 Like she said, my name is Taylor Gruessing. I work in the Mitchell Regional Extension Office, but I'm actually from Chamberlain. So I drive about an hour east every day. So coming up here was only about two and a half hours. But it's a lot of time on the road, but it kind of let me see the country, even though it's from the interstate every day. Grew up on a cow calf operation in Kimball, went to SDSU, Iowa State for some education, and then came back here to Chamberlain. My husband's a veterinarian in Chamberlain at an associate vet clinic there. So we do the dirty jobs on the weekend, I guess, work cows and everything, and then go to town every day. So I'm really glad Doug talked first, because he did my pretty much whole presentation, and he went long, so now I can go short, right? So if we have questions, I'll probably go through this pretty fast. It'll be a little bit of review of what Doug said, and then if we have questions, you can sure come up and answer questions to all of us, because I'm gonna defer to him. I love doing the research in the field from SDSU, but we always know we need the boots on the ground people to show you what really works, right? So everything in the book we know isn't practical. So we really like to kind of cross paths whenever we can. This is nothing new to any of you. Since 2012, or since 2002, we've lost 22% of our cropable pasture land in South Dakota, right? Crop prices went way high. A lot of it was converted into crop grounds, and none, if any, or little if any, is being converted back into pasture land today, even though crop prices aren't getting any better. So a continual struggle that we're gonna be dealing with, especially with bringing next generations back to the operation, trying to increase maybe our herd size instead of maybe finding more pasture acres to do that on. We're gonna have to maybe get smaller cows, like Doug mentioned, to get more live calves in the pen at weaning time. Grazing fees on that pasture land that we do have available are going up, hopefully not this year. We do a land survey every year at SDSU, and last year, I think crop grounds started to go down, but pasture land stayed about the same. So we need to be able to keep more cattle on those grazing acres that keep it productive in order to be profitable. We just talked a little bit about the drought. I pulled this up the other day. This is our projection into April. I went to grazing school a couple years ago and tried to keep in contact with some of the Grasslands Coalition folks, and a lot of them have these grazing plans. And so if they don't get rained by March 1st or April 1st, they're already on to step two of their grazing plan. So they're either cutting the number of cows from their herd. They're not gonna go to certain pastures. Potentially they're already making those decisions by April. So the dark, the brown is a drought persisting. So you can see kind of that cutting across Central South Dakota right where we are. It's gonna persist, but maybe not get worse. The light, the tan, a little bit more in that Northwestern side of South Dakota, Eastern South Dakota equal chances. So don't know if it's gonna get better. Don't know if it's gonna get worse. But for now, I think utilizing the programs that Kay just talked about, prepare yourself, whether start buying hay now, try to source those things before May when everyone else is gonna be looking for those options too. This is the inventory of hay stocks as of December. From 2017, we were down about 10% in our hay stocks for the year. So if you are looking for hay, everyone else is too. So hay prices went up quite a bit in South Dakota. Now over in Iowa or in some of the other states, maybe not so much, but we $120 hay by the time you get trucking onto that, and it's maybe not even the best quality hay out there. So it's gonna be a little bit, hay didn't go down maybe as much as we thought it would because we did catch some of those late rains, but just something to be thinking about in addition to our pasture grounds, what we're gonna supplement to our cows once we take them off of the pasture. So our goal every year is we're giving X amount of forage, especially in our pastures that we started talking about today. We're utilizing that to efficiently graze our cattle, hopefully 365 days a year, right? Up in the upper Midwest, that always doesn't happen, right? And so the more time we can keep our cattle grazing, no matter what it is, the more profitable we're probably going to be. So if we don't have pasture land or if our pasture's dry, last time I was up here unfortunately was in June for the drought meeting. I tested a lot of spring wheat for nitrates, a lot of waters for testing too. Luckily you guys actually were pretty good. I send a couple samples off for nitrates and all that spring wheat came back pretty good. And I think you guys did a good job of harvesting that early enough. So it did make some good quality hay for you. Most of the dugouts and the waters that I tested were pretty good at that time. I know late June you got a little bit more rain, but you eventually got better. But unfortunately that's what I was doing up here for you guys in June. So our pastures are really dry at that time. We were starting to look for options. I visited with a couple of folks about grazing peat or excuse me, soybeans up here, what options that would be for the cattle. Just kind of like anything with grazing corn limiting is gonna be your best friend. So some of those, they probably provide good nutrients, too much of anything is a bad thing in terms of that. So those are some options we talked about. But in order to make better use of our crop grounds potentially last year or maybe going into this year is to make cattle our crop going forward. So if we can turn, if we know the crop inputs are gonna be high, if we know the prices aren't maybe gonna be quite there, how can we turn our cattle into our crop on our crop ground that normally gives us corn and beans? And that's where Cindy asked me kind of talk about grazing off of pasture. So finding the cover crops, annual forages, crop residues, to maybe turn that, keep the ground active. We don't necessarily need it to let it go dormant but find other options that are gonna be more cost effective when we're running that product through a cow. Forage growth, you guys probably know this. Obviously we are dealing with our cool season grasses, warm season grasses, legumes, brassicas, those types of things. We wanna have diversity in our mixes as we've talked about today. So they all provide different attributes and nutrients to the soil as well as to the cattle that we're going to graze on. Usually our summer slump is when we're looking for forage. This unfortunately started in June last year rather than July, August, September, like we're normally used to it. So if this summer slump comes earlier than normal, what can we do to fill that in in a non-normal cycle? And that's where our cover crops, our annual forages go right along with those and then our crop residues, which are probably one of the most underutilized resources that we have across the country, mainly because of fencing and water restrictions. So starting off with any of those forages that I'll get to here in a little bit, we have our yield versus quality conundrum kind of. So if we have our grasses types that we're gonna look for, these are gonna be your better fiber sources. Fiber, grasses for gain is what I would like to say. So if you're really focused on maybe getting gain on some stocker cattle, some backgrounder calves, for example, grass is gonna be your best friend in order to get some pounds of gain on those, but they're gonna be a little lower in protein. Cattle don't need a ton of protein, but they need some in order to keep the room and happy. We have to have at least seven to 8% protein in our rations at all times. The legumes, brassica, broadleaf options, those are gonna be higher in protein, higher in digestibility, but less fiber in those. So maybe run right through them a little bit faster. So this is where our maturity flip-flop goes. So if we have our relative quality down here, we're just gonna have really young growing plants with really high crude protein. As soon as those plants continue maturing, obviously you're gonna be less digestible with more stems, fiber in that plant. So usually if we can hit right in the middle, it's kind of the sweet spot of where we wanna go when we're harvesting, either grazing or mechanically harvesting. One other thing I wanna point out is the mineral content of these plants also goes down too. So we had obviously a drought last year, some of those forages that we stored. We're usually lacking vitamin A and vitamin E into stored forages anyways. Some of our other minerals might have been more affected last year also. So always make sure you have a good mineral plan with your livestock, no matter what program you're in. Minerals crisscross every which way with reproduction, nutrition, health, and so on. So cover crops, usually traditionally they started right after small grains. So our wheat will drill right into those or silage harvest. They've started interceding into standing corn. We did a project down at the Southeast Research Farm in Beersford this last year where they rented the interceder, I believe, from Huron District Conservation. And that was pretty cool to see how they went in and put that in between the corn rows. The strategy there was to pick varieties that are more shade tolerant. And so they set in the ground, they plant their, or get their roots growing and then they wait essentially until that corn was gone and then they kind of took off and were ready to go. I haven't seen yield results on that yet. They did pretty good, I think, based on the varieties that they chose. That is the interceder that's available, I think, for producers to rent too, if you want to look into that option. Research in other states have looked at aerial seeding a little bit. The difficulty with that is the soil seed contact. So they're having, you have to increase your pounds per acre quite a bit in order to get a good stand for those. But those are some options too if you don't have a small grain, for example, to follow with cover crops. Like I said, we want to fill out that summer slump. We can do season long grazing, like Doug was talking about. Maybe sacrifice a crop, use a crop ground acre, start small, as Kay was just saying, maybe start with one piece and make a season long cover crop, see how it works, put it into your rotation if that works. We've also done a research project with some producers across the state where they have been working oats, for example, into their rotation with corn and soybeans. And then every fourth year, there's that cover crop for the soil health benefits, as well as the cattle benefits for that too. When we're picking our cover crop varieties, we want to optimize growing degree days. So based on the forage growing map I showed you, if you're doing a warm season, cool season, you can also make choices on low versus high residue options. So rye, for example, be a high residue, turnips, radishes, be a little bit of a lower residue option there, and then if you're choosing them for supplemental grazing in hay, you're probably gonna wanna go with the higher forage or higher fiber, higher grass variety or mixes in the cocktails, and maybe less of the broad leaves if you're gonna put it up for stored hay. Determining your grazing plan for cover crops or annual forages kind of starts like we graze pasture. So we wanna have a plan before going into that. If we're doing spring grazing, we really gotta pay attention to when it starts getting warm, obviously, and that plant really starts actively growing because if it gets too far ahead of us, past that boot stage, our quality is gonna go down relatively fast. As soon as it shoots that seed head, it'll be hard. The maturity and the protein is gonna continue to go down, not entirely making it useless. Just kind of depends on if you want quality or yield as your goal. For spring grazing, we have the winter hardy species. We can have the two options of harvesting either mechanically, putting up for hay, grazing those options. When we're grazing in the spring, obviously we usually have snow on the ground and so compaction can be more of a worry as the ground starts to thaw. I have some research later showing some differences in the compaction that was just reported from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. One way to alleviate any kind of compaction if you are seeing an issue, if you have the ability to move your mineral or move your water tank, that can make the cows go a different route every day also. So here's some cool season options. Obviously, oats we would plant in the spring, rye, winter wheat, trinicalia, we can seed in the fall. Here's an example of what my family did this last year. So we planted some winter wheat just on 30 acres right by our house and we divided it into four paddocks when we went to go graze that. We started paddock one, obviously. It only lasted about three days. Moved to paddock two, that lasted about six days. Three, it rained actually, that was the last time it actually rained, it was in paddock three, so we did get very good regrowth on that. And by the time we got to paddock four, which was about day 15, it was getting a little bit too mature for us. So that's something else to keep in mind if you are rotational grazing, your sum of these forages is to watch the maturity. So we probably should have moved faster from three to four because the regrowth we got on four was pretty minimal and it was getting sticky at that time for the cows to graze it. But all in all, we had 35 acres, grazed like 180 head for 22 days, I believe, came out to about 119 AUMs or three and a half AUMs per acre on that. So we went on on May 5th, I believe. So my husband graduated vet school on May 4th, came home and moved cows on cover crop on May 5th. And then we went to a cool season pasture just right to the east there. Let one and two regrow, took the fence down and turned them all back out to re-graze for a couple more days before we moved down the road. But if we wouldn't have had this planted last year, our pastures would have went extremely fast. Brill County was at least E3 last year where I live. So just one example that it really worked out for us, granted we have cool season pastures that we could have went to and sniffed off the top, kept it in a vegetative state. But this we calved, we weren't done calving at this time quite yet either. So this was right off of our calving pasture. So let the momma cows go out and graze that and the calves didn't have too far to go. So relatively small area that worked pretty good and to get us 20 blessed days on our pasture this last year. Granted for tonnage-wise, you know, winter wheat probably isn't the best option for tons, if you want to do Triticali, something like that, rye for example, you're gonna get maybe more tons of dry matter per acre, but protein content on any of those is very, very good. Probably too much almost to meet the requirements. It's way over requirements for beef cattle. Beef cattle requirements during lactation are about 13% protein. Most of our cover crops range from 18 to 22% protein. So that's plenty. But actually that's what my research was on in grad school is overfeeding protein to dairy cattle is bad, right? We've heard lots of research on dairy cattle side that if you feed too much protein, fertility goes way down. We're not seeing that in the beef cattle side. So not a huge worry on feeding too much protein to beef cattle as long as they're adapted to it over at least a week timeframe before breeding season would start, for example, you should be fine. Summer, warm season forages, has some good examples in Doug's pictures, sandgrass, sorghum, millet varieties. These are gonna be your tonnage options. I think Dan said what you had 8,000 pounds of dry matter per acre in his variety. So you can get a lot more tons of feed on these options, especially in the summertime. One thing to watch out for on these, as you probably know, are most of them are nitrate accumulators. So if you do fertilize a lot or have a lot of nitrogen, they can soak up those. Usually if we strip grays, these types of forages, you can limit intake and not have to worry so much about getting too much nitrates into them, but just something to keep in mind, especially on the sorghum options. If you don't want to graze them, or let's say we do get a bunch of rain and we want to hay or chop those forages for silage, you can certainly do that. Just kind of need to make your decision early, because if you're gonna graze it, you're gonna want to obviously start grazing a little bit sooner than you want to chop it for silage, mainly because our moisture is our storage issue with silage. We want that to be 35% dry matter about, so 65% moisture, which is still pretty wet, but usually when we see, like even last year when we started chopping corn for silage, it looked dry, but actually the plant was still pretty wet because those ears were immature, right? So they weren't as dry as maybe the leaves were dry, but the entire plant was still pretty wet. So an easy way to do that, we have some moisture testers across the state in our county offices and regional offices, or just chop it, lay it, you can turn your oven on really low, dry it out, weigh it until it stops losing weight, and then take your starting weight minus your ending weight, and you can find your moisture content on that. So you can go moisture, but also flag leaf to doe stage is when you would want to start harvesting that and usually a compromise at the boot stage, because it seems like we drive up at that flag, we come back at doe, so usually try to compromise at the boot stage for silage harvest, and then try to always cover your silage piles if possible. The first four inches of a bale or a silage equates to about 40% of the total bale or total silage pile. So you can lose a lot of forage products there without covering it. Usually can hire an FFA team or club or something, get some kids to come and run that tarp over top, put the tires down on it just to keep that oxygen out, because fermentation process doesn't want oxygen in there. So the better we can do storing our forage, especially last year when we needed all the forage we can get come this time of year when there's nothing left out there, the better we can be. And lastly, fall grazing for cover crops. Usually you want your fast growing species because your growing degree days are getting shorter. Winter kill varieties can be nice because then you don't have to worry about spraying them out in the spring. And then usually our ground is hopefully frozen by then, and so there should be minimal compaction risks with fall grazing. Here's a study done by Iowa State that was just done this last fall. They took, so we talked about pastures that maybe are getting invaded with like brome for example, or they had a Kentucky bluegrass pasture out there that they wanted to start over. So they terminated that pasture and interceded radishes, turnips and oats into that. 17 acres is all right by their farm. It equated to about 24% crude protein when they did a nutrient test on that. They took 17 fall pairs out and strip grazed these cover crops and they offered them some corn stock bales at the same time because the moisture content was so high in that cover crop variety. It lasted 38 days when they started grazing on November 14th and they had a killing frost on November 13th. So this was at Ames, Iowa, about six hours southwest of my house, I guess. So about eight hours from here. Results what they found. So these are lactating beef cows, keep in mind. Cows lost about a third of a pound per day in both treatments. So I guess I should mention the other half of the cows were in a dry lot situation. So they were comparing grazing a cover crop to a traditional fall dry lot situation. Both groups of cows lost 0.3 pounds, which isn't a lot, especially when you're lactating, right? So we were able to pretty much meet the lactation requirements of those cows, lose very minimal weight in both situations. For the calves on the other hand, they gained 0.9, almost a pound per head per day on the cover crop compared to the calves in the dry lot. We all know it's hard to have a place in the dry lot for calves to get a little extra feed rather than just the milk. And to this day, the beef teaching farm managers, so they weaned and he can still tell which calves he had on the cover crop versus which ones were in the dry lot. So essentially they are gonna be about 38 pounds more at weaning time where they were 38 pounds more when they came back into the lot. So this is just a little example. I know we don't have a ton of research on pairs on cover crop. And so that's kind of why I wanted to throw this out there is that it's, these cover crops are providing more than enough nutrients for our mature cows. If we can get young calves on there at their side and then they can learn grazing behavior too, that can be as money savings in terms of weaning them early and putting them in a dry lot with stored feed too. So year round grazing, Doug already talked about this a little bit. So obviously we'd wanna plant one in the spring, summer and fall. Example planting dates, I said I'm not an agronomist so we'll divert to Jason and Evely for that. So April 1st, June 1st example, you could do a ryegrass, oats, brassicas, radish and turnips. Summer, we would do more of the millet, sorghum, sandgrass varieties. You can throw the turnip radishes in there too for that diversity. And then fall, you could do oats, peas, vets, raddish for example. This last year, like I was saying, we did a research project. I was kind of worried about some of the producers not planting it because it was so dry. But all of them did and some of the other producers who I've talked to who didn't said they wish they would have. It's very low input on seed cost. You know, just plant it August 1st or as soon as you can right after you get your weed out. It needs very little rain to germinate and get something to keep that ground actively growing. One comment on that last slide there, that radish on the spring April 1st to June 1st, be very careful on the radish variety because most will just bolt in flour. Okay. Thank you. Example of a cover crop mix. So seed cost, it was gonna be, I just put on average a 25 for an oats turn up pea mix. Obviously you wanna charge, or here I'm calculating planting charges depending on if you're doing it yourself. You should still charge yourself something technically, right? Fertilizer, some people do, some people don't. Fertilizer kind of depends on the previous crop I would say. So for an example here, I have just 67, almost $70 an acre. If I got 2000 pounds of dry matter per acre, which isn't very much compared to like a summer cover crop, that would have a lot more tonnage. If I do an example of 70% grazing efficiency, Doug said cows eat 3% of their body weight per day. It's gonna give me about 30 pounds of dry matter per day on a 1350 pound cow, which would give me about 47 grazing days per head per acre on this cover crop mix, for example. If I equate that to about $1.43 per head per day for this cost, for example, if I was feeding them $125 per tonne hay, that'd be $1.80 a day. So a little bit more input, or in terms of running your tractor over to plant the seed, putting some fence up, maybe some water to move your cows out there, but you're not delivering hay every single day like you would potentially be in a dry lot situation with just hay. Challenges with cover crops, we know they're weather dependent. So like I said, even though it was dry, we still did pretty good with cover crops this last year. Late summer moisture, if you just catch a little bit, that usually goes a long ways. We're still struggling with establishment in corn and beans, but we're getting there. Herbicide restrictions, there's not all herbicides are labeled for grazing. So you need to make sure you're looking at that, that you're putting on for your previous crop. If it's not, if it doesn't say grazing on there, it's in the all other category. So it means probably it might not kill them, I guess you could say, but the research hasn't been done on it. So they don't know. So I don't know if you'd want to take that risk, but visit with your agronomists and hopefully be able to find an option wet that works for you to graze afterwards. Water and fence is always an issue with cover crops, moisture content. They are so wet. So providing either corn stock bales, something dry available for them, you'll be surprised if you put a cover crop field next to some corn residue, they will go back and forth because they need that dry matter content. They can't physically eat enough of cover crops every day to fill their energy needs. So they may lose weight on them if you don't have some extra dry forage or even just grass along the fence lines that you can't plant anyways, they'll nibble on those. Toxins, nitrates, prusic acid, we mentioned with sodium grass would be something to watch out for towards freezing. Sulphur, we've had some selenium issues too. So depending on your soil types, if you know you have some mineral toxicities potentially, some of these brassicas or a lot of these cover crops will take up those extra minerals. So limiting may have to happen if you have some of those. A nitrate or a nutrient test for any kind of forage can run about $15 or to $35. I'm not very expensive just to kind of know what you're feeding. Next crop residue. Like I said, one of the most underutilized options, usually we see the corn stalks blowing into the ditches. Pretty hard to bail it up in the ditch once it's there. But cattle are selective grazers. So we talked about the chocolate pudding plants. If you have down corn, they're gonna go to the corn first, and then they're gonna go to the leaves, the husks, cobs, and stalks. So usually we can turn them obviously out on a complete field of crop residue. But options to strip graze those would be better official because that keeps them more uniform diet, makes them eat the corn, the husk altogether. They're not normally gonna eat the stalk. We usually don't wanna make them do that either. But they're gonna selective graze. If you try to limit it to 10 pounds, 10 pounds of corn per head, 10 to 30. We had a lot of down corn this last year. I know Nebraska had a ton of down corn. So they said that if they kept it 10 bushels or more, if there's 10 bushels or more in the ground, they just really strip grazed it and watched for acidosis. But hopefully there'll be enough of the other dry matter on there too that if you do limit access, they can try to alleviate those bloat risks or foundering. Math, simple math, one cow per acre per month. UNL says 15 pounds of residue per bushel of corn that was harvested off that field. We assume 50% consumption because half of it's gonna probably blow away or it's gonna be trampled on the ground. It's giving you 120 bushel corn, for example, 1,800 pounds available, divided by two is 900 pounds for consumption. If she's gonna eat 2% of her body weight, this gives me one acre, 90 pounds, divided by 30 pounds per day, 30 days. Okay, so that's how we did that, pretty simple math. But if you have higher yields, obviously you're gonna be able to probably have some more residue available and stay out there longer. If you pay by the acre or pay by the head, sometimes if you have an open winter, paying by the acre is gonna be better off for you. Excuse me, paying by the acre or paying by the day. So if you're gonna pay by the acre, you might be able to take more residue off of there. But if you have an agreement to pay by the day, you wanna maybe increase your stocking numbers to utilize the residue for that timeframe. Here's the, UNL just came out with their beef report. They did a three year study where they looked at grazing, baling, or just leaving all the residue on a corn field. They took 50% removal on all of those treatments and they saw no difference in corn yields the next year, all in that 230 range. They did see grazing benefit of the soy being corn rotation. And they suggested weighing your bales when you take them off if you are baling. So that kind of gives you an idea of the nutrients to put back on that field. Compaction, we've talked about this a little bit. That's an issue that we're always concerned about. They measure compaction with bulk density, measuring the amounts of soil versus air properties. They did a 16 year study on a 90 acre irrigated plots where it's the corn soybean rotation. They implemented fall grazing, spring grazing, or no grazing at all. And they stocked it at 1.8 to 2.5 AUMs of stocker cattle. What they found was fall grazing increased corn soybean yields, spring grazing increased the soybean yields and wasn't negatively affecting corn yields, bulk density, or stability. The cone index, which would kind of be measuring the compaction increased a little bit, but it was still below the threshold that they were worried about, okay? So just a little bit of a pretty big study. I know it's only on a few acres. It was repeated year after year and didn't see some negative effects. They also did a survey of crop consultants, recommending grazing on acres. And most of the people that didn't allow grazing on their acres or crop consultants that didn't recommend it was because of fencing issues or the amounts that they wanted to get paid per acre for those residues. So most people are open to grazing as long as you can find a way to put up the fence, keep the mineral moving around the pasture to limit some compaction potential options. Okay, so nutrient analysis, at the end of the day, I've been saying that mature cows, they don't need all the nutrients that's in the cover crops at all the times. It's not gonna hurt them, but we're gonna put some extra body weight on them for sure if we have ample nutrients available. So just comparing a cover crop nutrient analysis, like I said, pretty wet, so about 80% moisture, TDN of 70%. If we go over to the crude protein differences between cover crop corn stocks, brome hay and pasture, this corn stocks is about 6%, which they can be all the way down to 3%. You know, we need 7% protein in the ration per day. So on the corn stock option, you might need some protein supplement no matter what you're grazing, just to keep the protein happy, but everything else meets protein requirements and TDN requirements, brome hay might be a little bit low, but usually they can consume more hay than they need to and be just fine. Price comparison between those corn stocks, if we consider labor, water, for example, it might cost us a dollar per head. So cover crops is gonna be your cheapest option here, but remember that we probably need to supplement some dry forage along with that. Brome hay, $1.80, and then pasture around me is still $1.75 to two bucks a day if you consider everything you're putting into it. So just some cost comparison options, make sure you take into account your labor, facility equipment options on those, but all mid-gestation spring calving cows can get along just fine on corn stocks with a little bit of a protein supplement and be fine. They can really put on some weight on cover crops. So all are good, utilize them all to your advantage. Why it matters for me, I do a lot of breeding projects or reproduction. We know that reproduction is the leading cost of profitability on the beef operation, so we have to get the cows bred, have to calf them and have to wean their calf, right? So that's why no matter what you're planting, we wanna consider obviously our soil health, keep that soil active at all time, keep the cows grazing as long as we can, assess body condition at several times throughout the year if possible. How many of you guys body condition score your cows? So very few, right? So we want, this is the easiest way we can assess the energy reserves of cattle. So we said he looked at the left side of his cow and he was like, ooh, she's pretty good, looked at the right side, oh, maybe needs a little bit of feed while we can look at their, over their top line and their brisket from behind, see how they're carrying their condition, and especially at weaning time. You know, if they wean that, go to weaning and they're a little bit thin, we can take that time when they're not lactating anymore to put some weight on before calving season, and we can maintain her after calving to breeding. If we're gonna try to put weight on from calving to breeding, it's gonna cost us a lot more money, okay? Cause she's lactating and she's gonna put everything she has into her milk. We want cows at a body condition score of about five and a half, heifers at a six at calving time, and we should be good to go. If we're overfeeding, it's gonna cost us too much money and not necessarily give us too much of a benefit. Here's some references of where you would look at for condition in order to assess where they're at. And cows, we have a one to nine scale. We wanna shoot for this five to six range. You should see about two to three ribs if they're in a five. If you see more than three ribs, they're getting on that four side. If you see no ribs, they're up in the seven range. This matters to pregnancy rate because we have to get them to resume cycling like we talked about within 80 days in order to maintain a 365 day calving interval. So if we shoot for, if we're in a four, we're only gonna potentially get 50% of those cows bred because they're not gonna be cycling effectively. If we're in this five and six range, we get from 80 to 98%. And that's right where we wanna be. If we are gonna be a little bit low, we're gonna have some dropout. This last year was tough on us for cows, but we saw a lot of cows move and maybe they were our problem cows. Maybe they struggled to put weight on. Maybe they didn't wean the largest calf that we needed. You know, it's okay to see those ones go sometimes. If we need to find a good side of the drought, that's what our good side was. So got rid of our problem cows potentially. This year, hopefully we're left with some good breeding back potential. They'll resume estrus sooner. Hopefully have more calves for us to wean or calf this spring and larger calves come weaning time. So that's about all I have for the grazing cover crop side of it. Economically, like I said, the more times we can keep them out of the dry lot, it's usually gonna be more cost effective for us. We can rest pastures. You see an improved livestock performance on some of the cover crop studies we've done. We've stopped to three and a half, four pounds of gain in young calves. So those are options too, rather than just corn, like we normally would put through them. Minera value would be something to consider. Take some soil samples to assess what you're, if you are grazing, what value that's adding to your crops. I mean, hopefully with good management we'll have improved or better or maintain crop yields from year to year. So with that, here's my contact information. I am in Mitchell, but I'll travel across the whole state. And with that, I'll try to answer any questions you guys may have.