate student probably going to have some future graduate students do that so um but it's it is a way of getting the milk production. Okay so a good question transfer here to the calves at the start no difference in calf body weight that's kind of by design you wouldn't want them to be different at the beginning and then already by day 42 the calves that had creep feed weighed more than the ones that didn't not a surprise that's what you would expect day 84 they'd separated by you know 75 80 pounds and then day 105 they come back together just a little bit and that would make sense if you look down here at the average daily gains I do want to point out here so first first two periods creep fed calves over three pounds a day just pretty good no non-creep fed calves two and a half which is also really good that's better and I thought it was going to be that's what our calves will do on pasture with their mother right and so that surprised me like what where where's that coming from right that if they're not really eating much out of the bunk we're not giving them anything else yeah they could pick up the bedding a little bit but I really think it comes back to maybe there was more sustained milk production through there than the models would have told us and also if they're only consuming milk maybe they stay more efficient on that all right and so I think we don't understand or know as much about that because we don't have a lot of beef calves that have only ever been fed milk for that period of time to really know what are they capable of gaining on just milk alone because we don't do that right so I think that's surprising but encouraging numbers and if you go to when we offer them creep they bounce up really good and those last three weeks they did over three and a half pounds a day so some compensatory gain this number is a little low the only thing I can tell you I'll show you their intakes here in a minute we had a little heat spell there I think those calves back off a little bit the other thing I will tell you is tracking gain over three weeks is tricky because you have some differences in gut fill and that really gets magnified when you try and calculate an average daily gain over just a few days it doesn't take very many pounds difference in fill to throw off that average daily gain last number I want to draw your attention to is this supplemental gain to feed and if we would make that a feed to gain that's I guess like six seven to one and that's a thing supplemental gain to feed that you see in creep feeding work so when we when we creep feed on pasture and we offer creep some of that creep replaces forage right and so oftentimes people kind of complain about hey those things were eating 10 pounds of creep feed but they didn't get very much more extra gain their efficiency on that creep feed was terrible and that's because in a pasture setting it's just replacing the forage it's not really a net benefit or certainly not all in that benefit in the dry lot it is it's not replacing anything so this supplemental gain to feed is better than what you'll see in any other creep feed literature on pasture because it's not replacing anything so that's good if you are going to offer that creep you're really getting a little more bang for your buck on that because it truly is all going to gain and not just replacing your your forage base yeah so question is is how can you tell if the if the creeps raising or you know helping the calf grow or the cows milk is and I guess I would just kind of come back to comparing those two when we didn't have creep that's obviously only on the cow and that's where we got the two and a half pounds per day gain when we had creep plus the the cow we were more like three and a half so that's our best way to kind of tease that out and then as far as keeping replacements I will hit on that a little bit later here when I talk about the flesh and the condition I would not recommend creep feeding potential heifer replacements there's really no benefit and potential for for negatives there thanks thanks for those questions and again if I didn't answer that specifically encourage you to you know put something else again in the chat there and I'll try and revisit that this graph here is on on the creep feed intake and so the orange line would be for those 105 day creep started pretty low just gradually worked their way up here's where I told you they kind of backed off right through here stalled out a little bit that may have been due to a heat event right there I think the important part is is when we offered creep to the short term they went up on it quick right and by three weeks there's no difference in intake between those two whether they'd been on it the whole time we've only been offered it in three weeks and so we got right up to about 10 pounds per head per day at the end but how many days until the calves are really consuming the creep yep so on this these calves when we started would have been 88 days of age and so we didn't offer it prior to that and so what is represented here as week one would have been when those calves would have been about three months of age and they started right out in that first week at a pound per day and you know every week basically over the next next 10 weeks they were adding half a pound or pound intake each each week we've done some where we've offered creep earlier in that and sometimes they'll get started on sometimes it just takes one calf to get in there and get started there's probably more variability at that young age at this later age when we come in here that they pretty well I'll go to it there's not as much variability great question and I did not draw attention to that it is there is corn corn is there's more corn than co-products but it's pretty similar and there's some distiller's grain some soy holes so there is a combination there I wouldn't characterize it as a high starch but it's not a it's not a no corn it's kind of an intermediate and I'll come back to that so that's a good question yeah I like ad libitum it was we did bunk feed it daily but the goal was for it to be ad libitum so we were trying to have just a little bit of refusal so yes we pushed them and let them have as much as we could good thank you told you we ultrasounded these calves all right they're gaining three and a half pounds a day they're probably potential to be a little fleshier lungismus muscle area there was a difference here whenever there's a difference and we know there's a weight difference I like to do that per unit of weight and there was not a difference when we do that calculation so what's that mean they weren't heavier muscles they were heavier right and so if they're heavier they're going to scan with a larger rib our larger lungismus muscle area they were fatter 12th rib and rump fat shows they were fatter visually we could see that we expected that but we wanted to have the numbers to verify that IMF had the question about the creep composition some of you may know University of Illinois has done a lot of work on this kind of early calf nutrition whether it's been creep feeding early weaning and a lot of that's focused around marbling deposition and certainly my predecessors and some of my graduate work was in that area and I do believe that there is an opportunity to influence marbling at that young age 100 to 200 days of age there's a window there where those intramuscular fat cells can still differentiate an increase in number and we have to have enough energy and I think there's certainly some work that would suggest the right source of energy and starch being key to that and so and we can talk more about that later if that really does interest you so we thought hey that's gonna be important to assess this there could be some differences in intramuscular fat wasn't significant and I'll come back to the fact that that wasn't a really high corn really high starch based creep and so maybe that's part of it but also point out that these calves they did have three weeks of creep at the end and also drive back to the point that they weren't on grass right so what they were getting was primarily milk which again we don't have some of that other creep feeding data that's out there those were all on pasture base so and and so some people would say I don't think creep really affects marbling anyway and so they're not surprised others would say oh I think I think I would have guessed there to be a difference sorry I had some boxes there a little pre-weaning summary then we're doing all right on time cow performance and repro were not impacted by creep feed duration it's good we wouldn't wouldn't expect that the long-term creep resulted in greater average daily gain greater body weight again we would expect that you feed them they grow faster resulted in being fleshier also expected that but I think it was good to put some numbers on it and document that and then the short-term creep during that period of time they compensated all right so again compensatory gain is that rapid efficient gain following a period of restriction I would say it would be safe to say that those calves that didn't have creep were restricted for those first 84 days and then we offered them creep and they bounced back a little bit now it wasn't enough to make up all the difference but they were sure made up some of that difference in those final three weeks if you saw on the objective I didn't say it out loud I guess that you said something about rumen fermentation characteristics and so what we wanted to do here my colleague Dr. Josh McCann does more on the rumen microbiome and he thought hey this would be a good idea to actually assess this and look at this I told you the reason we offered creep for three weeks prior to going to feedlot to make sure that they had feed exposure make sure that rumen development had occurred and they were ready for feed so we wanted to go in and see hey prior to that when some had had creep some hadn't is there any differences and so to do that we took rumen fluid from calves out of both treatments and so that's kind of the X vivo so rather if you've done any in vitro work hey we just get rumen fluid and we test the feed well we got rumen fluid from two different sets of cattle so it was kind of a different base right it would represented the rumen from these different management strategies and then we did the in vitro experiment you got to show this my grad student made it I didn't but obviously the idea there is we get the feed exposure and we get these these bugs and we get the right kind of rumen development okay so again at this time at day 76 just picture it as creep no creep right because the short term hadn't had it yet so it's creep no creep and what we found was the calves that had creep rumen fluid from them resulted in greater in vitro dry matter digestibility which supports that that rumen community was better was better prepared and more developed we also saw a difference between our substrates not surprising our creep feed was more digestible than the cow TMR so that part's not surprising and there wasn't an interaction a lot of numbers here though I'll draw your attention to the total VFA there was an interaction but it supports the same theory regardless of substrate we had more VFA production when they had been exposed to creep than when we didn't and so I'm glad we did this it kind of documented that I'm not going to show you the data but we did it again when they came to the feedlot so at that point they'd either been on creep for 105 days or they'd been on creep for three weeks no difference right no difference in any of these things which once again supports that three weeks was enough to prepare that rumen and I think that's important had we gone with these calves right here to the feedlot and started them on feed I don't think we would have got some of the same results that we did at that early part of that receiving period so now for the receiving phase we truck them to campus all right here's our receiving growing rationed silage corn hay distillers we get the hay out pretty quick we're on a slotted floor there at campus weight them every two weeks during that period kind of a summary of the body weights here they started different they stayed different the whole time but during that period the short-term creep fed calves had greater average daily gain they're still compensate all right they were intake was similar all right they tend to be more efficient and again that's the compensatory that's what we see if you take a set of contemporaries restrict one to a lower body weight and then put them back on the feed they'll eat the same it's kind of fascinating that they'll eat the same as their counterparts even though they weigh less so they're eating a greater percentage of their body weight and since they weigh less they have a lower maintenance cost so more of that intake is going to gain and that's how they end up being being more efficient oh I guess the last thing to point out there still didn't catch them narrowing the gap remember we're 75-80 pounds at the at the most now it's more like 35 or whatever so short-term creep greater average daily gain tend to be more efficient long-term creeps still heavier 42 days wasn't enough for them to come together so now finishing phase take you back to the beginning I said there's six pairs in each pin three heifer calves three male calves at this juncture the heifers were sorted off as potential replacements the steers we co-mangled we'd maintained pin even when we came to the this facility for that receiving phase we still kept those six calves from their dams pin in their own pin for the finishing phase we co-mangled managed them all together from a statistical standpoint our dam pin was always an experimental unit and we maintained that but we fed them together question may come up and I'll hit on this since there was already a question about the replacements no we didn't track the heifers all the way through it's 36 of them no no I think it's a really important question I would just tell you I would not creep feed my potential replacement heifers there's too many potentials for negatives one it costs more two if we do get them fat and fleshy there's data that shows that creep feeding can lower milk production seen as much as 25% reduction in lifetime milk production if you creep feed those calves especially if you do it for a long period of time and get them fleshy you're just it's pretty unlikely in a commercial setting that you recoup those dollars and you may cost you more if you're in a purebred seedstock trying to market these at an earlier age you might be able to justify getting those calves a little bloomier earlier that's a different scenario finishing phase here's our finishing rations we used here again we we use silage as our our forage base corn high moisture corn modified distillers pretty typical for our part of the world we did implant these calves day 148 day 223 we used the TEIS for the first one TES for the second one they were co-mingled so we couldn't have intake I don't like three animals in a pen that's not enough to really get a good pen average so that's why we didn't keep those pins but I still wanted to see if there's any intake differences so since they're all together we did use our grow safe system if you're not familiar with that and use the electronic ID allows you to get individual feed intake in a pen setting so we could keep them co-mingled and still know what each calf ate we did that just at the end again would have been great to do it the whole time didn't really have the dollars budgeted to do that so and then at the end we shipped them to Tyson we have a packing plant there in Illinois and Jocelyn, Illinois three hours from campus and we got a full set of carcass data so right here at the beginning of this finishing phase now it's just the steers so if you're like hey those numbers don't quite match before before it was an average of the heifers and steers this is just steers so about 60 pounds difference here so a little bigger difference than when the heifers were mixed in but by day 238 not statistically significant and by the end not statistically significant you might say hey there's a little bit of numerical difference there and I'll come back to that sorry I like to point out this number right here they're both really good but 4.8 pounds per day for those first 90 days in the finishing phase for those short-term creep caps they were still compensating right so still exceptional ready to gain making up for that and that's why at the end they weren't different now when we came in here for the last days and did our intake evaluation feed efficiency no difference in intake no difference in gain no difference in feed efficiency so by that last kind of 60 days they were the same right they had fully compensated and caught back up from a growth performance standpoint which is pretty cool if that can happen consistently maybe asking about the carcass data well hot carcass weight actually numerically identical so if there's a little bit of a numerical difference on live weight there was a little bit of numerical difference here on our dressing percent not significant and I wanted to follow them through and get this but you know we're a little short on numbers and I acknowledge that we're powered good for everything up through that receiving phase but when we drop those heifers out you know one one individual on a pin of three can kind of use some numbers a little bit about a half inch of fat right 30 yield grade no difference in marbling back to there wasn't any difference in IMF there at the end of the pre-weaning so wouldn't really expect there to be a marbling difference at the end so summarize that's 21 day calves they compensated now they'd been compensating but they hadn't caught up but now they have they have caught up no difference in gain or feed efficiency of those final 60 days because they'd already caught up and no difference in carcass traits so what about economics and I'll circle back to the question you know that what came in the chat relative to economics between a grazing system and a dry lot or a confinement system and I'll kind of reiterate what I said there that really depends because you got so many moving parts right what's your grass cost what's your feed cost here comparing these two systems well they're in the same thing right almost all the costs were identical right we had the same space allotment cows were fed the same the only difference in these two treatments was how long they had creep right so that's and there wasn't any difference in intake in the receiving or finishing phase so there wasn't any difference in feed costs and that stage so our only difference is in this creep feeding period so we would did want to do some economics here we use three year averages when we do this you know we could argue what's the best way sometime longer term averages make sense if we think we've entered a new era sometimes it's included in historical data isn't very relevant we could we could argue that for a while feeder calf value again three year average we did use a flashy discount and we did have a weight slide in there since there were some differences in weight we know that affects feeder calf value carcass value again we used three year averages for base price and premiums and discounts associated with quality and yield when we look at the kind of partial economic analysis here through the wean calf value there was about an $83 difference in creep feed costs if you creep feed them for 105 days it's going to cost you more than if you creep feed them for 21 days right you would expect that $83 they were worth more and again here's where some of those variables how fleshy are they are you going to get a fleshy discount or not we put one on if we wouldn't have they might have been worth a little bit more but we thought considering the flesh they were at it made sense we end up with a $42 advantage to the long term creep but I'm not going to spend $83 to make $42 right that doesn't make sense so the short term creep were $40 more profitable if you sell on that weaning now sorry I didn't mean to click through that if we look at it through the final carcass value we have the same feed costs we go here and actually just the way it worked out with the marbling score wasn't different we had a few more that went CAB and I think we had one more prime on that and so when you put the individual premiums on there we actually end up with a $19 difference favoring the short term so we combined that we got over $100 profit more by only creep feeding for three weeks compared to creep feeding for the whole time so in conclusion there that long-term creep did improve calf weight prior to weaning creep feeding for 21 days does appear to be sufficient for preparing that rumen again based that on two things the ex vivo data and the fact that in that receiving period they took off right away if they if they weren't ready to go we might not have seen some of that compensatory gain in that receiving phase it may have been a little more delayed but they hit the ground running I would say that we had them ready and ultimately creep feeding for three weeks saved cost still had them ready and didn't jeopardize final carcass merit so like any anything no one study answers all questions but I do think this has helped some of our producers and you know we're gonna gonna do some more of this gonna hopefully work with some producers on farm for them to try and track a little bit of their data I think just our initial reaction would be well we gotta feed them something they can't they can't have no feet right they can't just be in this dry lot they don't have grass we got we gotta let them come up to the bunk and I know some recommendations are to allow for enough space so the calf can get there too or add additional cmr feed to account for what those calves can eat and I would say this one study would say that may not be true and we need to continue to work on that because if they will catch up later it makes no sense to try and do it then right now you gotta make sure you get the value right if you're retained ownership that's easy to capture that if you're gonna sell them at weaning you need to make sure you're getting the appropriate premium for this thin calf that's gonna you know maybe go half five pounds a day average daily gain because of this compensatory gain I mentioned that first study was funded by Iowa Beef Industry Council this one was funded by Illinois Beef Association obviously none of this is possible without the grad students Megan Meyerskopf did the first one Lindsey Pugh did this one actually both of them have to be employed by Perina now and did a fantastic job when they were with us so with that be happy to answer questions you have yes yep yep great question uh was there and I'll repeat that for those of you on on zoom and I apologize if I didn't do that earlier was there any differences in treatment or health records there we had very very few respiratory which is a good thing but when you have so low numbers we treated like one or two on each treatment and so there wasn't anything significant and I didn't report it because they were just so low with these kind of numbers to pick up a difference in health treatment statistically we would have had to have treated like 50% and one of them and zero and the other I I don't really think that there should be differences though again if if our non creep fed or late creep fed calves had only been doing one and a half pounds a day and really look stunted or behind or unthrifty then I would maybe have been a little worried about them but they're getting two and a half pounds a day and they had the three weeks of creep where they really did well yeah they were thinner but they did not look like they were you know at risk any differences in feed deliveries to the cattle that are between fancy between fed or not during the year or during this meeting period I think we're at the time is there more feed for the cows a day no we limit fed so we I mean we fed the same amount to all the pens and and I wish we had a way to to track it but but we don't you know at that it's they were bunk fed but that's why we we did I had some undergrads that did some observations and this last year we did a different study and we really tried to do that more because we the study we did this past summer we looked at a energy dense limit fed TMR similar to this where they're cleaned up in two or three hours and then a bulkier higher corn stock inclusion one where it was really in the bunk for more like six seven eight hours and we counted number of calves at the bunk like every hour I say we undergrads did that and there there were on the bulky the cows they got full and they walked away before it was gone and then we did see some calves up there still pretty minimal but in this study where they're both where they're all limit fed it's cows just they stay at the bunk till it's gone and those calves really don't get up there you know how much chance yeah yes we have some of that and you know there was yesterday we had a conversation and gentlemen that works with some hoop building say that that that kind of goes away over time cows that I think he was sharing that once they'd been in there for a couple years and never left it kind of starts to go away and I wonder if we've seen some of that because I will tell you these these cows they didn't just go into this facility when we started they'd been in there all winter right this was our wintering facility and they'd been wintered in there the year before and some of these cows had been on some of our extended dry lot and and we limit feed you know higher energy ration pre-caving as well and so I think we maybe don't see as much of that as if you took a set of you know cows that had been only on range and then put them in there and said hey you're gonna we'll get deep for two hours I think we would observe we see some of it but we're mostly pipe and you know we don't have as many things for them to chew on and it's not a dirt lot it's concrete so it's not like they're eating the dirt or some of the things you see sometimes but yeah and we will see that a little bit in the spring or I will tell you if we if we use the heat detection patches they don't stay on very good in our in our dry lot those cows they it's totally different than when they're out on grass we don't hardly ever lose a patch out on grass in a dry lot it only takes one cow to figure out that she's good at ripping them off and they're they're gone so we use a in a loka 550 I'm not not an expert on that but they're I would say they're not cheap we use them in a research setting as far as what could be available for a commercial application you know if you have pure red cattle you can hire someone to come and ultrasound your calves for a fee and I mean even with commercial you can be cost-prohibited but there are there are people that will come scan your cattle there no any recommendations for portable or quick assessment for marbling or IMF now that I'm in a live animal really our only option to assess that would be to utilize ultrasound and and it has it's the one set of challenges there but certainly if you use a certified technician and those are go through like the cup lab the central processing that date is pretty good but there's a cost associated with that did you feed them so the heifers didn't come into heat and so maybe referring to MGA we did not have MGA in there again these heifers and steers were co-mingled up until that's into that receiving phase so those cattle would have been about 220 days of age we wouldn't have had any heifers cycling at that point and then at that juncture the heifers came off study and we only had the steers on study from that point forward in the finishing phase it was a is the creep pelated or loose it was a pelated creep feed commercial creep feed that we used just so happened that the local feed mill there our extension specialist Travis Matier whose name is on here he's been an integral part of all this confinement work we've done he's kind of worked with him on developing that I don't think it has to be a pelated but that's what we used