 And I'm going to talk on third trimester nutrition and postpartum beef cow nutrition. There should be a handout in everybody's perhaps, too, if there's an opportunity to share. I know we're running a little bit late on time here, but we'll try to work through this accordingly. With that, we have a lot of stress on our cows in the wintertime. Between the snow and the cold and the wind, there's lots of different ways to feed cows. Definitely a lot of snow this year. Access to water is always an issue. We can always wonder whether they can survive on snow, but good mining of a practice would always say, provide plenty of fresh, clean water for cattle. It's in a liquid form rather than a frozen form. How we feed our cows is a real question. A lot of people like to look at feeding cows at a low cost route. We tend to try to not put as many dollars in as possible into a cow, but instead try to conserve our checkbooks somewhat and try to get cows to produce a good calf without spending a lot of dollars and feeds to it. To understand this, we really need to think about what nutrition really means in a cow herd. Obviously, I talked about water there a little bit, but the next thing she needs is energy. That's the most expensive thing that we put into a cow, is the amount of dollars we spend on energy just to keep their blood flowing. Put some weight gain on, too, if possible, but it's the energy cost that's the biggest dollar expense per day per head. Protein is the biggest dollar per unit. Actually, vitamins and minerals can be a bigger cost per unit, but total dollars is really spent on feeding energy to cows. Proteins needed to digest the energy, vitamins and minerals are needed for good health. A lot of our minerals in North Dakota, a lot of our feeds in North Dakota are short on copper, selenium, zinc. Always balance for calcium and phosphorus. If you're feeding distillage grains, be sure to add extra calcium into your ration. And if you have got high sulfur water, you're probably not feeding much distillage grains because you could end up with some sulfur toxicity or polio-like symptoms. I have more questions on that. Please ask it another time. As we think about feeding a cow through the winter time and after calving, we have to think about her energy requirements throughout the year. Of course, most of the energy is required during lactation and then as the cows start to produce less milk, the energy requirements go down. You notice the cows peak in their milk production about 60 days, two months after calving, and then it abruptly drops at weaning time, which is usually sometime in our second trimester, and then as the calf grows bigger and the weather gets colder, our third trimester, or the last three months of gestation, is where the energy requirements of the cow picks up. Now for those of us that calve in the summer, in the springtime, or May or April, usually the weather starts to get nicer about the same time the cow's nutritional demands pick up. So we may not have to worry as much about energy needs and kind of live off the cow's back as compared to somebody who's calving in January. The other option is the guys that calve in the fall time, they're feeding cows during winter time for cows to produce milk for calves. In other words, the cows are lactating. It requires a lot of energy to produce milk for a calf if you expect to grow. The best way to measure your body, the status of a cow, is to look at body condition scores. Basically, one is skinny, nine is fat, really fat. Five is good. There's been a lot of research done on this particular avenue and a body condition score, five and six at calving time, appears to be your best bet. If you go less than a four, there will be problems of getting cows to breed back. So let's go through a little list here of what a body condition score look like. If you've got any cows that look like this, if you've got them sold or you think she's open, or there's other problems going on, but that's how thin this cow looks. You can see the backbone off her top. You can see the tail head area. She's fairly maceated. There's no extra fat in the brisket. These old cows, you just not like to have around. That's a skinny cow. Here's another skinny cow. Why is she skinny? She's old. But she's still a skinny cow. There's not a lot to her. Not much salvage value at all in this particular cow. There's a lot of ribs in the side of a cow. If you can count four ribs, like the cow in the upper left-hand corner, one, two, three, four, that's a body condition score four. If you can count five ribs, a body condition score five only counts two ribs. So look on the side of the bottom left-hand corner, and I think you can only see two. Hopefully there's enough contrast for you to see that. Look around the tail head. Look at the body. They look thrifty. They look okay. They're just not carrying a lot of condition. You can see them with five to a six. Here's body condition score six and seven. You can see they're a little bit more rounded, smooth over the top. Not a lot of fat in the brisket, but definitely these cows are in good shape, good condition. They can withstand weather, and they re-breed back quite quickly. What body condition score is this cow? I'd say a six. Five to a six. It's really hard to see the ribs. You can't really tell, but if you look at the rest of the body condition, she definitely has lost some body weight. She's not doing too good. If she's a late cavern, maybe the way the winter might pull out would be that she might come out of it. The best thing a person can do with cows like this is to buy some barb wire and develop another separate pen so this cow doesn't have to compete with feed for everybody else. There's some dominant things going on with her. She's not an old cow. She's just a cow that isn't getting her fair share. Maybe she's breaking teeth. She's just not carrying extra condition. That would be beneficial. Leaving her like this, she'll probably end up going out of the herd as an open cow. Body condition scores are a great way to measure the energy status of your cows. Go home, look at the cows. If they all look the same to you, ask your neighbor to come over and have them look at the cows. If you don't trust your neighbor's judgment, ask your local extension agent there in the room and they'll come out and see what those cows look like whether they should really be fed or not. Yup, you're right. I give you a lot of trust there. A point here is that a body condition scores around 80 to 90 pounds of weight. So it's really difficult to make a cow gain 90 pounds of weight in a month unless you're going to feed her a finishing ration. That's 3 pounds a day to gain 90 pounds in a month. Finishing rations are a lot of grain. So if you're going to make a substantial change in her body condition in a short amount of time, it requires a lot of energy. It could be grain, it could be a co-product of anything that's high in energy content. However, if you've got 2 weeks of 20 below weather, you can take off a body condition score pretty quick if you don't change how the cows are fed. Now, most of us don't see this. We all say cows are really going through a lot of hay because cows will compensate by increasing their intake of extended periods of cold weather. And by increasing their intake, they are able to offset some of that weight loss. But usually we don't have 2 weeks of 20 below weather. Well, I'm not sure what usual is, but this year, I don't think we've had solid that 20 to 30 below. So cows will compensate over a couple of days if the weather does change somewhat. Now, here's a point to look at. If a cow is thin, she actually needs more energy to stay warm than if a cow has got a little body condition. Here we've got a 1200 pound cow with a body condition score 4, so she requires 17.2 pounds of energy just to stay warm. Maintain herself at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. The same cow with a body condition score 6 now weighs 1300 pounds. It should be around 1320, but you can see the amount of energy she requires so running cows a little thin there is a means where you end up running them too thin and actually cost more in keeping those cows going than if you had a little condition on her. Here's some energy and protein thumb rules for mid gestation and late pregnancy and then after calving. As you can see, the energy content goes from 55% TDN up to 65% TDN. It requires more energy. I'll get to Hayes here in a little bit because you know 7% protein is about all that cow needs as long as she does get 7% protein. Most of our Hayes with a little bit of alfalfa will easily make that. If you're feeding any stover or straws and only grass hay and no alfalfa you will be under 7% crude protein unless you cut the hay in June. If you cut it in July or later more likely you're going to have a low percent crude protein. It doesn't take much to make 7% but if we're trying to get all feed into them as possible we do need to look at our crude protein. At late pregnancy it goes up a couple of percentages after calving it definitely goes up. We're usually lucky after calving because by that point they're heading out to pasture and what they select out on pasture is usually higher in protein and higher in energy than what they would need if we delivered it to them. Dry matter intake for planning purposes is somewhere around 3% of body weight extreme cold weather they can go up to 5% to 7% even higher if you let them waste a bunch of hay. Here's the same example except with some feed tests as you can see the grass hay TDN is 50% that doesn't meet the cows just energy needs the alfalfa hay is 56% that doesn't meet the energy needs of the cow well in late gestation or calving if it was put up where it had a little bit better no rain on it then it would be okay corn stover is low in energy content corn sallage is actually pretty good second cutting alfalfa is pretty good so as you look down through how you mix and match you can stage when you feed the hay or supplement accordingly get the best out of the hay you have I like to stress upon you cold weather thumb rules you know when I walked outside yesterday it was about 40 degrees and I didn't wear a coat I thought that was pretty comfortable outside now if that would have been last September I think I would have been putting on a sweatshirt we just adapt to our environment a little bit the same thing happens with cows and in the wintertime they'll adapt it's been measured it's called a lower critical temperature that's how low it'll go before they think it's uncomfortable so no wind, pregnant cow 13 below degrees fahrenheit that's what the literature shows that's pretty cold if there's a wet snow and a 10 mile power wind it gets up to 19 degrees fahrenheit that's actually kind of cool now we've had some colder weather than that and so it requires a lot more energy when we do get into cold weather but I just want to stress upon you cows can withstand with that furnace burning inside them ferment and forage and feed that produces a lot of heat and that actually and the hair and everything else goes together to keep cows somewhat comfortable if the weather goes colder than this lower critical temperature you can basically say for every degree change in fahrenheit it's going to take a 1% more energy and you can see through the slide what I'm referring to here's an example of feeding I got some hay prices here for January and feed prices for January 2011 you can debate whether you can buy hay for that silage and grain has gone up right now but we did this example so you can see the current prices it's all different than last year here's some some sample rations for a 1400 pound cow she's mature just maintaining your weight the mineral is a quarter pound per head per day and it's a mineral balanced for the types of feeds that you're feeding there if you're feeding a lot of straw and stover and distillers grains you will need to provide extra calcium if you're feeding distillers grains you'll definitely need to provide extra calcium maybe a little bit of phosphorus the trace minerals copper zinc selenium vitamin A are all needed and cost effective as you look down through the different rations you can look at the very bottom and see the costs we'll go to the next slide and you can look at the costs again with the various different rations and I'll switch to the next slide again costs everything's between $1 and a dime to $1.20 or maybe $1.25 it's difficult to feed cows exceptionally cheap based on current feed prices thank goodness we got high calf prices right now to enjoy there's an example of what to look at different types of rations if you want to have a more specific one contact myself or a local county extension agent and we can work through a ration for you or feed manufacturer they can do those they provide those types of services too now if you want cows to gain weight it requires a different type of ration here's the 1,400 pound cow she's mature, late gestation one body condition score over 90 days so that's a pound a day average daily gain if you start comparing the previous slides to these slides we're basically giving 7 to 10 more pounds of some type of co-product or better quality feed to offset in other words to increase the energy content of the ration the cost too goes from $1.25 up to $1.30 to $1.40 to put on the extra weight so maybe it's easier to get cows in good condition and keep them that way rather than try to feed extra weight on cows but if you do have thin cows cold weather conditions like this now would be the time to start looking at picking up the nutrient content for these cows so they can survive and their calves can survive because they're producing colostrum and a healthy calf at this particular time okay whereas to calculate the cost for nutrient it's pretty easy math in my mind it's basically I've got the math in front of you it's the cost per pound of energy TDN stands for energy total digestible nutrients if you're a young person in the crowd you can think of megacals of energy but I like to use TDN it's easier to think of and look at if we're buying hay at $65 a ton take $65 divided by $2,000 the TDN of the hay was 80% that's probably some other feed but in this example you just keep dividing and dividing and that gives your cost to TDN now you can compare feedstuffs and I think I have some right here here's in January 2006 corn was only $1.65 let's walk down memory lane and alfalfa hay was $40 a ton the cost of energy was $73 for the corn and the alfalfa hay was $94 what was our cheapest cost of energy back then? corn hay wasn't too far alfalfa hay wheat mids was in there and then hay ranked right up there with barley hay wasn't necessarily a cheap source of energy if all you're looking for is energy in 2009 we did the same thing corn is now up to rather than $1.65 it's $3 hay price went up a little bit now the cost per pound of energy is $133 hay is $160 golly grain is still a cheaper source of energy based on these prices now corn has gone up to $5.35 hay is still at $65 let's do the math this happens every so often where hay is actually cheaper to buy and feed than what corn is I wonder how long this will last I think this is a localized thing to probably change for next year you can see your cost of energy if you want to just put weight on cows you need to redo these calculations every time you buy and find out if you're getting a good deal you can also do the same thing with crude protein it just takes a different calculation a different coefficient to do it but if you look at a buy in corn for its protein content it's a very expensive deal if you look at a buy in canola milk for its protein content that's getting to be reasonable alfalfa hay is always figured in is a reasonable cost for buying protein distiller's grains needs consideration because it's getting very competitive for the price of protein you're buying energy and almost getting protein for free well here's an example of cow nutritional requirements 13 pound cow bought a consistent score of 6 last third digit station winter hair she's dry no weight gain or loss she needs 80-90% crude protein TDN's 50-53 calcium 0.26 phosphorus 0.21 here's some various haze we had in North Dakota gee it's definitely an opportunity to improve ration if this is the only type of hay that was provided you'd notice it in the cow condition now if you have a cow that's producing milk 20 pounds is her peak she's going to need more protein more TDN, more calcium more phosphorus and obviously we need to add more my point here is with feed analysis if you don't know what your haze are you need a feed test to find out what you actually have you measure for crude protein ADF which is an indirect measurement of energy content, the minerals and then from there you know what type of feed you have to supplement appropriately I'm going to switch a little bit and say so we've fed these cows now we're looking at another way in which to think about how we feed them there's something called fetal programming and that's basically well the question is is can we affect how a calf its growth will be depending upon how well we feed its mother there's some interesting evidence out there this is back in World War II in the famines that occurred around the Holocaust time they looked at a Europe where pregnant ladies were underfed it was a famine the children were born normal as they measured the lifetime experience of these children they had more hypertension more diabetes other diseases were at a higher rate than their counterparts that weren't malnourished is this whole true within the livestock area it appears there's some information there that says it would and you got to think of it from the perspective it deals with the development of the placenta the blood flow into the placenta how the nutrients get to the calf and how the calf's cells respond to those nutrients and it imprints into it over its lifetime as to how that animal responds so let's look at some studies here there's a Wyoming Montana study where they took spring born steer calves and these calves this is before they were born and its mothers during mid gestation the cows were ran in either a native grained pasture which is kind of a low protein low energy ration or an improved pasture which is quality the calves were weaned, backgrounded and then basically weighed the same when they were placed in the finishing yard when the calves were finished the calves whose mothers when they were pregnant were on the native range that had poor nutrition to it the calves had poor feedlot average daily gains, lighter carcass weights, lower back fat and lower marbling but when they went into the feed they were weighing the same so it appears there is an influence on how we can affect how a calf performs later in its life by how we feed the mother when she's pregnant now here's a study in Oklahoma that looked at nutritional changes in the third trimester four to seven months of gestation not very many cows, you can see the cow numbers a dozen or so cows in there by the condition score that's BCS at calving was on a high feed group in other words at four to six, seven months of age we had a high rate of feed a moderate rate of feed, a low or a very low so you can tell if they started out the same body condition score the high rate gained weight, the moderate weight gained not much low basically stayed the same the very low lost a little bit of weight birth weights I always get this comment gee, we can't feed cows much much well, let's put it this way it seems like we can't give a lot of feed to cows because that'll increase our birth weights look at the data of this study birth weight didn't change it's all the same look at the average daily gain of the calves calves are actually gained better out of the cows this is I believe feed lot the weaning average daily gain gained better out of the cows that had higher nutrition than those that had less presumably more milk production or was it imprinting I don't know let's just split this out by body condition score at calving time you can see that body condition score where they were the average daily gain hmm, not a lot of differences there I like to point out the birth weight not much differences there either there's other factors that are somewhat affecting the birth weight thing rather than feed okay, now let's just look at the cows I think this is kind of kind of wondering because it kind of presents a different viewpoint at our USDA research facility out in Beltsville, Maryland they took cows and restricted the feed intake in the second trimester the middle three months of gestation and then provided that as extra feed during the third trimester to the cows so they compared to the controls which was a certain amount of feed throughout the whole second and third trimester compared to those that were underfed during second but given the extra during the third what's out is that the cows that use the saved feed were actually more efficient they actually put on a little bit more weight than if you just fed them the same all the time but at the same time we just talked about fetal programming and implanting and how that could affect calf's lifetime later on hmm the whole story isn't quite here anyway, feed savings are minimal but the cow appears to compensate well if she's provided more feed to look at it. I think we looked at a North Dakota from the stair step feeding perspective and it's been documented this does happen now Nebraska did a study a little bit different one than what John Dooveter talked about earlier this one they looked at the dietary protein and pregnant cows basically the cows were run on winter range which is low in protein or corn stocks they had both types of feeding both with or without extra protein supplement the cows that had no added protein had more sick calves lower weaning weight, lower finished weight and less choice carcasses in the calves this is an ongoing study I think there's three years worth of data into it interesting okay now let's look at some more of the study so they basically said it was better in the feed lot performance to provide extra protein to get more energy in the cows, maybe it's a protein effect but now let's look at the lower performance of those cows that were underfed they actually went through and seen how the heifers performed and they came up with a slightly higher pregnancy rate on those heifers and with more of them calving in the early part of the calving season so the good news is if you underfeed protein maybe the heifers will pick up in the root product and be more efficient in their lifetime but then you sacrifice in the feed lot standpoint I think there's a lot of issues out there in this fetal programming thing we'll just have to see what works out there's a lot of different projects going on across the nation including projects here at ND issues center for nutrition pregnancy a lot of basic research is done at that particular center so with that let me just sum up for the end of the day and say that we need to feed a balanced diet with adequate energy managed for a good body condition score the goals of 5 to 6 5 to a 6 body condition score appear to be best in a reproductive management I encourage you to feed test to make sure that the types of feeds you're feeding are what you think you're feeding and then realize that if you underfeed during gestation it can have long term impacts on the calf's performance so with that I'll stop now and say if there's any questions or comments I can certainly take those or we'll sum up may I just remind that if you're in the room if you have the evaluation form be sure to hand that out and have the evaluation done before we continue on any questions I have a question for you Carl on this trace mineral supplements cows can store this stuff for a period and they tend to be higher level growing season versus the fall or earlier do you think we need to be putting out a trace mineral supplement all year long or a real good targeted job at certain times will that be enough the question is on trace mineral supplementation can we just do it at certain parts of the year or should we do it all year long um during the later part of the gestation that's where I think it's most critical that we have supplemental trace mineral nutrition um you'll see in projects where scours were a problem in calves nutrition was improved through supplementation of trace minerals prior to calving and the longer you can do prior to calving the better you can get your trace mineral supplementation in if you're going to cheat maybe out in pasture maybe during the low productive times of the year I don't know if there's a really good project that shows you targeting certain times of the year versus not and any time you do projects like that you almost come up to the issue of wow we really haven't seen any advantage to supplementing so it really confounds a picture it's almost come back to feed test if the feed you're using don't have a or adequate supplementation may not be needed but if you are short then you really should supplement and if you're extremely short do that kind of gore you're coming through John you gotta I guess look for deficiency symptoms if you're cutting the corners and if there's something there you better put some more insurance in the program if you've got a problem we need to talk and if you've got a perpetual scours problem that can't be offset just by management more betting calving different time of the year veterinary drugs and all that scour guard whatever we need to look at the ration because that might be a trip in there too any token I always like to throw this one out John so how many of us in the room take a vitamin supplement how many of us should now on our standpoint we do eat a varied diet so that might between tacos and roast beef and whatever else chicken we eat a lot of different things and that might do it but anyway cows don't normally get that varied of a diet any other questions Carl I would add something up here to your comments Bob no yes really if you're having some health problems in those herds my experience over the last quite a few years shows that water quality is a major factor there and you mentioned that at the onset is that you know if you have high sodium content or high salinity water as a source for your herd that definitely ties into the herds overall health and so on so sometimes that can be a factor that we want to pay attention to good point Tim have a water quality test done on your water look for total dissolved solids sulfur content and the bottle of water I'm drinking on is probably 600 parts a million total dissolved solids but if your water is 2,000, 4,000, 10,000 parts per million you probably do have mineral interactions occurring with your feed because of the water well I see our time frame is slipping away are there any other questions we will get disconnected here in just a little bit any comments amongst the group I just have one comment I would request that the room host if they have those evaluations if they pass them out so we can collect that data it would be great there thanks everybody thank you well if there's no other questions I guess that ends our last session the Dakota Cow Calf Clinics if you have friends that wish they could have heard part of this we do plan on having this available over the internet at our NDSU I believe it would be our cattle docs website so just do a google search of cattle doc like documents DOCS and look for the Dakota Cow Calf Clinics thank you