 I get the opportunity to talk a little bit about feed and co-product prices and those types of things. So let's just work through this and you should have a handout. If you don't have a handout, we certainly have one made up and sent out to you if you leave your name and address. But I've got a handout of the presentations, got a whole bunch of rations in it for later on that we'll talk about. Plus, I've got a handout on sources and prices for selected co-products in North Dakota. I've been collecting these for probably six, seven, eight years and I just went back five years to look at the spot market. And then this picture is kind of a report of what corn, wheat, mids, and distillers grains are all priced on a per ton basis over the years. You can kind of see they all kind of are pretty close. The lines are similar within 10, 15, 20 bucks until you got to October 2010 up into 2011. And now you look at September of 2011 and everything's just gone haywire again. So what my point is is what you thought used to be and always worked 10, five, six years ago, three years ago is now changing again. It's time to revisit all these prices. As you can see here, corn's always more expensive than wheat mids, right? Because corn's got more energy, right? Wheat mids have got some protein in it. They got some energy, but not near the energy is corn. But right now, wheat mids are selling for a higher price than what corn is. Why? Maybe it's the drought in Texas. I called the state mill in Elevator and asked them where their demand is going to. They said regional, upper northwest. In other words, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, creep feed season, all that. There's a demand just in this region. So just when you think the drought has caused this price, wheat mids to go up, no. It's just us up here looking for feed, something other than corn and it's driven up the price. Distiller's grains is actually at a discount but its energy content is fairly similar to corn. It's always time to revisit all these things. As you can see in the past, the two kind of mimic each other. Usually distiller's grains is priced about 100% the value of corn or 90% get down in Nebraska. It's 110% the value of corn. Well, you can see now there's some changes here and it's actually less. So it's worthwhile to check feed prices and just don't get into the routine of doing one thing time after time. We produce a lot of different other feeds in North Dakota. 20 years ago, we didn't have near this amount of feed stubs available to us in North Dakota. Now we've just got five ethanol plants located throughout the state and they sell wet, modified, or dried distiller's grains. They also sell liquid feed called consensus distiller's solubils but most of them put that back onto the distiller's grains and you really can't find any condensers so your solubils in these new ethanol plants unless they make a mistake. So if they have a production problem, you can certainly buy their problem but I'm not so sure you really want to have their problem at home with you. It's price cheap enough you can afford it. Wheat middlings, there's five places in the state the mill wheat mids. Barley malt sprouts, there's one place and that's at Spearwood, North Dakota. Corn gluten feed. Had the question yesterday, the other day, where do you buy corn syrup? Well, if you're looking at putting Carol's syrup on your pancakes, you go to Wapiton because that's where they make true corn syrup. But they're referring to the trade name of condensers so your solubils is being corn syrup so we're really talking about two different feeds but the wet corn milling plant down at Wapiton produces a corn gluten feed that's being used widespread in that local region down there and it's pretty tough to even get it up in our area. Potato byproducts, we've got two potato plants in North Dakota, beet tailings. We've got lots of beet plants in the state if you're on the eastern side of the state or even on the western side and we've got oil crushes in North Dakota. There's at least three permanent ones with another one that's working part time. We just got an abundance of feed. Here's a kind of a map in North Dakota and if you study it you can see we've got five different ethanol plants and we've got a bunch of wheat mid plants somebody probably never even heard about. That's why on this one handout that says sources and prices for selected co-products in North Dakota there's listing of names and phone numbers and locations and I tried to update it but you know it's business so things always keep changing but there's a lot of feed resources out in the state. Out in Williams County you're probably the furthest away from a predominance of the feed. Even Ward County's away but once you get close to that valley you can see that we've got an abundance of co-product feeds out here that can be fed that most for the most part end up going into the cattle industry. That picture's distillers grains. That's a real changer in the industry over the past few years. Once you get it on your hands you know it's what it's like. You know why cattle just go nuts for this particular feed. It's high in energy. It's all fiber, high in protein. You can discuss whether you want to feed it or not but I need to explain just how much of that stuff we produce in the state. We've got five plants. One's a 30-year-old plant producing 15 million gallons in ethanol a year. We've got two newer ones producing 50 million gallons. We've got two other new ones. That's Hankinson and Castleton, Tharaldson and they're producing 100 million gallons of ethanol a year. So if you figure out how much ethanol, how much ethanol they produce. They produce 2.7, 2.8. They're getting more efficient now. That's about 167 million bushels of, excuse me. Yeah, 167 million bushels of corn. Okay, so you take that bushels of corn and of one bushel of corn there's 18 to 19 pounds of distillers grains. So we're talking some really big numbers here. I think that's a trillion and you boil it all down at the bottom of the page. It comes down to for every cow living in North Dakota. Cow, not calves, just cows. We could feed them, we could feed 19 pounds of distillers grains to every cow for six months and that would just use up the ethanol supplies in North Dakota. That wouldn't touch any of the other co-product supplies. So we got a lot of feed around. Gall goes out of state because somebody else buys it which is okay, but if you're looking for feed we got a lot more than what you probably give it credit for. Let's talk about some rations now. We got to feed some animals. I always like to go through that little background during nutrition. Cows need water, energy, protein, vitamins, and minerals. What do they need? They need a combination of all of them and if they're going to gain, they need energy. If they're going to convert that energy or do a room infumeration, they need to have protein in there as well as everything else. You got to feed them a little bit everything. Now, when I go to feed energy, I always try to figure out the cost per pound of energy. I don't look at a cost per pound of feed but instead the cost per pound of energy and in this example, energy is called total digestible nutrients or TDN. So to figure out the cost of TDN, you figure out the price of the feed, $165 a ton and this 80% TDN on an as-fed basis. You take that number and divide and then you divide again. You don't multiply, you divide each time. Just remember divide and then when you get down to it, the cost per pound of TDN on that $165 a ton feed is 10 cents a pound. Now you can compare to the other feeds. Now that 80% was for as-fed. If you don't have the as-fed and instead you got a handout and we've got one here called alternative feeds and in the back of that alternative feeds bulletin is a list of feed nutrient profiles. Those TDNs would be listed on an as, on a dry matter basis. So then you need to use this calculation which is just dividing one more time. You take that line that says cost per pound of TDN, 165 per ton divided by 80% TDN and divided by 85. And you just do this for every feed that you have and you can figure out what your cheapest source is. We'll go through some math here and see what it comes down to. Of course, like I said, what you need, you need the feed prices. Don't forget to include freight when you get the feed prices so you can compare everything to home. Convert it so they're all in the same thing whether it's bushels to tons or to pounds, whatever, just comparing weights to weights. And then somewhere get the feed values for the feeds. Now I did three examples here. One's canola mill, one's wheat mids, and one's corn grain. If we look at the price per ton, canola mill is 195, wheat mids 215, and corn grain was 205. That's when I did this example. Corn's now slipped 60 cents, but wheat mids will probably follow with that. Maybe, maybe not. Canola mill. Of all the times I've ever looked at it for once, we've got a feed source that's high in protein. That's cheaper than corn. This is anomaly. This is one thing that doesn't happen very often, but it's happening right now. Why? Soybean mill has gone down in price and consequently all the rest of the protein products have gone down in price. So if your ration is short on protein, the protein sources are a nice thing to look at. I remember about 10 or 12 years ago, maybe 15, 18 years ago, we were adding one pound of soybean mill into finishing rations because soybean mill was cheap enough to afford the additional average daily gain you'd get off by giving just a little bit more soybean mill. But price comes into play. Well, look at these prices and we can do the cost per pound. You can see it's one's 9 cents, another one's 10 cents, another one's 10 cents. Look at the cost per pound of crude protein. 25 cents for canola mill, 62 cents for wheat mids, $1.20 for corn grain. Just what do you expect? Energy sources are not cheap sources of protein. Protein sources are cheap sources of protein. Now, if you go to the very last column where it says cost per pound at TDN, canola mill at 15 cents a pound of energy, wheat mids at 14 cents a pound of energy, corn grain at 13 cents a pound. Corn is still the cheapest source of energy. Wheat mids is not far behind, but canola mill is down there priced where it's almost the same for energy value as what the corn would be. So, as you look down through there, you just got to do the math because every year it just keeps changing. Okay. Feed efficiencies, I think John highlighted earlier. The more forage you put in the ration, the lower the gain is going to be. If you pick up the corn or grain, you're going to increase the average daily gain. That's just how these things usually work. So, I would get some assumptions too. I used some prices. Corn at 88% TDN, prices 560 bushel. Alfalfa hay is at 58. That's John's better quality hay at 80 bucks a ton. Grass hay, that's John's poorer quality hay at 60 bucks a ton. Wheat mids, 215. Barley-Meltz sprouts at 215. They have less energy, but they're still priced up there. So, somebody likes them just really well. The better deal would be wheat mids. Corn silage at a price of $50 a ton. Boy, that's a good question. Where do you price corn silage at? Do you use what? 7 to 8 times the price per bushel of corn? Or do you use 10 times the price of bushel of corn? A lot of different ways to try to figure out how you're going to price your corn silage at, but I use $50 a ton. I think people might say that's a pretty good price, especially when you used to pay only 20 bucks a ton or 15 bucks a ton. Canola Mill at $190. Well, let's go through some examples of rations now. We're going to do a 570 with 5 pounds steer. We've got three rations. Basically, we've got three slides here that all kind of deal with the same thing. Grass hay, we're giving them a calf. 18 pounds of grass hay at 52% TDM. He gains 2 thirds of a pound a gain. His feed conversion is 27 pounds a feed to 1 pound a gain. Cost of gain is 80 cents. You use a better quality hay, it gets a pound and a quarter. Feed conversion, 14 to 1. Better quality hay, cost of gain, 56 cents. Okay, if you're trying to make money on this deal, the cheaper cost goes where it goes. If you decide to use the grass hay, but spike it up with a little bit of corn, and then you got to add some canola mill in in order to get some extra energy, your gain is going to be 1.8. 10 pounds of feed per pound a gain. Ration cost is going to be 102, and the cost of gain is 50 cents. As you increase your gain, the cost of gain is going down. Let's do a 660 weight calf. He eats a little bit more rather than 18 pounds of grass hay. He's eating 20 pounds. His average daily gain is a little bit more, not much. Feed conversions takes a little more feed to put on the same weight, cost of gain 84 cents. You look at the alfalfa hay and the grass hay, the gains all increase not as much as the lightweight calf, because the lowest lightweight calves are more efficient than the heavier calves, but your cost of gain keeps going down as we increase the energy content of the ration. We get up here to a 750 pound calf. He's eating 22 pounds of hay, but he's not gaining anything. Still calves at $1.40 a pound. I guess that's still a product pencil in. Alfalfa hay, just feeding that straight, it'll be 64 cents at a pound and a half. Add some more corn to it down to your own 60 cents. So there's basically the same ration for three different weight groups, and you can see how the cost of gain increases as the calf gets heavier. Okay, but the cost of gain also decreases as the average daily gain gets better. Now here's some rations just for some 660 weight calves. We're going to use grass hay at 10 pounds, barley hay at 10 pounds, the energy content of the ration. I think in terms of TDN, if you're a nutritionist in the crowd, you might think in terms of NEG, so I've got both listed up there. If everyone makes sense to you, I might just say TDN just to move along here. Here we're looking around almost two pounds a day gain with half grass hay, half barley sprouts. Ration costs 138, cost of gain 71 cents. That's kind of high. I mean, can we do better? Let's use grass hay, wheat mids and limestone because wheat mids is high on phosphorus. We don't have enough calcium in the ration. We've got to add limestone. TDN's now 70. Feed average daily gain is two and three quarters. Cost of gain 55 cents. Well, let's say we want to use grass hay and alfalfa hay and not use the limestone. Just kind of do a mix and add 10 pounds of wheat mids. 2.6 average daily gains, 7 to 7 or almost 8 pounds of feed per pound of gain. Cost of gains of 55 cents. Okay, not bad. Let's look at some other examples. Favorite co-products and some decent quality feed. Here he stepped in a little corn grain and with the wheat mids for a 70 TDN ration. 2.6, you can see the cost of gain was 54 cents. Go down to your bottom of your screen. You'll see some grass hay there at four pounds. Alfalfa hay at four pounds. Wheat mids at six pounds and we spiked the grain up now at six pounds. You got a higher energy ration rather than 70 at 78. They're doing three pounds a day gain. Average of the feed conversion has gotten better and the cost of gain has gotten down to 50 cents. Now I want to back up into that middle one. This one really caught my eye when I did that ration. Alfalfa hay at seven pounds. Corn silage is much as they want to eat. Doing about two and a half pounds a day gain. Is that going to get for calves fat, two and a half? Probably not. If it's a better quality corn silage, maybe they'll do two, seven, five. Maybe they'll do three pounds depending upon the value of the alfalfa hay that goes into it. You know, it's all a matter of how good your corn silage is. But this one caught me back. This is $50 a ton corn silage and its cost of gain was 43 cents. So I deregid the math land. Okay, maybe corn silage is $60 a ton. That put that up to about six cents more at 48 cents a pound or 49 cents a pound cost a gain. Then I made corn silage up to, what I say, 15. Now it's up to $60 a ton. They raised it another six cents. I got it up to $70 a ton and raised that 43 up 18 cents. So what I'm getting at is, I'm not sure where this corn silage fits in there. It almost appears to be a cheap source of energy. Something to rethink now from what we've always done in the past. Usually we've always looked to go the other way. Well, time to think about it a little bit differently maybe and think about that for the future. If you've got corn silage, maybe you're on the right track. If you don't have corn silage by now, it's just something to think about for the future. Here's another ration, alfalfa hay at 13 pounds, corn grain at seven pounds, two and a half pounds a day gain, 49 cents cost a gain. More corn grain plus a protein supplement because you need some extra protein added in the ration. 54 cents or 55 cents cost a gain. Your feed conversions continue to get better. Here we got 13 pounds a grain, five and a half pounds of alfalfa hay, 3.3 average day of the gain. You do that for too many months and these calves are going to get kind of fleshy, but your cost of gain is really low. A lot of different rations to be looked at here, different ways to feed calves and do your own math. I provide this as an example of what you can kind of look at. Okay, I think I just changed rather than alfalfa hay. Now I went to using grass hay and distillers grains. 15 pounds of grass hay, five pounds of distillers, two and three, two and two, excuse me, a pound and two thirds gain. Cost of gain is 56 cents. You go down there with grass hay and corn grain distillers were at 48 cents. If you notice, look back through there and you'll see as you increase the corn grain and distillers grains, your ration cost goes down and it seems to me that distillers grain or rations are one of the cheaper ones and that's because the price of distillers grains is discounted. There's a lot of energy into distillers grains. So this is dried. You could use wet. You just have to adjust the moisture content in your rations. Okay, so how do you get better average daily gain in calves? Like I said, you increase the amount of energy whether you use a co-product or grain, balance the ration accordingly. You can buy other things to add into a ration to make them do better. Ionophores, Bovatec, Grimensen will improve feed efficiency in calves and you can get five to seven percent feed improvement by doing that. If it avoids coxidiosis in the group, that's probably worth more than what the Bovatec, Grimensen costs in the first place, just avoid the coxidiosis. Now, if you've got a big outbreak, that's probably going to be a big deal. So you might have to use something different like Dequinac or Emprolium if they're really at high risk calves. Implants, I know if you're going for the natural market you don't really want to talk about implants but implants will improve average daily gain, five to seven pounds. You don't see 20 pounds of weight gain in the calf very easy. It just kind of disappears all over. But if you look at implanting calves versus not implanting calves, that 20 pounds keeps coming up if you do a good job of implanting. In other words, don't let it get obsessed. Actually put it in the air and not on the ground. All those little things that you think you do right but if you ever go back and look at ears to see if you actually put the implant where you thought you did, you find out that you're about 70 percent effective and 30 percent you should just shoot up in the air and put it on the ground because you blew it. Yeah, that happened to me and when you do the evaluations and see how good you are, you find out that I guess we can always be better. So don't give the person the most experienced person working cattle should be running the implant gun. Not the least experienced person. So the guy that, yeah, think about who you want to use, have that. Implants do work. For only a buck, 20 pounds of weight gain, it's a big deal. That's if there's no additional benefits for natural. And I just had to say again about coccidiosis and these newborn calves with stress they do are these newly weaned calves with stress. If they do have coccidiosis, that'll just ruin your feed to gain in a group of calves and if it's bad enough, it'll probably scar the intestine. So these calves will never gain very well throughout the whole feeding period. You really want to avoid even running into that issue. Even if it means working them slow onto a diet and enduring that lower average of the gain during the first month just to get calves to go. Well, let's just summarize a little bit and say feed prices. They seem to keep relative to the corn price. Nothing's been really changed. Corn's gone up, wheat mids have gone up, barley mulch sprouts, hay's gone up too. The problem with hay, you can't haul it very far. Young animals have really good feed efficiencies but they tend not to eat as much as bigger animals so they need a more energy dense diet to do as well. As you increase the energy density of the diet, gains go up and it appears every time you do that your cost of gain goes down so look at that. Don't forget when you do feed prices you got to include transportation. The kick I always get out is when you're looking at a beet pulp and you get 27 tons for the cost of freight and it's $400 for to get them hauled in and I go great, did you know that stuff's 90% water? So you got 2.7 tons for 300 bucks. That's 100 bucks a ton. Hay's cheaper than that. Well, if you can't buy feed, it's good to keep somebody involved hauling feed. That's okay. So I offer to most people, if you don't believe me that wheat mids are that, excuse me that beet pulp is that wet, let's take a sample and have it analyzed for moisture content so we can see what it is. And I've had some samples come back in that are 50% dry matter and I've had them come in that are 90% dry matter, 90% water. So obviously getting 13 tons of feed for $400, 13 tons of dry feed at 50% dry matter, that's a hell of a bargain. So you just got to know what you're doing and expect what you get and yeah, things can happen. Distiller screens can look wet. It can look dry. It can change too. With that, I think I'll just summarize and say here's there's some changes in the industry when it comes to prices and now we just have to look at things like grinding grain too that can come to an advantage to improve your feed efficiencies. All those things at one time that you probably just kind of said, well, we'll just do it this way because it's probably cost effective to that way. It's time to rethink those with the high price of corn.