 One of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag, LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Likes, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations, Davis and County Ampliment, Scott Supplier, CropTech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis and County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota No-Tail Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont, so let's give them all a welcome round of applause. The first presentation is the president chair of the Soil Health Coalition, Doug Seek, he's from Selby, and Doug's got a lot of ideas that a lot of people think they're kind of off the wall and then all of a sudden a year later you're doing them also. So I'd like to introduce Doug Seek, please. Good morning. Good morning. Thanks for coming. Thanks for introducing me, Dan, that was nice. Yeah, we get to running around in these circles and we get to start doing things that are a little bit different. And Jim Garrish wrote one of the books he wrote was Kick the Hay Habit, and in there he talks about he said you're going to start doing some things a little different and he said you think your neighbors are going to run up to you, pat you on the back and tell you what a good job you did and he said that's not the way it works. He said you're not going to hear much. He says but if you watch in four or five years they're going to come up to you and tell you what they started doing and that's kind of the way that works and it's really cool. I get it. But I'm here to talk about livestock integration. Like Dan said, we're trying to get more cattle back on the land. It's all about the soil biology, right? And when we've got the livestock out on the land it stimulates the microbes. It stimulates all the bacteria in the soil but it stimulates all those microbes and it gets things rolling. And we're learning that the increases in organic matter are coming from those microbes. So livestock are part of the key to the tools that we're using to increase organic matter. Maybe I talk about the picture. That's not a very good picture but that's my place there. I'll give you a little bit of an idea of what the country is like where I am. This is one of my pastors but in the background Lowry's down here. So I'm north of Lowry about five or six miles, something like that. When I go in I listen to people do talks like these. They have these neat charts where they've shown their place with all their subdivision fences. I just thought I would be remiss if I didn't show pictures of the subdivision fences. So there you go. Those are 20 acre parcels and I do a rotation through that. We cut those with polywire, sometimes just do one-day moves and make that into a four-day parcel. This one down here we picked that up a couple years ago and I haven't cross-fenced that. And I don't know if I will. It's kind of nice to have a vacation pastor somewhere you can just kick him in and get out of there. This is some cropland that I planted back to grass over the years and we've subdivided that too. So I'll talk about this later but I've made a lot of changes. Some of them are working, some of them are a little bumpy but if you see something up there you want to talk about, track me down. Okay, livestock integration. I just ran into this here a couple months ago. This gal, Cynthia Cullenback, did some research and they wrote a paper. And in the paper the UNH scientists suggest that soil organic matter accumulates from inputs of dead microbial cells and microbial byproducts formed when the microbes eat plant roots and residues rather than from plants themselves as previously thought. In the past, scientists thought the best way to build soil organic matter was to slow down or inhibit decomposition using plants that soil microbes find difficult to decompose. The idea was that the undecomposed plant parts would gradually become soil organic matter especially if the soil microbial community was inactive. And that's what I thought too. And I ran into two different schools of thought. When I started going to HMR holistic schools they were talking about okay let's get the cattle bunched up and let's get them to step that grass and that plant residue down on the soil so that the microbes can get at it and chew it up and spit it out and whatever turned it into plant food. And then I'd get around a more university setting and they argued more that organic matter was increased by the roots dying off in the soil. Well it turns out they're both right. But maybe the HMR guys are more right. It looks like the microbes are playing a pretty key role. So whatever I can do to enhance the microbes is probably going to help me increase my organic matter in the soil. That's the whole theory behind planting the cover crops too right. To get that diverse cover crop mix out there you create an environment down there that the microbes thrive in. I didn't know that that was what we needed to do to increase organic matter. I just knew that it worked pretty well. So anyway now we've got a little research to kind of back that up. We'll see. So microbes make the organic matter, livestock integration, increased organic matter equals increased production. One cow's urine contributes 112 to 117 pounds of nitrogen, a third of a pound a day. 90% of that's returned to the land and maybe 90% is a little high. Maybe 60 or 70% of that stays there for them. But if you have them in the feedlot you've got to push them in or out, maybe compost them, maybe you don't but you haul it back out, you spread it. It sounds like 5 to 8% of that nitrogen gets back in the soil. So getting the livestock out of the land is perhaps a more efficient way to cycle that nitrogen and get it back in the soil. Can everybody hear me okay? I talk fast and I mumble. If you can't hear me wave your hand or something. Thanks Dan. Livestock integration, the low hanging fruit is crop residue grazing right. Corn stock grazing is the big one. How much is out there? How many pounds of corn stover is out there? How much can I graze? 1400 pound bale of hay, well maybe I should answer that. The bottom line, there are just as many pounds of corn stover as there are pounds of corn grain. So for round numbers, if you've got 100 bushel of corn, you've got 5600 pounds of corn grain, you've also got 5600 pounds of corn stover. It's a good rule of thumb, you'll see it all over the place. So a 1400 pound bale of hay at $80 a ton is $56. 1400 pounds of stocks, $21. Now 1400 pounds out of a 100 bushel of corn, is that a third of 5600? I mean you're leaving a lot of residue out there. $21 a month, if you've grazed that much off, you save 35 a month, 3500 per every 100 cows. So you've got at least 100 bushel of corn just for a nice reference point. You've got 5600 pounds out there. If all you do is take off 1400 pounds, enough for a cow for one month, you've fed that cow, you've used the livestock integration, you've made some money off of it, and you've left plenty of residue out there. How to make that work, you've got to train the cows a little bit. Your best bet on training cows is to spend as much money as you can on a good fencer. But you'll probably do like most of us do. First you buy the low priced one, then you buy the medium priced one, and then you buy the high priced one. And everybody says buy the high priced one first, and I don't know, hardly anybody does. But I've had problems with vegetation on the fence, and when I went from the $300 fencer to the $1400 fencer, I didn't have any more problems with that. So if you can, buy the good one right away. If you need to train them during the winter to snow, once you get a snow pack out there, they don't ground to the soil very well. So the cows stay in more out of respect for the fence than they do out of the actual shock they're getting. So what do you do? Train them by going up by your water tank, take a run of electric fence, I don't know, 50 feet or something like that, hook that to just one energizer. Make that the only fence that energizer is running. Run, the top wire is the hot, the bottom wire is the ground, and when those cows are jostling around, get it close enough so they bump into that once in a while. Okay, I'll train them. Okay, even if there's snow on the ground, you'll get them trained. Challenges, the weather, the portable windbreaks, you know, use what you got, old horse trailers, semi trailers. Water, we've learned a lot from the folks up in Canada about things that we can do to make this cattle deal work a lot cheaper and a lot more efficiently than we used to. And we've learned from them that we don't really need to water those cows during the winter if we've got halfway decent snow out there. If I've got a quarter of corn stalks that doesn't have water on it, I'll just wait on it until we get some snow and I'll graze it anyway. The cows are winers, they'll wind the first couple of days. If you turn them out and you come and check them the next day, they're going to come running toward you and try to tell you they're dying. But by about the third day, they start eating snow just fine and they remember it a long time. They teach their cows to do it and it goes down the line. Neil Dennis out of Canada said, you got to be a little careful if you have two cold snaps in a row. And I don't understand what he's talking about there exactly. I know that that's a dangerous place. I wonder if it has to do with dehydration and I don't know. But anyway, if you've got two cold snaps in a row, it's a little trickier. But I've run cows for a month out on different pieces of corn, ground or crop or as they do without water. And they come off it doing just fine. In fact, I brought one set off a quarter one time. They'd been there two weeks, first time I'd done it. And if we let them across the road, they could go a half mile home and get a drink. And they knew how to do that. They'd done that a lot of times. And right over here was another cornfield to graze. And I opened the gate and I got them across the road and then just to mess with them, I let them toward the cornfield a little bit. And they ran past me to get to the cornfield rather than to go home and get a drink. So it looked to me like they were doing just fine. I use a lot of poly wire fence. Things that make that work really well. The O'Brien original posts. You'll see some of those in here. I'll point them out when we get to them. But if you're going to use plastic step-in posts, you want to get the right kind. Because you want to make this easy and you don't want to cuss about it. The first time I used plastic posts, I picked some of those up at Runnings. The big bulky things with a spike like that on the bottom. Terrible. They were my first experience with plastic and I said, I'm not using those anymore. Then I listened to Jim Garrish talk and he talked about what kind of posts to use and it makes a heck of a difference. You can push these O'Brien originals into frozen ground. You'll look for a plant rudder or something and work. It's just amazing. But you got to get the O'Brien originals. I get them from Ken Cove. Compaction, move the cows every five days. Split your quarter of corn stalks into 30-acre parcels. Move those cows across them. Okay, but I'm really here to talk about bale grazing. The guys up in North Dakota and Canada taught us about bale grazing too. And I'm skeptical. It takes a while to get me sold on something. When you get me sold, I'll go gung-ho, but it takes a while to get me sold. I heard guys like Gabe Brown and Kenny Miller and the gang up there talking about bale grazing and turning the cows into a week's worth or ten days at a time. And I thought, yeah, I don't know if I'd buy that. Then I ran into one of their events. I ran into a guy out of Canada. We were visiting at a table and he said, I turned him into a month's worth at a time. I thought, well, if you could do it for a month, I could probably try it for three or four days. So I went home and I started experimenting with it a little bit and it seemed to work pretty well. So what I'll do is I'll put out the same amount of hay I'd normally feed. So if I'm feeding five bales a day or whatever, let's use round numbers. If I'm feeding 10 bales a day and I'm going to graze them for four days, I'll give them access to 40 bales. And when I'm really on my game, I'll set it up in the fall and I'll take this 15 acre parcel or whatever and I'll put rows of bales all the way. I'll build a checkerboard with maybe 300, 400 bales, something like that. What you're seeing right here, each of those rows has 17 bales in it. And I just give them two rows, I don't know, every three days or four days, however the mouth worked out. You need at least three bales or at least three days worth. So you have enough hay out there so all the cattle can get to the hay. If you're doing two days worth, then there's too much fighting and crowding. I heard a guy out of Canada talking about like 10 cows per bale when you're setting up. So that's another rule of thumb. But if you've got four days worth of feed out there, you've probably got enough feed so that they can all get to it. And that works pretty good for me as far as being comfortable with how much waste is going on just mentally. Of course, the better quality hay you use, the less residue will be left behind. Those you can see, some of them are set on end and some on the side. I think I had some hay that I'd bought that had net wrap on it. And I thought if I set it on end, I'd be able to just go out in the winter and slice that net wrap off and peel it off. Well, the net wrap goes around the end of the bale, doesn't it? So, swinging a mess. And I've just run into some research that says that you have more waste setting them on end anyway, so I'm probably going to just put them on the side. I use mostly that twine that's supposed to degrade in the sun. Of course, it doesn't, but it's supposed to. And I leave it on. They just dig through. Now, I'm not saying I'm going to keep doing that, but that's what I've been doing. If you do that, don't go out there and cut hay the next year. You'll find that a baler pickup is a really efficient tool for picking up twine. A lot of guys that do this use Cecil twine. And they don't worry about the twine too much and it just rots away. They'll work their way through the bales. They'll eat, sometimes they'll eat what you know to be the best ones first and work their way through. Sometimes they'll eat things you didn't think they'd eat first. Why are they eating that bale full of weeds before they're going to the alfalfa? They'll jump around. You can kind of put a couple marker bales in each row if you want. Put a bale all its straw or some kind of not so good hay. And you can kind of watch when they get to working on that bale, then maybe it's time to be thinking about moving them. But I pretty much do the math. If it's 10 bales a day and I put out 40 bales, I pretty much leave them four days. Then about the third day you go out and look and you see a lot of circles and you see a couple bales that still kind of look like bales. They'll lay on them. They'll dig through them. If you're really worried about making it efficient, you can come back again in about 60 days and graze it again and they'll dig through the stuff that they've urinated and defecated on and they'll get a little more of it. I just use polywire. You can see the polywire running along there. I use it if it's, if there's snow, I'm using it right now to bale graze some and we've gone, you know, the snow is that deep and they're staying in. The deer are a little bit of a problem. Not the local deer but the deer that migrate through. The locals kind of learn to deal with it. Okay, so when you bale graze, you get a pretty good bump in production in that area that you bale graze it. And I've been thinking about, well, why is that happening? You know, other than the obvious. But look at, this is one of the bale circles after things have thawed off. You can see that's about a foot thick and that's all snow underneath there with hay on top. And if you guys have been feeding, you've noticed that that hay right now it's insulating those piles of ice pretty good around the hay yard too. Well, the same thing's going on here. So it starts thawing and the snow melts off out here and everything's opening up and thawing off and it's like a damn cooler where that bale circle is. And when the stuff in that bale circle finally starts melting instead of running off down the creek it goes out and goes in. And you really get around the edges of those circles you really get some nice dark green grass and you can tell. Oh, that's an O'Brien original post there by the way. It's got a nice tang on the bottom. It's big enough to get your foot on pretty well. It's got about six or eight different choices for where to put your string and then it's got some clips on the other side too. But it's real easy to get the string on them. You can drive along with a four-wheeler and go like this and it's very efficient. Just another picture of that duff. Okay, so you end up with some circles out there where things don't grow back real well. But you can see there's a fair amount of variation. There's not much coming here. There will be next year. There's a little more coming in some of these. Some years that's not a problem at all. In some years I get a little more weed pressure in here. Canadian thistles do like those bear spots. So it's a trade-off. Cattle will eat Canadian thistles. If you get them back in the right way. Canadian thistles like 18 to 20% protein. Okay, so waste. There's been some comparison studies when he used a bale processor. Now this is from Gene Govan. I couldn't find the source he was talking about. But Gene was telling me that they did a research project where they put out tarps and they used a bale processor and they used college kids and they weighed and they did a lot of research to figure out what was going on. He said in that research it showed 18% loss from the bale processor, mostly from the leaves turning into dust. 13% in the ring feeders and maybe 12.5 bale grazing. More circles where you see things coming back. That's my sweetheart there. She keeps me going. She had a kidney cancer deal. Showed up right before Christmas. And so all of a sudden we don't know what our schedule is going to be for the next month. We don't know what we got to do, where we got to go. We were going to graze corn in January and February. And so we just switched it. We got the neighbors to come over and we set out a bunch of bales. We put about a month's worth of bales out and we just went to bale grazing. We gave them, I don't know, weeks worth at a time or something like that. We just got on the road. She's doing fine. They took her right kidney out. They said they got it all. They've done all kinds of scans and she's doing real well. But you can see it's coming back in the circles nicely there. It's when it first starts coming back. This was later, same field just up the line. This was later we got about an inch of rain. And they just pugged that up. That's an alfalfa wahee mix. And I thought, uh-oh. This is going to be bad. Notice the two trees in the background here and the post here and the location of the T post to the REA post. This is the same place just a little bit later. Maybe three weeks later. I don't know. It came back just fine. Alfalfa seems to like to be abused. I run lanes for them to go get drinking water and stuff and I think, oh no, they've killed it in the lane. No, it comes back. More regrowth. More of the O'Brien post. I don't know. This is about a month after we, two months after we bail grazed, I suppose. What forage was that? The green part. A wahee intermediate wheat grass and alfalfa. And if you look close, probably a Canadian thistle or two. Just for the protein content. It works better. Bail grazing works better on planted grasses than it does on native grasses, for me. When you use it on native grasses, you can go into a crested wheat grass situation or a Kentucky blue grass situation and you can suppress them a little bit and you can see the western wheat grass coming back in. So there's a tool to use on native grasses where there's an invader problem, but I have the best luck bail grazing on the tame grasses. Okay, look on the right side of this cow. See how that triangle is caved in in front of her hips there? And then this other red cow up here, it's all bulged out. When you're trying to figure out if your cows are full or not, because cows are liars. No matter what, I go out to move them and they can be standing in this deep of stuff and they're bellowing and crying. If you look at them on the left side and that stomach is pushed out, they're fine. The right side doesn't tell you a damn thing. Don't bother looking at the right side. You'll think they're starving and they're not. This is, you can see the regrowth where the bail grazing lines were. And I just did it on the south half of that field and you could ride across that field and you could tell right to the line, this is where we bail grazed and that's where we didn't. This is this year's bail grazing deal. I guess a couple hundred cows and their calves and I think we're giving them ten bales a day on that bunch. This is a Lakeland Ag Research Association. If you google that or just google bail grazing out of Canada, something like that, but they've got some interesting articles on that. They did the research too. Unrolled onto the snow, 12% waste. Processed onto the snow, 19%. Processed into a feed bunk, zero waste. So unrolling, about 12. Bail processor, about 19. Bail grazing, these are all bail grazing. Standing it on the side, putting it on the end, side end, side end, different mixtures. Average, putting it on the end is about eight and a half or nine. So you go out there and you look and you see that circle left and you think, oh my God, I'm losing, I'm wasting feed. And then you get to kicking at it and it's not very deep usually. Or if it is deep, usually what's left there is the stuff they weren't going to eat anyway. They would have eaten it, we can make them eat it, but does it have any nutrition in it? This is kind of a neat trick just for winding up string. You can get these deer spools or you can use a welding wire spool or an empty Gallagher fence spool. Take a couple of big washers and threaded rebar, run it through there, double nut it, tighten it down. And any kind of a pipe, stick the pipe on this end and hold it like this and run the drill with this end and you can wind up a quarter mile string in about, I don't know, two minutes. If you're going to do this, do whatever you can to make it easy so you keep doing it. Josh is going to talk about grazing unharvested corn so I'm going to buzz through this really quick. Terry Gompert told us that a cow will do just fine on 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of corn stocks per day. So you just do your allocations to figure that in. I give them a little alfalfa because I think they should have a little protein. A lot of people don't. You need a good fence. If you're going to graze unharvested corn, you need a good fence because they're going to be hungry. They're just eating 40 pounds and they're only eating 20. But I'm not going to go through this stuff because I don't want to move in on Josh's stuff, but that's what it looks like. I left 30 acres last year and I left 30 acres this year and I just cut it into checkerboards. Leave about 28 rows, combine about 6, 12, something like that. Leave 28, 6 or 12. I'll do some math thinking what I'm going to have there for cattle and then I'll go down the field with the combine and I'll combine perpendicular across the rows so I can have a nice pathway to run the string. That really helps when there's snow. This year, like I said, we had the health stuff. We got Mary a little bit healed up and then I went and got a colon scope and they found out that I had a tumor in my colon. It turned out to be precancerous, so that's good. But anyway, I had that taken out on Valentine's Day, nine days ago. We couldn't go out, we weren't set up to go graze the corn. We didn't have the time, we weren't around. So we went to plan B on grazing corn and I rigged up this gravity wagon and I put a slide and a rope on it and a spring. Can't see it very well, sorry, but it's just a slide with a spring and I just sit up in the pickup and drive it and I pull on the rope and I count to 25 and pull ahead and count to 25. If they can do it on 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of corn stalks, they can do this fine on 10 pounds of corn and 10 pounds of poor hay. They seem to be doing fine. I've still got the calves on them. I usually don't wean until March anyway. My neighbors have been so great about doing chores. A couple of them are learning about feeding corn. They're working into it pretty well. I think that's all I'll talk about. I've got other stuff. Extremely briefly, think about this. We're in cool season grass country and we're out there trying to graze these cool season grasses into the fall, into the late summer and if you're like me, you're whining about how I need more warm season grasses out there and you've already got this pasture. It's hard to shift the species, right? Well, you know, warm season, cool season is April, May, June, July. I got to thinking, why don't I kick those cows out there? April, May, June, July. Maybe I can stockpile and go March. I'll go on the grass, March, April, May, June and July. Then August, September and October, why don't I graze warm season cover crop mixes, sedan mixes. Then November, maybe do corn stocks. Then December and January, February, graze standing corn again. It works out to a little under 500 bucks for feeding that cow for a year if you do it like that. The 484 that I came up with was $3 corn and grazing unharvested corn. There wasn't any allowance in there for grazing corn stocks, which would be cheaper. With the corn stocks, maybe you'd be at 460 to take the cow for a year. You know, this whole haying deal, I figured it up one time because the radio wasn't working in the tractor. I had time to think. So I just ran through, how long does it take me to cut bale and stack, and I figured it's about 11 minutes per bale. You know, it's four and a half weeks just to put up a thousand bales of hay. Now my stuff's a little slower. You know, you guys have better equipment. You can probably do it faster. But the point is it takes a lot of time to put up all that hay. And maybe that's why I don't get to go fishing as much. Well, any questions? Yeah, I'm a slow reader. There, change. Let's look through your laundry there. Some of that stuff didn't work, some did, so... Okay, well, May-Cavin, that's really been working well. I don't know. There's just not much to it. I switched to lower birth weight bulls about the same time. That lets me leave the calves on the cow until March like this. Cows don't really need that greater nutrition until right before the cow. So I'll pull the calves off here pretty quick, and they've got a couple months to kind of put some powns back on before they... before they cow. Maybe I pulled a couple calves last year. I'm sure I did, but it's not like it used to be. I use smaller frame cattle now. Dallas Anderson has a good analogy. He said people don't brag about how big a ear of corn that they sell. He said they brag about how many powns they produce per acre. And Kit Ferrell, he's an interesting fellow. Anyway, he told a story one time or laid some things out for me. Anyway, the short version is that a semi-load of small calves brings you a bigger check than a semi-load of big calves. Think about that. 700 pound calves bring, let's say, $1.20, 500 pound calves bring $1.50. The truckload of small calves brings you more money. The cows eat the same amount of feed. Cow eats about 3% of its body weight. So 150 small cows eats the same amount of feed as 100 big cows. You sell the smaller calves more powns, or the same amount of powns. Assume you have the same amount of powns. But you get a bigger check for the small calves than you do for the big calves. Daily moves. Yeah, that works pretty good. I like the long rest periods. When I do the long rest periods I get to see grasses doing things I didn't see before. We get to see the big blue stem go to maturity and go to seed. I'm not saying it wasn't there before, but we'd graze it, it'd grow back and we'd graze it again. It goes to seed and we see the it's spreading. I've actually seen a little Indian grass in one pasture and I'm kind of excited about that. I'm going to cattle that have less milk. Heavier milking cows take more feed and if you live around my place you have to be kind of tough or you don't make it. I want that cow to milk enough to raise that calf as a supplement. I don't want it to be the calf's only source of feed. My primary concern is I want that cow to breed back. So okay, let's get enough milk to grow the calf but not enough to make the calf into a moose. I wean at 10 months. I don't know, that works for me. I just leave the calves on the cows until about March. If you're going to do that, keeping replacement heifers out of that I'm ending up with more opens and they told me if I did that I would have more opens. A lot of folks that do this will wait to breed their heifers when they're two-year-olds instead of one-year-old. So that's... But the other way looking at it is if you have 50% open the 50% that bred ought to be pretty tough animals with good fertility. So if you don't do... if you don't do any pampering if these calves just ran on the cow over the winter, feed them hay for a month or so before the grass greens up or two months and then kick them onto grass and then kick a bull in with them you haven't got any extra cost into it. So with your heifers or herd of grass cattle that you kicked a couple bulls in and ended up with some bred ones out of. There are parts of that that I don't like but... that's the part. It's hard for me to wrap my head around being okay with opens. Banding... I've done more banding than I have cutting the last couple of three, four, five years. For me, I like the banding because it's fast, it's easy. I use a California bander. It fits on your hand like a slingshot. Thing down a little piece of surgical cord and you just wrap it around and clip it and 15 seconds you're done. If you count to two to make sure you got both testicles it's a slam dunk. I need to talk to people in the feedlot so you can find out, okay are you still discounting for banded calves? Is that a problem? Blah, blah, blah. If you use a California bander it takes a couple months for the scrotums to fall off. The last, the fall calves we did the other day after I put the band on I slit the scrotum. They say then it only takes a few weeks because it dries out quicker. Stay tuned. I don't give much for shots. When we run them through and give them a do the banding in about February, January, February, January let's say we'll give them a seven-way with tetanus and that's all the calves get. Unless you buy my calves and you want a virus shot in we'll run them through and put viruses in. Marketing. I was having pretty good luck marketing them off the farm through Kim Ulmer for a few years now. And then that didn't work so well last year so we ended up going to the sale barn. But I very much prefer selling right off the place because I don't give up all the shrink. We pencil in two or three percent shrink instead of maybe six percent at the barn, right? I quit using pour-ons insecticides five, six, seven years ago. Probably closer to seven. Cow's still rubbed a little. Cow's rubbed a little when I used IvoMec too. I think I'm getting along okay. Ear tagging. I kind of quit ear tagging for a few years on the calves when they were born and I'm going to go back to that so I can do a little more effective culling. But I may not tag them when they're born. I may tag them when they're about this tall and just crowd them in a pan and just tag them that way. It's me, okay? If I get hurt tagging, the neighbors got to do things for me. And I'm getting too old to be rolled around by a cow. While back I started planting with my cropland acres to full season cover crops. We can talk more about that if you're interested later. I graze more the hay ground and I'm grazing standing corn and I'm cutting into the next speaker's time. Any other questions? When you figure out the number of bales per day, do you allow for the calves or are you just pulling like ten pounds per calf? I allow a little for the calves. Yeah. Same way with the corn. I'm feeding more than ten pounds per head. I think I'm going like 14 right now because I figure the calves are eating part of it. Have you ever had any problems with your float? No, I really have. Well, that's not true. What did that one die from? I'm not sure. I seem to have more cows die from getting stuck on their side than I think should. I don't know what the standard should be. We had one die the other day right after we turned them into a fresh bunch of bales. So maybe I was laying on a circle, maybe it got upside down. But I think the degree of fullness plays a role in them in getting up. So I don't know that I've got very many that just go out and die from bloat. But I think I've got some that eat like a pig and go lay somewhere where they can't get up. As far as grazing alfalfa, alfalfa grass mixes, I haven't had any trouble with that. I don't think cows like protein unless they need it. I'll kick them into an alfalfa grass mix and they'll just watch. They'll go out to eat the grass first and then they'll eat some of the alfalfa. But it's better to turn them in in the afternoon when there's no dew on the alfalfa. You get up into North Dakota and up into Canada they do lose cattle from grazing alfalfa mixes to bloat. And water is a key part of that. Maybe, I don't know, half? I don't know. We'd have to ask Dennis in our CS guy. Thank you guys.