 Pretty nice night, a lot of work to be done, not a lot of people going to be sitting here, but hopefully some of the comments will be accessible and they can find them later to see what we've got to share. Pretty much an excellent year for the cattlemen, the cow-calfmen. Got through winter and spring calving without too many major problems, an excellent summer for grazing. Feed supplies are high and the market prices are phenomenal, so it could be one of the best ever years for some of our cow-calf producers. We're going to talk a little bit about some budgets and maybe what it looks like as far as the alternative of beating your calves versus selling them and there's a few key points that kind of come out this year. Probably the number one thing is these prices we've ever seen before. If you're going to be buying calves or going to be expensive to fill the pens, if you've got calves on the cow, you're going to be real tempting to sell them. They're going to generate a lot of cash. John, are you still with us? I'm still here, but my PowerPoint seems to have disappeared. Yeah, I guess we'll take a break for a few minutes while we try to resolve that issue. Is anybody else still in the system, other than John DuVetter? Yeah, Fargo's here. Thanks, Tim. We've got some system problem. Everything was going good. I think Macintosh County hooked in. Yeah, we're back with you now, John. I can see your picture. Okay, we're back. We're going again until we get interrupted with another alert. Awful good counterprices on the slide. I've indicated what some people have actually sold calves. Contract before we'll be delivering in the next three or four weeks. 550 pound calves at $2.75. There's a lot of money to buy a calf and it's awful good money to sell a calf at. Don't look at the supply and demand situations changing drastically. So it might be a fairly stable or we can kind of think the fundamentals are in place that we're not looking for any wild moves all today. We had a little bit of a limit down, but as the market rallies up, there's going to be some up and down days. Generally, the outlook is pretty positive. Try to get some prices for planning and doing some budgets and pull up our sale bar reports. We noticed that there's not many calves moving yet. It's kind of hard to get a real good read on what they're worth. This was an Napoleon market report early in the month and it does show some pretty extremely good prices. I was working on this presentation yesterday and I pulled up the futures market and we had a pretty good day. They were up strong. We have cattle trading out into the future months in which we'll sell background calves at feeder weights in the 230s. Then today she took a little bit of a dive and so we're not quite as strong currently. So we got expensive calves. That's one of the themes. The other theme is we got a lot of feed around and we got a lot of cheap feed compared to what we've seen over the past several years. Large corn crop, planning prices, transportation issues, white basis and some places and so pretty cheap corn. We've also got some other opportunity fees that have shown up such as high vomit toxin or scabby wheat, winter wheat. Some of that is at a big discount in the market and will be available as a feed grade. Probably have some frosted corn that will make good test weight, merchandisable corn but will have good salvage feed value. And our hay stocks are in fairly good in the state. They're really high and demand to suck this hay out to other places in the country. It's kind of diminished as they got rains and the drought area shrunk. Just put a slide up of what our local grain elevators got posted for prices. We can see out in there that corn is only in the lower $2 bushel range. Quite a bit of a contrast to a year or two ago. Hay prices. Everybody kind of wants to know what hay prices are. There's not a real good market to gauge those by. But one of the things that we do have is a monthly survey done by our North Dakota Ag Statistics Service. They reported alfalfa hay for the month of September was at $84 a ton. And other hay, which is just a plumber of your grass hay, your mixed hay and so forth, was down to $59 a ton. Those are off from the month before, they're off substantially from last year. There's lots of hay around. It's not moving very fast. Third theme is with the feeds that we have. We have potential to put cheap gain on cattle, fairly cheap gain. A lot cheaper than we have been able to. And if we get animals that perform well, feed prices, we can have cost of gains. Probably down there $0.60, $0.70, $0.80, depending on what kind of animal performance and ration we're putting in front of them. Our interest rates remain fairly low. And one of the things to always watch for as far as looking at things and opportunities is typically the fall season feeder heifer calves are discounted severely to steers. We've seen in the last couple of years they've been 20 bucks, 15 bucks behind their steer mates. And sometimes it gives you an opportunity to buy something a little cheaper to put in the pans. And it gives you another option for a market. As some of them might have enough quality to be packaged and bread marketed as replacement cattle in which the market is very strong for. When you do budgets, which I'm going to share a few with you, you have to make a lot of assumptions and you have to put some prices and costs in that budget to come up with a bottom line. I picked some fairly simple feeds that put some prices on them. I used corn at $2.50 a bushel. It's a little stronger than what the market is out west. But by the time you haul a transport store, a little shrinkage and loss, that might be an appropriate number. Same for hay. I put $70 a ton on 12% crude protein, 56 TDN hay. You can probably buy it cheaper than that. But by the time you grind and put it in a ration, you're going to have that much into it. That price of corn silage is $27 a ton. A nionic protein supplement at $600. And then distillers grades at $120. And that includes a little extra for some transportation from the plant. I took those feed prices and then I plugged in four budgets I want to share with you tonight. One was a budget that just takes some heifer calves. We have an opportunity to make a good buy on some or keep our own. And winter, I'm at a gain that's probably suitable for making replacement for the size heifers by turnout time, which is one and a half pounds a day gain. And would feed some heifers from the $500 to $750 pounds. Then I had three steer rations. One that steers at a fairly typical of $550 pounds. A fairly typical background and gain of $2.5, feeding them up to $800 pounds. Some lighter weight steers that would probably even push us hard over a two pound a day gain, taking them up to $750. And then if we got some of these big strapped and good growthy calves that we don't want to stall out, keep moving them along for three pound a day gain on some 650 weights, taking up to $900. So I'll go through those four budgets with you. And that's give you an indication of maybe what's out there as far as cost a gain and margins it might be in these expensive calves with this cheap feed. And of course, there's a lot of assumptions in these budgets. Be aware that you can run these on a spreadsheet called CAPWeb. It's on the internet. Or you can adjust these things accordingly as your local situation and prices dictate. The first budget was the Heifer budget. They put 250 pounds on these Heifers, but we're going to do it over most of the winter. 167 days of feeding. I gave them a fairly simple ration of grass hay, a little corn. A little supplement, half a pound a day cost the feeds. But those prices I showed you before was 84 cents a day. Taking that feed cost and that ration and plugging it into the CAPWeb budgeting spreadsheet, we bought these Heifers or priced them in at $265. It might be a touch high. It might be a little low, depending on the fall of the situation of the day. I sell weight of 750. Gain was one and a half. The ration cost on an aspect basis of $88 a ton. Plugged in a 40 cent yardage cost in these budgets. And that yardage has to cover the wear and tear on your equipment facilities, the upkeep, electricity, the fuel, and the labor to run this feeding operation and enterprise on a per head per day basis. I kept death loss at a fairly conservative rate of one and a half percent. They're home raised calves. That's usually pretty achievable. If you're buying high stressed sailbar calves, that's probably only half of what it should be if maybe it should be stronger than that. I kept the vet medicine kind of as if they were your own calves. If we're doing some calves that have these stress issues and we're giving some antibiotics on arrival, that's certainly going to be higher. I did not plug in any price protection such as LRP premiums or put option costs into these budgets, but you can figure those in off the bottom line if you'd like. This heifer being winter, about a half a day, ends up having a feeding cost of feet alone of 55 cents a pound. When you have that 40 cent a day yardage, it goes to 81 cents. We end up with a break even of $2.15. I took a guest that used the futures market a little basis for heifers and decided my best guess at the selling price might be $2.20. When we put that in there, there's not a lot of profit to be made with those inputs into this budget. It leaves a profit of $35 ahead, plus you've made a yardage cost of 66 ahead and part of that is labor, so however you want to partition those out, there's certainly a positive return, but not a huge one. Then we took the more traditional steer cat, 550 pounds this time of year, fed in for 250 pounds a day gain, but did that a little faster and only took 100 days in the lot. We had to feed in a little bit of ration, instead of an 87 cent a day cost, it's $1.06 because we're feeding some corn silage, some alfalfa grass, mixed hay, corn grain, a little supplement for protein vitamins and minerals, and like I said, that's a dollar, it flew over a dollar a day per head. It put in pretty much the same variables. The ration cost, because it's a wetter, it's got silage in on an as-bed basis, it's a little cheaper, daily yardage costs, depth loss, health costs, processing costs, they're all left in there the same. We ended up, because these calves are eating more costly per day, but they're gaining more, the feed cost per pound a day goes down to $0.43. We have a cost of feeding of $0.59 for our yardage and feed, and we put depth loss and interest, trucking and miscellaneous costs in there, it's $0.88. We have a break-even of $2.20, a little higher than the heifers, because we bought them for, I think I put them in a $2.75, just go back and look. Now a $2.80, so they were more costly as steer calves, and they had a break-even of $2.20. I put them in a $2.25, a little basis under the $2.30, because they're eight weights, not seven and a half weights, and that left a small margin again, in the pure profit line, plus a little lighter to steer rewarded in the yardage cost. There goes to take a bunch of steers that are a little lighter weight, feed them for a two pound a day gain, took 13 pounds of hay on average, at their average weight of 600 pounds in the feeding period, three and a quarter pounds of corn, used a little distillers grains with that, and that had a data cost of $0.83 per calf per day over the feeding period of 200 days. Put those lighter weight steers in at $3, because when I looked at that Napoleon sale point report, it was pretty easy for four weight calves to be at that level. That might have been a little conservative even, looking at the demand for those that looks like maybe their piece of wheat pasture, or maybe the lighter calves will have a pretty strong buying interest. They reached 750 pounds after a couple hundred days. Again, kept most of the rest of the expenses the same as the previous budgets. We look at those costly lightweight calves that fed feed costs under 50 cents, feed in the yardage under 70 cents, total cost of gain, 96 cents of break even of 218. Those steers and the march board should be priced pretty comparable to 750 pounds to what the feeder index or trade is estimating, so I put them right in at 230, and that left an $82 margin for profit per calf with this alternative. Certainly, if you think you have to pay or realize you're going to be more costly than that, that will come off that bottom line. The last budget I'd like to share with you is for some of these bigger, heavier calves. These calves are 650 pounds, and we're going to push a little harder. We have to feed a little harder. The ration cost per head per day goes up to $1.16. I'm feeding them, excuse me, 9 pounds of hay, 15 of silage, 7.5 of corn grain, supplement, and some salt. And we're achieving on that ration these bigger steers, three pounds per head per day, for every street game. I priced those bigger steers in the $2.65 to pick a number, which I think maybe they could be reasonably bought in this part of the state anyway. Their ration, because it contained a fair amount of silage, it was less on an as-bed basis. I bumped the debt loss up a half percent, because every time you kind of push a cattle a little harder, put a little more feed in the bump, you open up another prospect of a few more health issues and digestive issues, such as bloat. And so that's in a little bit higher. The rest of the costs are left the same. And again, no price protection in here, which is something that you certainly want to consider this year. If we look at the output of that budget, we've got all the costs listed. You know, what cost to buy that calf is a $1,722 steer you're buying to feed. You're putting $87 to feed in, $33 with the yardage, you've got a marketing cost, an interest cost, debt loss cost. We've got close to $2,000 into that animal. After 83 days of feeding them, cost to gain, cheap, $0.80 overall, feed costs only $0.34, feed yardage $0.48, a break even at $2.14. I thought maybe that heavier nine-way steer is going to be a basis back of $8, $10 for where the Peter market is trading. So the player price team is an outpriced of $2.20. That generated a little over the costs that we got in them for a profit of $51. Now those do show that cost to gains are low. Expensive calves have potential to make some money. Everybody can work on their own feeds, their own yardage costs, their own buying and selling expectations and run these budgets to see what looks like it's worth, going to work for them. But in spite of a little positive on the bottom, all four of these budgets I've shared with you, there's a lot of risk when you get $2,000 of calf tied up and buying the calf, feeding the calf. If you have health issues, non-performance issues, debt loss issues, profits can be eroded away really fast. 2% debt loss on these $1,500 in calves takes 30 off the top of all the rest of the calves. So not much room to lose them when you're paying that kind of money. Of course there's also the risk, as we saw today, high markets don't just stay at one level. They go up and down. They can have more potential, maybe for some down and up at these high prices. So we want to make sure we protect ourselves from feeding cattle with some kind of forward contracting price insurance, options, or marketed price decline risk strategy. So with that, I probably used up my segment of time. We've got people who will talk a little more about market protection, a little bit more on some of these fees that are available in the rations. And I will conclude and turn it back over to you, Carl. Thank you, John. Is there anybody out there that might have a question? I think we can entertain one or two questions for John. If there's a question, by all means, please ask. We'll wait. While we're waiting for you to ask a question, I'll just comment and say, John, it seems like those four-weight calves are priced pretty high, but based on your budgets, they could be priced even a little bit higher. You agree? I think we hear in the stories that some of the low four-weights are actually pushing the $4 range. So I think, you know, you'd have to find some of the high-quality lightweight calves that the number of maybe I put in. Are there any other questions for John? Thanks, John. Appreciate that.