 My name is Warren Rushi. I'm the, my title is the Extension Feedlot Specialist at South Dakota State. But for a, to a large extent, this is sort of like going back home a little bit in terms of topic area. I'm an accidental PhD. I'm an accidental feedlot specialist. My kind of core was cow calf production, cow calf science. You know, you go back far enough, all I ever really wanted to do is run cows, but you know, I ended up where I'm at. So this has been fun. And you know, and it was opportunity for me to kind of share some of the insight we've got in terms of how we manage cows. So as a bit of a background, I already mentioned, you know, I've got a background and my start was in the cow calf system. Home for me is about three and a half hours almost straight south of here. I grew up on the eastern fringe of the James River Valley and Kingsbury County, South Dakota. We had kind of a mixed typical operation for that part of the world, foreign beings, sometimes some small grain, hey, cattle backgrounding yard and a cow calf operation. My wife and I came back to that operation in our late 20s with the idea that we were going to raise cows, raise a family the whole bit. And very, very quickly we ran into the obstacles I've got lined up in terms of pasture and forage availability. In our little corner of the world, you know, we quickly outstripped our ability within our family to run as many cows as what we needed to do to make a living. Plus my dad realized that I've got some additional help. I should buy more cows too, because we didn't have a lot. We'd really soiled off our family's cow herd in the 80s. So we rebuilt it in the late 90s. So I'd buy some cows, he'd buy some cows because I got him to help me. And really rapidly we had used up all of our family's capacity. So now I've got to go into the land rental market. And I miss a lot of things about production ag. I do not miss that roller coaster of trying to figure out how to finance cows and rent land at the same time. In our little corner of the world, everyone has 100 to 250 cows. I can count on one hand and within 20 miles of my house, I can think of at least five people that at that time had 1,000 cows or more. And if I go out another 20 miles, there's another half a dozen. So the competition for pasture is fierce. So what we, our solution was, we went an hour away from home or an hour and a half found pasture and hired trucks. I joked that when I started that, I had a full head of hair and when I left, I didn't. I've always been envious of people that could simply open up gates and move cows from one pasture another and do all these cool rotational things. And that wasn't the hand we were dealt. So really all of those things, those issues that I've got outlined in terms of why the competition for pasture is so challenging, it comes down to in our area, access and affordability where Dr. Shike is, it's really simply availability. He doesn't exist, but I don't know of it, relatively few places where it's simple and easy to access more pasture. And certainly not in the part of the Dakotas that I call home and that we're at today. So what I'm gonna talk about is how do we stretch those forage supplies? Dr. Shike's shared a lot of research data. I'm going to be very light on research data today. I'm really gonna approach this as if one of you are coming, give me a call and say, what are my options on how to feed cows? I'm gonna focus on the winter cow feeding period, legislation and in early lactation, mostly because that's the stage of production that's really applicable to almost everyone in terms of feed needs in the Dakotas. If whether we're a full confinement type system where we're obviously feeding cows all winter or a more traditional system where we graze as much as we can and then feed cows, or even in some of the approaches where we're pushing the envelope and what we can accomplish from grazing with stockpiled forages, bale grazing, et cetera. In this part of the world, we all have to be ready to implement the winter feeding program when we get one of those good old fashioned Dakota winters with a couple feet of snow. So I think that's the reason I'm focusing on the winter feeding is because of how it applies in other places. As I analyze that, as I think about what our options are, to me, I have two different choices. I can either come up with some cheaper feeding gradients and do some substitution or I can try to make better use of what we already have on hand. And how we do that, there's a lot of different variations on those things, but it really comes down at least in my mind to those two approaches. So first, I'm gonna think about, well, what do we have that's cheaper? And so this is from my perch in South Dakota and you folks can tell me if I'm wrong in this area of the world, but in our location, we did in South Dakota last year, east of about highway 281, we did not have a good hay production here. It was just flat out too dry in May and June to grow much hay at all. So hay is expensive. If I look my favorite place locally to look in South Dakota for a hay price is the Korska Laxion because they publish it online and I can kind of get a snapshot. You know, last week, when I put these slides together, the average for grass hay was 115 to 190 a ton. I don't know what the 115 looked like. I don't know what the 190 looked like either, but it just told me that hay was not, you know, the competition for hay is pretty strong. Now, at least at home, and I'm guessing this isn't that similar though, that when we do get dry, assuming we can get some corn to come out of the ground, in a lot of cases, we have more corn, more feed than sometimes we know what to do with in the form of things like corn silage, corn residue or corn grain. And that's the case this year for us. We had the opportunity to put up a lot of corn silage. Now, I know there are some, and with a PhD, I ought to use all these sophisticated ways to evaluate and tell you what corn silage is worth. But my experience has been that if I take the price of corn, multiply it times 10, I get awfully close and that's really easy to understand. And so that's what I use. And I used a little maybe higher than that. And so our, you know, I'm pricing this corn silage somewhere $45 to $55 a ton to account for the diesel fuel it took to get there. Got some shrink loss that happened between harvest and when we feed and some of the other things. But if I take corn silage and deconstruct it, a ton of corn silage is roughly equivalent to 400 pounds of hay and 400 pounds of corn. Give or take. If I'm going to go buy the hay and buy the corn to recreate corn silage using the feed market in my area, it's going to cost me 65 to equal something that I value at about 50. So right now, at least at home, we have a competitive advantage if you have corn silage and the ability to use it. And that's going to be kind of the theme of what I'm going to show, talk about as some alternatives. So my first strategy on this in terms of ingredients substitutions is do we have some opportunity to replace, you know, a moderate energy feed such as grass hay or a lot of our feed hay supplies with something with a bit more energy density like grains, silages, co-products. And so I've got about four or five different kind of scenarios I put together. And I'm going to say up front, these are not prescriptions. Don't necessarily take these and say, this is how we need to feed cows. This is as much of a guideline or some ideas as anything else. But what I used for my starting point, I used these values for foster feed. I used a 165 for grass hay because that's roughly the midpoint of what I see at home. I priced corn stocks at 75 because that auction, that market was, that's where they were pricing corn stocks. Corn silage, I used $50 a ton. I used 415 for corn price. And when I just looked up my local elevator at home, that's actually relatively expensive corn today. I used modified at 110. I priced wheat mids at 150. And that's because that's what Dr. Carl Hoppe wrote in some paper that came, article came out in January. That was my source. Cause we don't, I don't see wheat. We don't have real rarely F ever in South Dakota have wheat mids available to us economically. And then the beet pulp, that's because that's what a cattle feeder in Minnesota told me he could get beet pulp last week. So that's a real unscientific survey of feed costs. Carl's nodding his head. So that's either, okay. Yeah. And that was a delivered cost, which by the way on all these byproducts and hay itself, that's a big part of it. I learned that as a pretty young extension professional in a particularly bad winter we had in Northeast South Dakota that I could find hay for people a hundred miles away that sounded really good until I added in the cost to get it on truck by the fuel and get it delivered. And all of a sudden it became really expensive. So that feed, that trucking part of it really gets important with any of these prices. All right. So my, my base scenario is I used a 1500 pound Angus cow with 30 pounds a day of milk production. The 1500 pound cow, I picked that as a pretty reasonable approximation of what our cows are. If anything, I might be a little light in some herds. When I started out my extension career and I'd ask people what their cows way they'd all tell me a thousand pounds and they were all wrong. And no one's cows weighed, no one's cows weighed a thousand pounds in the early 90s. If I ask that today and I have people tell me 13 or 1400 they're also probably a little light. Our cows have gotten a lot bigger. As I said, I work in the feedlot world now and our average outweighed on Finnish cattle is usually around on calf feds, high 14 to low to 1500 depending on when we decide to pull the trigger on yearlings it's gonna, we're gonna ship a set of probably 1550s. If this last month of January didn't bite us too bad they'll be close to 1600 pound average. We don't make those kind of cattle on 1200 pound cows. We just don't. And I use 30 pounds of milk production because in the spreadsheet that I used to formulate these that's the highest option we've got. I firmly believe we have added an awful lot of production potential in terms of milk way more than what we sometimes realize. So whether or not we see it the potential is there. And if the potential is there that affects nutrient requirements. And then I set it up for a late gestation and early lactation diet and I use two ground rules because as you'll see these things I put it in together are not particularly precise. I don't have pounds per day out to the 10th because no one feeds like that. But what I did put together is say I'm gonna make sure we meet protein needs. So on the computer, the spreadsheet I had it has a protein ratio and that had to be a one or greater. The second thing is I, they're estimate on terms of average daily gain for the cow needed to be positive because I don't wanna be, I don't wanna have cows going backwards and I wanna make sure I've got some cushion to account for South Dakota, North Dakota kind of winter conditions. And you know, if we run too close to the edge when we get a month like we had last month we're gonna go backwards and I don't wanna do that on a cow herd because it's too hard to keep up or to catch up. All right, so I'm hoping this is readable in the back of the room for everybody but my number one is kind of my, this is my base, grass hay modified distillers. And I think for grass hay I use something around 8% crude protein. So kind of try to hit middle of the road not assuming we had really great hay but it's not junk either. And with 30 pounds of grass hay three pounds of modified meeting protein needs. The book says they ought to gain around half pound a day so they're in mild temperatures. So we shouldn't lose weight. They're eating around 2% of body weight which I'd buy that in late gestation for that diet. And my cost a day using those figures is about 265 per day. I didn't include anything on hay waste I didn't make any assumptions there. So if anything, this number actually probably gets inflated because we're gonna have to, there's few ways we can get zero hay waste on feeding cows regardless of our method but that's what I came up with. My other options were then I took grass hay away entirely and used corn stocks as kind of the extreme example of if hay is expensive and sometimes hard to get corn stocks might not be or I could have also used wheat straw perhaps different prices but the same nutritional principle applies. In that case I had to feed a little more distillers and I fed silage back to that energy dense, less expensive. In this case they say they may have gained because of that extra distill I needed the distillers for the protein and the corn silage to make up for the fill and it says it's gonna gain just a little more weight and they're gonna be slightly eating slightly less what I plugged in results in a slightly less dry matters per cent of body weight. These cows might be slightly hungry but the cost difference I'm shaving off more than a dollar per day. Using the values I just put up on that screen previously by using things that were less expensive than hay. Here would be some of the options that we don't have at home that usually the ability to use but people in this part with access to those processing plants might. This is corn stocks and wheat mids or corn stocks modified and wheat pulp. Performance not that different than when I was using corn silage cost per day not that much different either. Roughly a dollar per day different compared to the grass hay distillers option. So back to I think Dr. Scheik made the comment of you use what's available. This is a good example of that. If you have these feeds available and you can get them in economically it's usually there may be some rare instances where it doesn't work to do that but more often than not if we can use a byproduct some under industry as a feed source for beef cows it probably is going to pay if we have to feed them in general. Lactation diets, the trends stay the same it's just the amounts change because we've got an animal with greater requirements more milk which is gonna need more protein more energy has the capacity to eat more feed about a dollar 20 per day difference between a grass diet, a hay diet at 165 versus some of these less traditional crop residue and annual crop based kind of for diet options and similar kind of spreads with using things like different co-products wheat, mids or beet pulp. On occasion we've got a lot of diversity in the beef industry in terms of size of operations and capital available and all kinds of things but I was very quickly doing the math on some of those price spreads and perhaps they're not there cost spreads maybe they're not there every year but right now at a dollar a day if I have a hundred cows and if I'm in a situation where we're gonna feed cows for say 150 days that's about $12,000 by my calculation probably actually more than that probably closer to 15,000 I can probably make a payment on a mixer wagon to be able to do some of these things perhaps not but at least it's got something to work with in order to do that. All right so what about some of the approaches that Dr. Scheich was talking about where I would classify what I just showed you as slightly limit fed but what about something that may be a little more restrictive taking advantage of relatively low corn prices comparison to hay. So what I did in this case we're definitely not feeding the appetite but I use the same kind of targets but instead of using corn silage I use corn and what we're trying to do with that is well number one we're gonna use feeds that because of energy density they are a lot cheaper per unit of energy than hay would be we're also gonna be able to use some of the biological efficiencies of limiting intake. Dr. Scheich talked about that earlier we've seen that in our shop on feedlot cattle where we are restricting feed intake by eight to 10% and we're seeing some really nice responses in feed efficiency. I'll know more in about a week and a half whether we hurt harvest quality or not by doing that but at least from a gross feed efficiency standpoint limiting feed intake does reduce maintenance costs for a whole lot of biological reasons related to gut mass liver activity, all kinds of things. Again, same scenarios before I did feed 1% of body weight as roughage for one I really don't want to run the risk of doing some things on gut health also keeps cattle somewhat more satisfied and I use the blend of grass hay and corn stocks. What I ended up doing was I fed about 17 pounds of roughage from those two sources through in seven pounds of modified and five pounds of corn grain. Actually, because I use the grass hay the cost advantage wasn't as great as it could have been if I had not used the grass hay and fed corn stocks instead but we were only feeding it 1.5% of body weight. These cows are going to be hungry doing that. And then this is what it looks like on an early lactation diet just a little more corn, a little more distillers but almost a dollar a day difference in terms of feed costs per head. So, and I- How many hours a day assuming all cows have that state? You know, that's a great question. So the, I think everyone heard that as we're repeating it but the, you know, I'll double check the question was how many hours a day does it will those cows take to eat that? You know, that's going to depend a little bit on how, you know, what that restriction looks like but it's probably only two or three hours tops. We've seen that on, you know, on bunk, you know, fairly restrictive slick bunk strategies on feedlot cattle, they clean that up pretty quickly. Dr. Scheig talked about three hours and they're with their limit feeding. I would expect that would be pretty similar on those kinds of diets that, you know, they're going to be, they're going to be wanting to get slicked out up fairly rapidly, which really brings me into the slide in terms of bunk space. I borrowed these from Carla Jenkins at the University of Nebraska, you know, using things like their recommendation was at least two feet of bunk space per cow with an additional foot for calves because their observations have been those calves will come up and eat some of the TMR as well. The other part of that then is we want to make sure we got a consistent feed and routine and knowing exactly what we're feeding in terms of a moisture content, nutrient composition. I'm going to foreshadow a little bit of Dr. Carlson's slide, but he talked about, you know, especially if we're doing limit feeding during the summer, we're, you know, we're switching the mindset away from, you know, a traditional, maybe ranching approach to management to a bit more of the feedlot approach in terms of feeding deliveries and so forth, especially if we're going to do things like limit feeding a high corn diet. You know, the things like the bunk management and timing all become more important. Also becomes important as we use a lot of things like corn stocks, one of the things I don't like about feeding corn stocks, if I feed a lot of it, they can really do a lot of sorting and really changing what that, you know, there's the diet I made up on paper and then there's the diet that the cows actually eat. And if we're not careful, they can get vastly different with something like corn silage. The other part of that is, and we've touched on this a little bit and we'll talk about it a little more through the course of the day, if we're going to do, especially as we start replacing pasture, you know, think about where and where, what places are we gonna feed these cows and what does that yard condition look like? At home, we're certainly dealing with a lot of mud issues, you know, muds, I heard some conversations on the side when we're getting ready talking about mud season, it's coming off a lot earlier than what we were ready for. And, you know, that becomes a real challenge, you know, and it's probably a cost that, while I could show you all those feed cost differences, if we're going to really go into this in any kind of permanent kind of plan, we have to start thinking about concrete and some other things, you know, I've yet to talk to a cattle feeder that's ever told me I poured too much concrete, I overdid it, I've yet to meet that person because we just, for whatever reason, and that gets into some other side issues I don't wanna necessarily talk about, but that mud challenge, at least in where I live, has become more of a concern. We've always had mud, but it seems like it's worse. Or maybe it's because I'm getting old and I don't like dealing with it anymore, but it's something we have to think about is cattle comfort, especially as we, or we have to think about alternatives, like in some of the things that Kaley's gonna talk about in terms of sacrificed pastures or cover crop options that give us some opportunities to get cattle off of mud, but before we have to go to permanent pasture. I think that's a real key point of all of this is how we integrate all that rather than just use a one size fits all recommendation. I did not talk about minerals and vitamins and that's on purpose because I am not a vitamin and mineral expert by any stretch. One thing though to keep in mind, if we're starting to think about implementing some of these strategies that involve feeding less ingredients than we otherwise might, is we gotta make sure we've adjusted some formulations. Cattle don't have a requirement for a percentage of calcium or phosphorus, they have a requirement for a fixed amount. And then it's our job to make sure we get that. And this was personal communications from Dr. Jenkins. In her operation, her family does a lot of dry, a lot of cow work on some of these harvested and crop residue type systems. They've increased the amount of vitamin A they provide simply because as they've replaced some green forages, they've found that their cattle benefit from that. And then there's some things peculiar to grain and co-products that play a role in terms of how we formulate mineral supplements on calcium and phosphorus. This came up, Dr. Scheick talked about a little bit and this also came up with one of my friends that we've worked together for a long time and he worked with his rancher clients on limit feeding cows at attitude problems for lack of a better word. The kids would say they're hangry, they wanna eat more but we didn't feed them enough. And that is a, it's a roadblock or it's a challenge and it's real because as the owner of the cows and you drive by and you know on paper we satisfied them or we should have but they sure don't act like it. So how do we deal with that? Well, one of the approach I used in our operation because we did a slight limit feeding, I fed a lot of corn silage, I fed distillers and I fed whatever we could run through a tub grinder that approached hay, straw, crops, corn stocks, ditch hay, whatever. Our approach that worked pretty well was I fed those cows on a quarter section of crop ground. Every other year it was corn, sometimes soybeans and we let them run the whole thing. And it was kind of girls, we gave you enough feed, now go out and pick whatever you can. And it kept them reasonably satisfied until the grass started greening up and then there wasn't a fence we made that could keep every single one of those cows in but that's a whole different issue. The other approach, and I called it, I nicknamed it the iPad solution because my kids are 23 and 19 but I'll freely admit that when they were little, there were times when our youngest, here, here's the iPad. Go entertain yourself for another hour because we got stuff to do. And that might not win me any parenting awards but it kept peace, it kept them occupied, it kept them out of trouble. Which is sort of the approach of what I'm thinking about on if we're feeding cows in a pan. And honestly, I somewhat stole this idea from Dr. Vernon Anderson because I think this is the approach they used at Carrington. They fed a TMR in the bunk that met most of 95 plus percent of their nutrient requirements. And in the back of the pan, there's a hay rack filled with whatever is cheap. And that, to me, is the key word. It has to be cheap because they're not gonna get a whole lot of use out of it. They're probably gonna waste quite a bit of it but that's the place where things like the cattails and the reed canary grass and the CRP hay that's not very good or corn stocks or something that it's safe but not particularly palatable or valuable from a nutrient standpoint. But it has the attribute of they gotta chew it, they're gonna spend a lot of time doing it. Keeps, gets them satisfied and with the idea. And if they're wasting some, that also provides some bedding which in some of these systems could be real important. Yon, I think also on part of this as we start programming feeding or limit feeding or prescription feeding, whatever buzzword we wanna talk about, it's important to understand precisely what exactly are we dealing with from a both a feed and a cattle standpoint? Those first three bullet points in terms of moisture, protein, energy estimates, fairly easy to get at. There's all kinds of labs, there's technical support out there that can help people determine exactly what are we dealing with from a feed standpoint. I think sometimes in some cases how those ingredients interact with each other, we have to consider, we know that if we combine something like a wheat star or corn stocks and with a protein supplement, those two, we end up with an increase in digestibility and increase in intake that we don't have if we feed corn. So we need to recognize that now we're feeding corn as the energy source and the roughage is scratched. We need to make sure we're understanding that difference. The other part is, what do we know? Make sure we're accurately describing the cattle. I talked about already the cow size and the cow milk production. I think our cows are simply way heavier and have way more production than we give them credit for. We don't always necessarily see it because of some of the things Dr. Scheich talked about in terms of differences in feed availability and nutrient quality, but from a requirement standpoint, those differences are real and are there. And so everybody manages cows, sells cull cows, use those weight slips as somewhat of a gauge say, what is most of us don't routine, if you do, you've got that data. If you routinely weigh cows, but a whole lot of us don't, I never did. Other than I know what they weigh when we sold them off the scale, but you can use that as a bit of a gauge to say, all right, what is my mature cow size? If I sold a load of tested open cows that are close to right on condition, maybe a hair thin and they weighed 1475, my average cow size is probably not 1400. We've probably got some bigger cows in this mix that I need to account for when I'm setting that up. I don't know if it's possible to give, or at least I never did, give a cow calf nutrition presentation without using some picture of a body condition score because that, in spite of all our technological advances, our best gauge of energy status on a cow is just like our grandparents did. Go out and look at them, tell me if they got some covered. The difference in the challenge is sometimes my body condition score five might not be quite the same as yours is. We've all heard that message that our target is a five, we just have to make sure we're using the same vocabulary to describe that. And just as important, what direction are things moving? Are we, I don't mind cows losing body condition and into going into weaning, especially if I'm weaning early enough where I have the advantage and the opportunity to use crop residue or something relatively cheap in mid gestation to put it on. I get more nervous as we start seeing them going backwards. If I didn't have them already pretty fleshy, I start seeing them declining into calving and into the breeding season. So the next part, and should maybe pause, are there any other questions in, okay. The next part of what I wanted to visit about was, how do we optimize what we already have on hand? Because the reality for those of us in the beef industry and this part of the world is in a lot of cases, the crop and livestock enterprises work together and what we raise is what we feed and we get the situation where this is what we produced. So this is what I need to use. How do I make the best of what we have and turn that into cash using it through the cow herd? One of the things I think, and I think this is underutilized and it also fits if we're doing some of these programs involving totemics diets is the use of ionophore, specifically rumensum. And so how that works, it works on the rumen bacteria. It changes fermentation. I could go into a long technical discussion, but essentially what it does is it changes the products of the fermentation so that the animal captures more energy from that. The folks at Oklahoma State did a really nice job of summarizing some of the data on different projects, different trials that they have been done in universities using rumensum in mature cows. The dosage, the range in their study that they used was from about 125 to 200 milligrams per day. And what they found over those different research trials was they saw a reduction in dry matter intake by about 8% with no difference in cow gain or pregnancy rate. If you're using a mixed diet, this is a really pretty simple practice to implement. We're already mixing the feed. Ideally, we're probably force feeding the mineral, probably make some sense. And so it wouldn't be that much of a step to add a dry or liquid supplement that contains this ionophore. Different story for not, because that is not labeled for self-fed supplements. So if we're not using some kind of either hand feeding or mixed diet, this is going to be really difficult to implement and probably wouldn't work. But if we have gone through, made the investment in a mixer wagon, already starting up the loader to grind hay and fill up the feed wagon, this isn't something that would be terribly difficult to implement and would potentially save us on the feed cause side. The other part of this would be, how do we process and handle some of the feeds? And this was a, I've got two parts, two different parts of a study that my friend Alfredo DeConstanza did at the University of Minnesota that I thought was interesting from the standpoint of minimizing hay loss. And he looked at, this particular first one was, he looked at differences in hay processing and how the hay was fed. And so in this study, you saw it on some mature cows. The hay they used, I didn't put it on the slide, but it was approximately 10 and a half percent protein and about 62% TDN. So pretty good hay that they were used in this particular experiment. And what they did is they ran it through a bale processor. I think it was a hay buster, but it really doesn't matter. Or, and they fed it either on the ground or they fed it in a bunk or in hay rinks. In other words, they tried to use some kind of tool to restrict access and control feed loss. So on the top row, and so I've got it grouped up into long hay and a ring, long hay ground, fed on the ground, bale processed in a bunk, bale processed on the ground. Feed intake, and they did a bit of a back calculation. They measured the area that was covered in waste hay, sampled about a portion of that, weighed it, dried it and used that to estimate waste and then use the subtraction technique to come up with the estimate of intake. It's not necessarily ideal, but it's not, it was the only place I've seen where it says, how much hay did you use? It's hard to put a bale in a hay ring. It's hard to measure. We know they're wasting some, but it's really hard to measure how much. And so this was their approach of doing it. But so what they saw was with going from a hay ring to the feeding long hay on the ground, there's about three pounds per, three pounds a day waste hay, taking a bale process, going to the ground, almost about three pounds of waste, less waste if you could bale process it. What I thought was interesting was this intake. And I think it's, which you would expect, I would actually have expected that that processed hay, they would have ate more of it because that's kind of the typical response when we, why would grind hay? For whatever reason, and that might just be some noise, but here they actually ate less of it. And I think it's because it's on the ground, that I'm guessing this number is probably low and that we've got more spoiled cows didn't, if they didn't slick it up fast enough, because they, we've got some that's either urine, fecal losses and whatever else. So, but here were the differences in costs. And I used 165 a ton for hay costs again, and I added five tons for processing. I don't know if that's the right number. I know it's not zero. It costs some money to start up the tractor, it costs some money to own that hay buster equipment. But here was a difference of, you know, almost 30 cents, a little narrower with the bale, you know, with the bale processing on feeding method. But, you know, so in the bunk, the difference is pretty minor for one versus the other on pretty good hay. I don't know if that would have been the same on poor quality, but what it shows to me is if we're gonna feed long hay, we probably need to think about ways to control feed waste, either by grinding it and feeding it in the bunk or putting it in a ring. The other approach, and it sort of touches on the question time of access and also on the limit feeding, but I recognize that not everybody has access to a mixer wagon because of, you know, takes, you know, that now we're dealing with daily chores and for a lot of our industry, the cows are a side gig. You know, we've got jobs in town and we're having some cows because it's an opportunity to supplement family income, use some assets we have existing but it's not enough to make a full-time job out of it and we have to do some other things to make a living and it's hard to justify some of this equipment investment on modest numbers of cows. But so a lot of people are, you know, you probably could listen to all the things I talk about and say none of this are things I can implement. This I guarantee almost anyone could implement if they're willing to do that and that's limit the amount of time cows have access to a hay ring. This is the work Alfredo and his team did. I know Dr. Lemonager at Purdue, they did something very similar to this with time access. But what they did is they used long-stem hay in hay rings and I think this hay was around 8% crude protein, about 52% TDN. So again, not terrible hay. Good enough for a cow in the later stages of gestation. And what they did is they limited access time that those cows had to those hay rings to either six hours, 14 hours or they had to run to the place for 24 hours a day access. They measured disappearance and waste just the same as I described earlier. They calculated how much the area had hay on the ground and sampled that and did the dry matter intake. But what I thought was really fascinating was when they made those cows gave them only six hours, they did not waste much hay. They ate 21 pounds a day and they only wasted a quarter pound per head per day. That's pretty good. If they gave them all the time they wanted, they ate 27 pounds. Cause let's face it, you give cow and let her stand there all day long. By the way, access was not limited. They had plenty of room. So she ate there, excuse me. She ate, she sat there and she ate a lot. Waste wasn't terrible at two pounds a day. It wasn't outrageous, but she just ate a lot more of it. Nearly a 60 cent a day difference in daily cost. Again, you're using 165 for hay cost per ton with no difference in cow weight. Carl, do you have a quick? There was no differences across those in terms of cow performance. So getting back to when I talked about limit feeding, we'd know it does some things with maintenance costs. I think that's what's going on. I also think some of this is more sorting and some other things happening. I think most of it is when we're limit feeding cows, we're changing what their maintenance cost is. Now everyone, to me, the beauty of the cow calf business is all of you get to decide how you wanna operate your own operation, how you wanna live your life. But as I look at that, it's 60 some cents a day. And if I'm feeding cows for 150 days, that's about $90 per head on a 500 pound basis of a feeder calf that's almost $20 a hundred difference. We'll do an awful lot of things to get $20 per hundred premium on a calf. I look at that and I'm not so sure that perhaps if I've got some kids at home that I can't tell someone to figure out our time window somewhere between maybe not six, but maybe less than 24, one of your jobs is to open up the gate. And your other job is to someone drives those cows back in and we're gonna, because we're gonna limit some access to reduce how much hay we're using, we're burning to save on some of the overall cost. This is, to me, it's an opportunity that's really independent of scale. It's more work and more hassle. Most things that save us money seem to either cost investment or time, you either invest time or invest money. I think this is at least a possibility. All right, I'm, how am I doing on time, Zach? Okay, I got just a few things left and it's back on that theme of, how do we optimize what we have? To me, this is one of the areas, feed shrink, is one of the areas that a lot of places we could improve on, including my families. We didn't always do this particularly well. We should have poured more concrete where we ground hay. This was a summary that Dr. Mike Brooke, it's got a little age on it, but I don't think any of this has changed. This was for a dairy audience, but their estimation of for a dairy for all the pounds of feed they bring in, anywhere from 15 to 20%, potentially they capture no value from because of these different losses, wind, wildlife, moisture, spoil, discard and spilled feed. I don't think we're that different. And if anything, in some places, it might be more than that, potentially. This also comes from a dairy publication or a dairy proceedings that I've used on some different conferences, and it compares feed losses with different storage methods, either the open uncovered pile, the commodity type shed or a closed bunk van. I don't think I'm gonna, I shouldn't really shock anybody when I say, well, as we provide more protection, we lose less. That's kind of a captain obvious moment, but the thing, and I didn't really, and the percentages, I'm not sure how they derive those, but to me, they make some sense that our ground hay covered open, we can have some pretty high losses. The one, and I hadn't really thought of this until I was going through and finding slides to use, and I thought of this one. For dry grains, they said if we have them in a bulk bin, we might lose two to 4%. There's always a little bit of loss anytime we store grain. The engineers will tell us that, and I think we've all probably unload enough grain bins and say, yeah, that makes sense. Their estimate was if I just put that out in the pile on the edge of the apron in front of the bunker silo that I'll lose 5% to 8%. Is anybody gonna do that with very much grain? With a big, I mean, the local elevators do, at least at home, of course, they also pay for it by adjusting our basis so that it gets super wide, and we, the people selling grain end up paying to do that, but almost no one, that's not a recommended practice very often is let's just dump grain on the ground and feed from that pile. But when we do the math, and I didn't think about this until just the other day, but using that 165 per tonne of corn silage, that's, or per tonne of hay, it's just a hair over 8 cents a pound. Multiply 8 cents by 56 pounds on a bushel of corn, and the hay is every bit as expensive as corn is, per unit of dry weight. Am I doing the math right? Pretty close. We would never treat corn like we treat ground hay. And our, and full disclosure, our family ground hay pile, you know, get a guy in at close to $300 an hour, and he grinds hay with a big cat mounted cat, he can grind an awful lot of hay, and we kept it in the wide open and let the wind blow in the rain and snow at everything else. So we weren't necessarily any, I can't hold ourselves up as the example of efficiency here, but I see that all the time. We put ground hay out on a pile. I think there's an opportunity to do some things that help us preserve some hay and keep some of that that we're spending money on, either raising or buying. This was not taken in North Dakota. This was taken in South Dakota. I see this too often on cover piles. I'm not going to ask anyone here if this is you, but if this is your neighbor, we're losing up to 20% of the dry matter by not covering. We did some of my coworkers. We did some little laboratory silos, essentially a PVC pipe, stuff it with silage and either left it covered or uncovered. And uncovered or covered with syrup from the solar plant didn't really matter. We lost 50% of the organic matter in the top foot. Oxygen is the enemy. Now I get how much work that is. I haven't helped cover a pile in quite a few years and my height, weight, proportionality might show that, that I haven't worked that physically hard in a while. But when I was doing it, I was the junior person on the team at the age of 40-something working with my 70-something dad and uncle. It's work, I get it. But that was one of the few things that my uncle and I would agree on is that we had very few opportunities to make as much money as we did that morning we spent covering the silage pile because of the amount of feed we didn't lose because of oxygen. So that is my contact information. You can find me and find our whole team really on the extension.sdstate.edu website. Be happy to discuss any and all things related to cattle whether that's cow calf feedlots or anything else. With that, I'll open it up for any questions people might have either live or on Zoom land. I know I am what's standing between us and lunch. So I fully understand if people maybe wait on questions till later, but we will be here for the rest of the day. Be happy to answer any questions people might have.