 for this meeting possible. Some of our sponsors, Cass County Ag Improvement Association, the Ransom County Crop and Livestock Improvement Association, the NDSU Extension Service, the NDSU Department of Animal Science, the North Central Research Extension Center, the Carrington Research Extension Center, Serylson and ethanol, Blue Flint ethanol, and the North Dakota Corn Consul. So all those into our groups played a major part in helping make this meeting possible today. My name is Brian Zemperk. I work down in Ransom County as the Extension Agent, and I'm going to serve as your host this afternoon. We're going to get going with Gailen's going to talk about some storage issues this afternoon with the ethanol product. So at this time, I'm going to turn the floor back over to Gailen and get going with his presentation this afternoon. OK, thank you. Can you hear me? If you can hear me OK again, Scott, maybe give me a message. But I'm sure your lunch was better than mine, so I hope things are good there. And basically, I was going to talk a little bit about what costs the store, as well as maybe pricing options on distillers grains. And then also then jump into stories, things that we've tried here at Nebraska, both at the university, but also I'm going to share quite a few anecdotal stories from producers across the state that have allowed us to watch what they've done and recorded and gather some information from them. At the end, I'm quite excited because we're also going to compare feeding stored material versus not storing it and just mixing it fresh. And the part I'm kind of most excited about is that we've allowed some to spoil and fed it to compare to some that was not spoiled and be kind of interesting to show you that data. OK, so a lot of people have been very interested in the storage of distillers grains. And the reason that they have been is because we thought it would be economical to store. And I'll go through some of those examples here in a minute. Before I do that, Carl and the committee asked me to discuss a program briefly that we use to make decisions on whether to purchase the distillers grains and how much to feed. We've called that cattle code. It's a complete budget type model that uses the performance data that I showed you from earlier on the meta-analysis. In other words, the comparison of performance on different levels of different byproducts. You put in the feed ingredient costs that you have that you've been quoted. And then it calculates how much it costs to get it to your operation from the ethanol plant. How much you're going to feed, and then put in the cattle interest and feed interest. And it'll basically do a budget that shows, OK, how much more or less can I make if I feed the distillers grains? Now, so far, excuse me, so far, cattle code focuses on just the feedlot sector. But I think many people know how to do the calculation to do it on a cow-calf operation. But I want to go through that here just real briefly as well. So this is a picture of basically the entire sheet that is cattle code. And it is available online. And I have it up on my computer. So if you bear with me for just one second here, I'm going to try and share with you so you can see the screen that I'm using that's got the actual cattle code on it. So hopefully that shows up there now. And then we'll go back to the slides here in a minute. So when you first come to this Excel file, there's really only two sheets on there. It's one that just has a description of it and the different inputs and outputs that come. So it's just a real simple description of what it is. And then the other sheet is where you put in the steps that you want to actually follow. So up top here, right now, excuse me, is a 740 pound steer that's going to be fed to 1,300 pounds. And what you do here is these are the inputs if you were just going to feed them grain. So this is without the byproduct you're going to feed them. And so in this example, the cattle reading, 24 pounds a day, a conversion of 6.5, the price on calves. Now that was a little while ago. So we could change that and make these, hopefully, they're both higher. Let's just put them in at 134 and 110. I assume that you can see me doing that. And then medicine costs, death loss, and yardage charges, et cetera, you really want to make sure that this is as accurate as you want it to be for your operation. Now that's the first step. And most people get confused. You actually got to put in what are you using, what was performance for cattle fed just a grain based diet, not what are they going to perform like if you use the byproduct because that's what this program predicts. OK, down below here is probably the most important part because this is what compares different ingredients to corn. And when this program was developed a few years ago, corn price was $3. And so you can see what our corn prices are that are in there as default. And you can download this and, again, modify it the way you want. Now the whole way this program works is that you call the plants and get a price. And these prices are not accurate today, again, because prices have easily doubled now recently. So the examples only as good, though, is the prices you put in. And so I want to go through this because it basically makes comparing apples to apples a lot easier. One of the challenges on pricing the stillers grains and other feeds is that you get those prices on a per ton basis. And that's probably a per ton as is or as fed. And what you really want is a price per ton of dry matter to compare then to a price per ton of dry matter on corn. Well, as an example, I don't know if you can see this, but that corn is $3.30 and the is $187.83. If I change that to $6, that price is $250 per ton of dry matter. Now that's the important number to compare to the prices above of wet the stillers grains as an example. At $70 per ton, if that's what you get quoted, turns out to be $218.75 per ton of dry matter or as the percentage of corn is 88% right now. So if for no other reason, this program allows you to quickly identify, OK, what are my prices of corn that I'm paying or could get paid for my own corn? And what is the price quoted to me from the local ethanol plant for the stillers grains? And they're going to give you your corn prices quoted in dollars per bushel. And the ethanol plant is going to give you dollars per ton as is at the plant. And those two numbers cannot be compared. It's very difficult to compare those two. The only two numbers, which I assume you can see are these two numbers, this $218.75 and this $249.96. OK, but once all that's inputted and you put in ingredients, other ingredients in their cost, what happens is on this, this just next to those, the step three, it has a list here of different ingredients and then what's the inclusion. So right now, in this example, it has wet the stillers grains included at 10% with a 50-50 mixture of high moisture corn and dry rolled corn. And then 10% of the stillers grains is displacing those mixtures of dry rolled and high moisture corn. You could just use dry rolled corn if that's what you're in fact feeding. And anyway, it talks about, OK, what is my pounds that I'm getting per load? Some trucks are 30 ton loads, some trucks are 25 ton loads. What's my price per loaded mile? Again, that's probably a low number based on today's economics, et cetera, et cetera. How many miles from the plant am I? If you're closer to the plant, your trucking distance is going to be less charged than if you're further away from the plant. So it allows you to manipulate that, if you will, on how much transportation is going to cost you. And then all of that information's put in and then you get output. And so what it does is it predicts how is dry matter intake going to change, how is feed conversion and average daily gain going to change, and how will days on feed, if they gain more, how will that change as well? It puts in the feeding costs and the non-feeding costs, the cost of the cost per head of hauling, and then your ration characteristics and cost, total feed costs, and then your feed costs to gain. And notice, then, it gives a profit loss based on those numbers that you put in on the first input of step one. OK, all of that's not different than anything else that you may have used in the past, but here's where it changes is that this is then compared to this column of not feeding byproducts. So if you feed distillers grains at 10% inclusion, which is what we happen to have been up above, compared to not feeding, you stand to make $27 more per head than if you didn't feed it. Now, hopefully, everybody there that's got a feedlot that's in the audience notices what the P and L is on this steer based on those costs I put in. And that's, unfortunately, not far off with what some cattle are going to do, probably, that are in the yard today, unfortunately. So it doesn't say that you're going to make $27 a profit. What it says is that you're making $27 more than if you hadn't fed distillers grains. Now, I don't know how well that showed up. This program, again, is available for you for download. And if you want to do that, you're welcome to download that and play with it. If there's questions, we can come back to that next time. I'll go back to the slides here now and go from there. OK, so what the rest of the topic then that I'm going to discuss with you primarily, and again, we can come back to the cattle code if there's questions, is how do you store this? And first off, why would you store it and what's it going to cost? Well, to be frank about it, the reason that we got into this storage issue of wet distillers grains is because we have a lot of cattle and a lot of cattle close to ethanol plants. And so most of our ethanol plants prefer to make wet distillers grains. Then they don't want to spend the extra money to dry the distillers grains down and ship it out of the state or out of the country. But the problem with that approach is that our cattle and feedlots goes down in the summer month. And so we approach that we started into this four or five years ago because we saw dramatic decreases in the price of the distillers grains through the summer months, which means it's a good time to be purchasing the distillers grains. And that's primarily because of this decrease in cattle on feed numbers, as you can see here in July and August. And so if I was going to purchase distillers grains one month of the year here in Nebraska, I'd make sure I was year in, year out purchasing in July or August. Now, this is another diagram that illustrates that. And I realize it doesn't show up well, but the red bars are cattle on feed in the US. And so again, I'm just pointing out that cattle on feed in the US drops to around 10 million head in feedlots in the summer months as compared to 11 and a half or 12 through the fall, winter months. Now, so what? Why is that necessarily related to the distillers price? Well, if you look at this blue line that's in the background and on the y-axis over here is relative price, the cheapest price for distillers grains year in, year out is in the summer month. And we believe that's a cause and effect because cattle on feed numbers are lower, the distillers price is lowest in the summer month. So my only point of saying all that is is that that's what led us into this type of work and really has been what people have adopted. Now, that's for a feedlot even, they could purchase their feed needs potentially in the summertime, but it's also really important then for a cow calf producer that may need supplement in the winter and yet that's when they can't get into the distillers grains market and or it's the worst time to get into the distillers market because that's when it's gonna be the highest price. So the benefit of storage is really for small producers that can't handle semi-load quantities and feed it up fast enough and for small operations and cow, small feeders and cow calf producers that want to purchase feed in the summertime and feed it out later on throughout the year. Now, I mentioned this when we first started and I think it's an important point and it's sort of a feed sheet. When I'm talking about storage of distillers grains, I'm gonna show you some examples where we mixed a forage in with the distillers grains at say 80% distillers, 20% forage. And that's on a dry matter basis. Now, notice that because the forage might be 15% water or less and the distillers grains is 65% water or more, that when I go to weigh them out and mix them together into a bunker, I really only need about 9.3% forage and about 90.7% distillers grains. So my point is, is that there's a big difference between inclusion on a dry matter basis and inclusion on an as is basis or as fed basis. Notice 20% versus 9.3, 80% versus 90.7. So it's really important that whoever's mixing this, and again, if you're used to feeding cattle, you have to deal with this some anyway, but your nutritionists or extension or someone may help you with these calculations. My only point is it's important to understand the difference between dry matter and as fed because it dramatically influences how much you're gonna mix. As an example, if you were gonna mix up 20,000 pounds of this or 10 ton, you would need 18,133 pounds of distillers. If you did it on a dry matter basis, you would have loaded incorrectly 16,000 pounds of distillers grains. So it makes a big difference whether you're working on a dry matter as fed basis. When you go to load it in the truck, gotta be as fed. When it comes to the nutrition of the cattle, dry matter is the only thing that's important. Okay, what else do you need? Well, if you're gonna mix this to bag it or to put it in a bunker and mix it with forage, you'll need some equipment to handle it, which for some producers, that can be a limitation. You will likely need to grind any of your forages that you're going to mix with the distillers grain. Now, we've run things through our mixer wagons or trucks with scales, primarily because we wanted to do it accurately. I'm not sure that's a requirement in all operations that that mix is just perfect, but that's the way we've done it. And then if you want a bag, generally you could have a bagger, but you may want to just hire that out. That's the most common way. Okay, so if you're an operation and you're going to store wet distillers grains for feeding later because you want to buy it when it's cheap in the summertime, you have to account for how much you're gonna lose. Now, the definition we use for that is shrink. No matter what happens, you will never feed the same amount that you purchase. I don't care who you are, you never feed all of it. You're always gonna lose some. Now, it may dry out, you may not weigh it out accurately, you may actually lose some to fermentation losses, et cetera, but that shrink is really important. And it's important to know what that number is because if you're gonna store it and you lose half of it because you stored it, that's probably not gonna be a good deal. If you lose 5% though, versus 15%, that could be the difference on whether it's smart to store it or not. So my point is, is we've got to estimate that and we've got some data on this, but I'm just saying that the numbers that we propose is likely three to 6% if you're bagging, five to 15 if you're bunkering it or putting it into a bunker. And again, date is always best. And if anybody stores this, it's always great to measure how much dry matter did you purchase versus how much dry matter did you get fatter delivered to the cattle. Okay, so now there's sophisticated and then less sophisticated ways of doing this. Our economist, Dr. Darrell Mark, that we work closely with, who's obviously gonna do it the more sophisticated way has developed a computer model as well. And then we've also provided a hand calculation sheet, which is what of course I use, generally because it's a little simpler. Well, we want you to account for how much the byproduct costs, so the cost of what the stiller's grains at the plant, the cost of the forage or whatever you're gonna mix with it, if you're gonna mix anything with it, that'll give you the total cost of your feeds. We have a mechanism to account for the transportation or the cost of getting it delivered. Generally, those loads are gonna be 25 to 30 ton loads. Obviously, we have to cover the cost because it is a fairly labor-intensive process when it's first stored. Have to account for fuel costs, which obviously in today's market is a big issue. There's a cost of your bunker. Even if you have one on hand, there's a cost to your having a bunker and there's a cost to bagging if you choose to bag it. You may rent equipment, so you may have other equipment costs that you gotta account for, plastic if you're gonna cover it, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's an interest on when you buy that feed compared to when you actually utilize it at the cattle. So again, Dr. Mark has sophisticated this in a spreadsheet which I will briefly show you and then I'll also show you though a hand calculator that does this, but it does a lot of things where it'll tell you your total cost on an as is basis, your total cost on a dry matter basis, which I think is very useful for producers to compare. It'll give you estimates of your shrink. Of course, you put that in, but I mean it'll give you an estimate of what that shrink does to your cost. And so you can get total cost on a dry matter basis with the shrink included, which again, I think it's an important cost to keep in mind. So there's a manual that we put together three or four years ago that sort of described our experiences at that point. It was sort of a cookbook, so to speak of different mixes that could be tried that we knew would work well, but in this manual, which again, I've shared and hopefully it's part of your materials there today, on one of the pages on the inside there, I believe it's just one second, it is page 14 in that manual is the sort of hand calculator example of doing all of these different costs to eventually get to how much does this cost you if you're gonna store this and how much does it add to your feed cost. So make sure this is crystal clear. Just getting material in in the summer and storing it is not a free process. There is cost to it. So the only way that storing wet distillers grains makes any sense at all is with the assumption that it'll cost you less if you buy it in the summer and that therefore, if you can buy it at a cheaper cost, some of these extra costs of storing it will be offset because the original feed was cheaper. I think most people assume that there's not much cost on storage and there is. So that's why I'm emphasizing that. Well, and if you want the more sophisticated approach with the Excel file, there's four steps in that Excel file and I have a picture of it. And basically you put in what times you're doing this, what's your interest rate are and your strength, your feed cost that took you to purchase that, what's your equipment costs are and then all your labor and transportation and interest. And so it does a good job of analyzing those costs. Again, just like cattle code, this one is called a cattle store and it's a model that predicts the storage cost with multiple steps. It's actually fairly simple to use and allows you to play with that. Again, unless there's questions, I may not switch over and share that screen with you at this point, but be happy to go through an example if there's a lot of interest in that there. Okay, now maybe into some of the details of what we've tried. There'll be a lot of pictures here, so I have a lot of slides, but it's mostly pictures and things for me just to comment on and then move on. So, I didn't go on the tour obviously this morning, but I'm presuming that's wet distillers grains there and not modified. If that's wrong, we'll talk a little bit about modified, but at least with wet distillers grains, this here is a picture of a payloader and the whole concept of this picture is is that you cannot drive on wet distillers grains and pack it in. The payloader wheels just spin out underneath it and Terry Klopp and Steen colleague here at Nebraska uses the analogy that the wet distillers grains is like mashed potatoes. Hopefully everybody there can relate to what mashed potatoes are like. So just imagine trying to drive a payloader on a big pile of mashed potatoes. It just doesn't work to pack it in. As you can see, the payloader just drives into it. It doesn't actually drive up on it and you won't be doing that very long before you get stuck. So the concept that we started with is is let's mix some low quality forage in with it. This is just our research station where we are grinding wheat straw, we've tried corn stalks, we've tried about any forage that's available to quote unquote bulk up the wet distillers grains. With the goal in mind that you either bag it under pressure or drive on it in a bunker and pack it in. So our experience at the university is that if you try and put wet distillers grains in a bag and you put pressure on the bag, you will have to rebag it the next day. No, the material is so dense and has so much pressure that if you put any pressure on it, it will expand and blow off the bag. Now to be fair, just to be really clear here, wet distillers grains will go into a bag and it'll keep in a bag. You just can't put any pressure on it. And so I think it's fairly clear in this picture, the top of this bag is right here. I don't know if you can see it because there's a bag of corn solids behind here, but this is modified distillers grains. And then right here is where we switched over to the wet distillers grains. And you can see that the height of this bag is about there. So the bag is about twice as wide and about a third of the height if you put wet distillers grains in a bag. But again, it'll work. You just can't put any pressure on it. Modified distillers grains will go into a bag because it's been partially dried, will go into a bag just fine under pressure. So this is again our bagging system. Again, we mixed everything through trucks so we knew the right mixes and we've tried adding different levels, if you will, or different concentrations in the mix of these bulky forages. So we obviously, this blew out. And so we were putting pressure on the bag and we didn't have much forage in because that was one of the treatments and it blew that part out. As we added more forage to that mix, it started to bag fine under pressure. And so we were trying to determine if you want a bag wet distillers grains under pressure, what's the minimum amount of forage. The other thing we've tried, again, this is our research station, is putting these materials into a bunker and being able to drive on it. So this right here is 30% grass hay. We happen to use grass hay for this. And this is 40% grass hay on a dry basis and then we were able to easily drive on that and pack it. Now, another common question about this is, well, is this like making silage? Does it in silo? And I want to caution you that the concept is very much like silage, where what you want to do is get the air away from it. So oxygen is the enemy. So if you can keep oxygen out of this, it will dramatically improve your storage and decrease spoilage. So yes, we're packing it in like silage, but it's not because it's gonna go through the ensiling process. It's primarily just to keep the oxygen away and keep it from spoiling. So again, you can see we were able to drive on that with no problem and it packed in quite well just like silage, again, to get all the air out. We had a conference at our station a couple of years ago and we did some mixes, which is what they're mixing right here and packing it in. This happens to be a pile of straight wet distillers grains. We had modified distillers grains that we just piled up straight. We had wet distillers grains, again, that we just tried to pile. And then what we did is we covered those piles and we also covered the mixes that we made. So you can see that we covered everything that we did in plastic and put tires on it. We let it sit for, I think it was about 30 days ahead of the conference, maybe longer, 45 days. And then we had the meeting and we opened them up for the first time. So when you open up those bags, this is the modified distillers grains that was just piled straight and covered in plastic. So you can see that it doesn't look very good. And when you dig that away, you get about, oh, a six to eight inch layer that's pretty poor, obviously, and spoiled. But I will point out that below that spoilage layer all the way down that modified distillers grains from that point on is quote unquote, just as good as the day we brought it in. So my point is you can pile it straight and cover it. You'll just get some spoilage on the top. And then once it seals off, it's sort of preserved, if you will, down below. This is the mixture of four-aged mixed in with wet distillers grains. It's not as good of a picture because it's not as far back into the bunker, but not near as dramatic of spoilage, only a couple of inches instead of eight to 10. These are those bags that I had shown you originally where we had a taller bag of modified distillers and a much more lower height bag that was wet distillers grains. And then we opened those bags up again after about 30 to 40 days of storage for the conference. And they look as good as the day we put them in there. So again, you can bag wet distillers grains with no pressure. You just, it takes more area and you gotta be a little careful on when you're feeding to feed it up fast enough. So what we've tried is we've tried adding wheat straw, corn stalks, we've used grass hay to wet distillers grains. So all of these are with wet distillers grains. And then we've also added corn stalks and wheat straw to modify the distillers grains. Now, in some cases in the feedlot situation, you're actually trying to get just the minimum amount of material to bulk it up. And so again, these just happen to be numbers that we tried that worked. In the bunkers, we've added 25 to 30% wheat straw. I've been able to drive on it. We did a different study where we happened to need more corn stalks. So we added 45 to 55% corn stalks. We've added 30 to 40% grass hay and they all worked. Now that's all on a dry matter basis. My point of saying that is, is notice that if I add 12 and a half percent wheat straw on a dry matter basis in a bag, the bag wet distillers grains under pressure, that's only about five and a half percent on an as is basis. So it's a lot different when you go to weigh it out in the trucks and mix it up. So those are things that we've tried and gotten along real well and had no trouble with storage. Okay, so what have producers tried? Well, this is a project near Odessa where they stored wet distillers grains. Kent Hubbard, he mixed them with forage he had, sorry, and drove on it and packed it on just like he would his silage. This is the pile when it was done. The criticism here is that that pile was way too wide and not near tall enough. The goal in making silage and making these storage piles is to make them a lot taller and a lot less wide because you wanna decrease the surface area. So the second year he made a much better pile. It was much more narrow and a lot taller and more successful in our opinion. Other producers have used instead of just piling outside and driving on it, they actually put hay bales around. This is a cow calf producer and made a makeshift bunker. They piled hay down, excuse me, they ground some hay and spread it out on the ground. Then they brought in the wet distillers grains and dumped it on top of the hay and sort of layered it in. And then they mixed it. Once they had piled some wet distillers grains on it, they actually used the front end loader here to do the mixing as they pushed it into the bunker. And so they did not run it through the mixer trucks and weigh it all out. They sort of layered it in and then mixed it up as they were packing it and pushing it up. So obviously if you can't tell which one of those works for the University of Nebraska, that's Denny Bauer who's got the red Nebraska code on. He's an extension educator out there. Once they had piled it, they covered it in plastic and with hay and it just looked great underneath. So there was plastic on it. They actually put some hay on top of that to try and make the seal even better and worked just great for them. Others have just tried to pile it. This was a produce. I've cut out a lot of the slides that you, that I had shared that may be printed for you just for the sake of time here. But this was, I think, 30 or 40 loads of wet distillers grains in the summertime, more or less piled on the corner of a pivot and allowed to sit there. So this was put out in July or August, I can't remember, out near Madrid's, out near North Platte. This was coming back a few months later. You notice that the color is a fairly nice, bright yellow here and then it gets much darker as it's stored and dries out. And if you looked at that pile, it looked fine on the surface, sort of dry, but when you dig down into it, you'll notice that there's a spoilage layer here and then once you get below that spoilage layer, again, it looks pretty good. As good as the day it was put in. But this was left uncovered and just allowed to sit there. Again, the cost has to be pretty low, but that's the way that these folks wanted to store it at that time and then feed it out later. And of course, we've done some things at the Goodman's and Ranch where, again, piling in a makeshift bunker, putting plastic all around it, and piling in wet distillers grains and sort of sealing it back up. So it looks like a nice pile. Looked good once it was opened. Really had very little spoilage. This is that same pile being opened later. Hardly any spoilage on top or anywhere else on that because it was sealed really well. Okay, what we've also tried to do is we've tried to evaluate whether you need to add a cover to it or just let it sit. And to do that, we could either use a whole bunch of bunkers or we could use barrels. And our barrels serve to mimic, if you will, or simulate a bunker situation. So in this case, we were looking at covering it with plastic. This is actually sand that we poured on top of the plastic like you'd put a tire down on the bunkers, on a bunker that was covered in plastic. And then this is opening that barrel 45 days later. Notice that here in the middle where there was no air that got to that material, looked just as good as the day we put it in. Around the edges where it wasn't sealed is where it spoiled some, but not much on the plastic covered barrels. We also sprinkled salt on this at about one pound per square foot. This was the day that it was put in and this is what it looked like after being stored for 45 days. Again, we wanted to see how much spoilage would occur. And these were our controls. If we just mixed wet distillers grains with straw and put it in these bunkers and let it sit for 45 days, notice what happens. On the very surface, it dries out and looks pretty good. But once you move down through, you really get three layers. And then down below this layer, once you get down into the barrel down here, then that material looks pretty good and looks like it did when we put it in. So my point is, if you just pile it and pack it, you will get a fair amount of spoilage on the surface. I think that's normal. Some producers, the question came up this morning about distiller solubles. Some producers will actually use those solubles and spray it on top of the bunker. So we went ahead and mimicked that. We sprayed solubles on top of these barrels, either with or without salt and looked to see how much spoilage and losses we had. So basically the students went in and recorded how much weight was spoiled and how much was not spoiled, how much we lost and which covers were best. So to kind of summarize that, if you were in a 10 foot bunker, our estimates are that you'd lose three and a half to 5% of the dry matter. And depending upon the cover, we saw anywhere from one to 15% spoilage, which you got to keep in mind that just because it spoils, you're probably gonna feed it. And so just because it spoiled, we assumed that we would need to quantify that amount and that that's gonna end up being fed to the cattle. Plastic covering it in plastic resulted in the least amount, obviously uncovered and just left out as a control was the most and the solubles and salt were kind of intermediate. Now, the last thing is if you're gonna use syrup and spray it on top of a bunker storage, so to speak, you're gonna lose 25 to 50% of that material that you're using as a cover. And that's just important to keep in mind. In other words, a lot of people like to do this but the solubles better be cheap because you're gonna lose at least half of it or at least 25% of it. In general, when the distillers spoils, the fat is lowered, the pH is dramatically higher in the spoiled layer compared to the unspoiled. Fibers increase because you lose fat and you don't lose as much fiber. The minerals increased or concentrated some and the proteins either unchanged or increased some. So in essence, the spoilage process uses up the fat and sort of keeps all the mineral and the protein and the fiber around, so to speak. Okay, so that's kind of a quick overview and I know that's fast, but I also know it's after lunch and so hopefully that was okay. But we wanted to look at, so what? What happens if you have the distillers grains and it spoils? What's the impact of using that spoiled material? So we went and we got distillers grains from the same plant and we put it in a bag or in a bunker. Clearly, if you look at this bunker, it's a lot of spoilage in that bunker. We actually had two bunkers. We fed out some cattle feeding that material compared to a bag. And after 39 days of storage, you got quite a bit of spoilage and if it was in the bag, you didn't get hardly any. So it clearly was different. This is the bunker halfway through the feeding trial and this is down towards the end. And again, you can see that on top of there, we're getting some areas where we've got a lot of spoilage and it did not look good. This is after we mixed it in the finishing diet, this is the control diet that was distillers grains out of the bag and this is the distillers grains diet out of the bunker. Clearly, you could just visually see which treatment had the spoiled stuff in it. And if you looked at the composition, the fat was actually a little bit higher as a percentage in the non-spoiled or bag distillers grain. That little bit of spoilage that you saw in the bunker lowered the amount of fat, increased the amount of fiber, protein was unchanged, pH was a little higher as you'd expect, mineral was higher as you'd expect. And actually the bunker got wetter and then it got drier at the end. But I don't know if the dry matter matters, this is gonna change, the stuff left out in the bunker is gonna change depending upon what the weather does. If it was in North Dakota, it would have been about 10% dry matter this year, so at least based on what I hear up there. So we lost about 12% of the material out of that bunker just from storing it. So about 12% less, if we, whatever we purchased, 12% was gone. And you have to account for that loss and when you price those ingredients. We lost 16% of the fat that we bought. We lost 8% of the fiber in about the same amount of protein as dry, excuse me, as what we lost in dry matter. Pretty bad stuff. So how do you think they perform? Well, this is a corn-based diet that we fed as a control. This is the 20 individually fed head steers. This is the bagged distillers grains that was not as spoiled, obviously, in a bag, fed the 20 steers. And this is the spoiled material out of that bunker that you looked at. So these guys, you would guess, would do poorer than these guys if you looked at those bags in the bunker. Well, what happened is that final weight was impacted average daily gain was impacted and feed to gain was impacted as well, but not the way you'd expect. Final weight was much greater, but it was greater for the two treatments, regardless of which one it was, just the two that had distillers grains was greater than the cattle fed corn. Average daily gain was greater for the two treatments that had distillers grains, but no difference. And if anything, numerically better for the cattle fed on the bunker and feed to gain was about the same. But again, numerically better if anything for the material from the cattle fed out of the bunker. All of them did better than the cattle fed corn, but again, that's to be expected. Carcass characteristics were not impacted, so I'm gonna jump right through that. Okay, so we thought we were pretty smart. Spoilers, the spoiled wet distillers grains or the stuff in the bunker had less fat. We saw the same increase in pH and mineral and fiber compared to the bagged material, but the thing that was surprising is there was no difference in performance between the stuff that had spoiled versus the stuff that was allowed not to spoil. So we thought, well, that's interesting, not what we expected. So let's do it with some growing calves and then we'll kind of have the complete picture. So we went and did it with growing calves, the same way we fed cattle that were fed distillers grains at 15 or 40% of the diet that was stored in a bunker. And then we fed 15 or 40% of the distillers from distillers that was put in a bag that we're saying. So we're saying bagged materials non-spoiled, stuff put in the bunker is quote unquote, spoiling, allowing spoilage to occur. That's fine, this is what it looked like. This was done this fall and winter, excuse me, this winter spring. So this was put in the bunkers back in November and the trial started here in March. So it went through the wintertime. This is what it looked like as we were going. Doesn't look near as bad as the stuff that we fed out last summer. You can see that there's clearly a discoloring across the top and some spoilage, but not near as dramatic. So what happened to performance? Well, interestingly, at 15% inclusion, this is the spoiled material out of a bunker that was allowed to spoil more. This is the non-spoiled material out of a bag. Again, it fed at 15%. And then the same over here, but these two were fed at 40%, so just to be clear. So if you just look at these two numbers, cattle that were fed the distillers out of the bunker that had more spoilage ate about 1.8 pounds less per day, gained about two-tenths of a pound less, but not dramatically different. And if anything, there wasn't a significant difference there, but numerically the cattle fed, the bagged distillers grains did just as well if not a little bit numerically better. Okay, sorry, let me back up. So over here at 40%, again, the cattle fed out of the bag, eight more feed gains weren't dramatically different, 2.5 versus 2.35. And notice here that if anything, the feed conversion's better for cattle fed, the spoiled bagged material compared to non-spoil. So it's perplexing, it's interesting, I would say, but we didn't see a dramatic difference in performance. Okay, the last three slides I just wanna show you, we compared feeding this stuff fresh versus stuff that we've stored. And in this first study, it was 30% wet distillers grains, 70% corn stalks, and cattle fed material that had been stored versus fresh, eight more, gained more, and were more efficient. And those were significant. So feeding this stuff, then it comes out of a bag that's been stored, was better than just mixing 30% distillers and 70% stalks fresh every day and feeding them. So there was something that was improved. But here's the problem. These guys gained more, but they also ate more. So we don't know if they gained more because they just ate more, or if it was in fact better feed. So what we did is we went back and we said, okay, let's force the intake to be the same. When we did that, the gain was less, but here's the problem. We did not do this study right. So we did it the first time, we didn't get it quite right. We did it the second time, but we didn't use the same distillers grains in both cases. And it turned out that the stuff we fed fresh was actually better, had more fat in it, had more energy. So we messed up the second one. So then we did it a third time. And this time, I think we got it right. We forced them to eat the same amount. We got all the same source of the distillers grains and had a distillers straw mix and noticed that the stuff that was stored, those cattle gained more and were dramatically more efficient. So we believe storage with a forage in a bag anyway, certainly helps performance compared to feeding fresh. So sort of a summary of all this, which I know is a lot of material thrown at you, but I tried to be as complete as I could. If you can store what distillers grains alone in a bag, but you better not put any pressure on it unless it's modified distillers grains. We've done a lot of work where we've mixed it with low quality forages anywhere from 15 to 50% forage with 50 to 85% distillers. And we've bagged it and we put it in bunkers and we've never had any major problems. Storing it, storing wet distillers grains with the forage probably improves the forage. In other words, that's why the siloed material or the stored material performed a little better. I'm guessing there's 20 to 30 or 40 producers across the state that have done this. I can think of at least a dozen or more that have done it and no one's had any trouble. And I'm saying that on purpose is that I've never heard of a horror story of storing it. There's only one, at least in Nebraska. And I mean that because there was one story from Iowa State in a trial they did where they stored it and it didn't do so well. So my point is is that a lot of people tried it and they've all gotten along good. I recommend covering it in plastic even though it's a labor-intensive process. I think it's well worth it. You should plan on losing five to 15% and you should expect that the fat will be slightly reduced if you store it and that's from the spoilage process. We didn't see, we saw spoilage maybe, maybe not, hurt growing performance and certainly had no impact on finishing cattle performance and that's not what you would expect. So we're quite intrigued by that. With that I think I've taken plenty of your time and I know especially since I'm on over the internet it's even more challenging. So I appreciate meeting up with chat with you from here and I hope it's been useful, but don't know if I've taken way too much time and no time for questions. Is there any questions for Gail or whatever you want? Is there been anything done with using an ointment on using an ointment? My product? My product? Yeah, this last study here I kind of skipped over that. That last study had an inoculum put onto it compared to this one that was exactly the same but without an inoculum. And the inoculums for silages and so forth are generally there to help with the fermentation and speed that fermentation process up so it ensiles faster. Because I never really explained why this doesn't ensile but the pH of the stillers grains coming out of those plants is already very acidic. It's a pH of three and a half to four and that's what the final pH is for silage. So and that's what kills off all the bacteria and silage is that really acidic environment at the end once it's ensiled. So my point is I would be surprised if inoculums have much benefit. Now to be fair, notice that this was not significant because they both have a letter B on them but you can see here that the conversions went from nine, eight to nine and so these were individually fed steers and there was I think 20 animals on each of those levels so that should be pretty good replication and but I'll let you decide if that's significant enough. That's the only study that we have. I'm not aware of others that have got other experiments looking at use of an inoculum in this process. There may be other work out there but I'm not aware of it. The common common thing that's growing in some of the spoiled stuff and whether any of them are harmful to cattle and I guess when Greg gets into that just give his stuff a last question about what the other types of products are. Yeah, that's a good question. We've analyzed some of those samples, not some of them, a lot of them for mycotoxins. We've not done the mold types. I know that's possible to do. I have some colleagues that are in the plant pathology area and to be frank, I hope I quote them correctly, they've suggested that isolating and analyzing for all the different fungi that are there would not be a good use of time. And so we have not tested for all the different types of fungi and molds that are there. But what we have done is what they did recommend is do tests for presence or absence of mycotoxins. And I've got to tell you, we've never seen any spikes and any mycotoxin. We've tested for the suite of mycotoxins that are out there. Mycotoxins is sort of a general term for all the nasty things that some fungi can produce. And we've never seen anything. And one of those studies that, remember those piles of distillers I mentioned that were on the edge of the field that they had just piled up. In that specific study, there was a spike in xarelinone. The problem is, is that we didn't test it when it was first put out there. And we happen to have a corn year that year where we had some corn with a lot of xarelinone. So I can't promise you whether it came from the corn originally and just was into the distillers grains to begin with because the mycotoxins that are in corn end up in distillers grains. There's no doubt about that. And in fact, it gets increased three times based on what we were talking about before. So I can't say that the mycotoxin was there because of spoilage or whether it was there because it came in from the corn originally in the ethanol plant. So that's the only one know out of 10 or 15 samples that have had any problem. So I don't want to say that it appears that it's never a problem, but I would have expected us to see it if it was much of an issue. It's a good question. Hi, Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. Hi, I'm Galen. What's your experience with that? What's your experience with that and the spillage grains and all the coles? Yeah, we've, I've been approached about that. And, you know, I'm aware of those. And I think that there's no doubt that there's preservatives, if you will, that could be added. And there's no doubt that my guess is they'll be very effective. I don't have any experience with them. We haven't tested any of them. And it'd be nice to have some date on that. Cost effectiveness, as you know, normally that can be quite prohibitive. I mean, I think that's a common statement anyway, is that the cost can be prohibitive. The benefit here, though, could be is that if a preservative was able to be sprayed on, the spoilage is not occurring throughout the whole pile. It's occurring at the surface where it's exposed to oxygen. So my point of saying that is, is that preservative costs might be very, it might be decreased because you're just spraying it on the surface, and that's where you need to inhibit the mold. But I can't answer whether it would be effective or cost-effective, because I've not tested it. I do know Camin and some of those other companies that have those products are quite interested in it. Just got to keep the cost down. Sorry? The cost of abortions, the brain and the cells. Does it cause abortions? I apologize, I couldn't hear very well here. Question one, though, the mold and the cod, first and foremost, brain and the cells. Yes, there are a few of those. Beef cows are by far the most sensitive out of cattle, the most sensitive to mycotoxins. That's probably one of the first, unfortunately one of the first symptoms of it. Finishing cattle are probably the least susceptible animal out there, followed by finishing swine, but breeding stock is very susceptible. There are many of those mycotoxins, depends on which one it is and how potent it is. And the problem is to see there's a suite of probably 20 different mycotoxins, and each one of them has a different concentration before it causes some of those challenges. I don't have all that information on the top of my head. I apologize, but a few of them are quite potent and very instrumental in causing abortions or fetal problems. But like I said, we've had a lot of folks do this, and no one's told me it's been a problem for them. And my experience is, is anything I tell people to do, and then if they go out and they try it and they have any problem at all, I'm the first one to hear about it. So I'm saying that, not jokingly, I'm saying that that's a good thing and I've not heard of any problems. It's always something to check, especially if you're feeding it the breeding stock. Gail in here, that was the last presentation with us, Gail in there.