 Hello, my name is Kevin Sadovic and I'm the Director of the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center. And today's topic we're going to talk about is a trial we're doing to compare winter cereal crops for spring grazing. In particular, we're going to look at forage production, livestock performance, and the economic cost behind using winter cereals for grazing purposes. With the popularity of cover crops the last really five to ten years, winter cereals have become popular for using as cover crops because they give you the opportunity to keep green tissue on the ground longer in the fall and earlier in the spring, keeping those roots active and keeping the soil health and the microbial population functioning at a proper level. So the winter cereals have become really popular with cover crops and have other opportunities as well in terms of the livestock sector. Winter cereals are traditionally seeded in mid-September, however you can see them as early as mid-May up to about late September and they do provide a really nice green lush cover for that fall time period to protect the soils. The beauty of them is they're green up early in the spring about two to four weeks earlier than our natural grasslands would and give you opportunity for green cover on those soils as well. They also give you the opportunity for livestock performance. The winter cereals tend to mature about three to four weeks earlier than our traditional spring seeded crops and so you have an opportunity to take a hay crop off in the early part of June. What we wanted to look at was the grazing side of it because it looks like there's tremendous opportunity to graze our winter cereals in the month of May into early June. And so when we look at the traditional winter cereals, winter rye has been the one used by most of our producers today and have been for probably the last 30 to 40 years. What we wanted to look at was some of the newer winter cereals including winter triticale and winter wheat as how do they compare with winter rye in terms of performance for livestock as well as production and looking at the economic returns of the three different varieties of winter cereals. So what we did is we planted these crops in the early part of September and we basically grew them in the fall, they grew them up in the spring and then we harvest them with heifers and we started grazing them about May 10 and they came off around June 8 to look at that spring grazing window of opportunity. What we did after that is we actually burned these down. The field behind me shows you where our winter cereals were at. We then sprayed them down with Roundup and seeded them with a cover crop and the cover crop that we can see now will become our second crop that we will also graze this year looking at dual purposes of our land to get more economic return from these producers. So what did we find? When we look at the winter rye and the winter triticale, our winter rye was our most productive of our winter cereals producing about two ton an acre by June 8 and so you can take it off as a hay crop by that time as well as grazing in that month of May. Our spring triticale was our second one at producing about 3,200 pounds an acre where our winter wheat, the Willow Creek variety we looked at is a much slower growing variety and really didn't grow aggressively till the month of June and so when we look at our performance numbers on here, the winter rye and winter triticale were really our only options for spring grazing. When you look at livestock performance once again our winter rye was our best performing winter cereal where our heifers produced almost a pound a day gain on our winter rye where our winter wheat and our winter triticale were really neutral. They had no loss or no gain over that 30 day period. When you look at the economic cost of these winter cereals, our winter rye again was our most economically viable option costing us about 65 cents to 85 cents a day to feed those heifers versus about a buck 60 on the winter wheat and about a buck 80 on the winter triticale. So we looked at these three varieties and in the end winter rye seems to be one of our best options and we'll repeat this trial again to see how it does over a two year period. So from that, thank you for your time.