 Good morning everyone. Like she said, I'm Wade Pickenpaw and I'm the research specialist here at the Carrington Research Extension Center. Last summer we conducted a research project that looked at the impacts of added roughage on feedlot performance, digestibility and ruminal characteristics on steers-fed wheat-based diets. So we decided to do this project as we received a lot of phone calls from producers asking what they can do with an excess of low-quality wheat. So wheat can be used as an alternative grain in a feedlot diet. However, it is more rapidly fermentable than corn, so it can increase the risk of digestive disorders. To offset these disorders, cattle that are fed high grain diets can have an additional roughage in their diet to offset those disorders. It increases the amount of buffers that are entering the rumen, essentially increasing the ruminal pH. And in addition to additional roughage, feeding ethanol co-products such as distillers grains can also offset acidosis as it is a high protein and low starch feed. So the objective of this study was to evaluate the impacts of including additional roughage as well as 30% modified distillers grains with solubles in feedlot diets that include wheat. So our hypothesis was that increasing dietary roughage would actually decrease feedlot performance. And then we further hypothesized that increasing dietary roughage would reduce digestibility but increase ruminal pH. So for this experiment, there were two studies, the first one being the feedlot study. We utilized 72 feedlot steers that were randomly assigned to one of 12 pens and randomly assigned to a treatment. There were four treatments, the first one being 10% roughage, which was our control diet, a 12%, a 14%, and a 16% roughage diet. As wheat decreased across treatments, wheat or straw was replaced instead of the wheat. Study two was a metabolism study that utilized four ruminally and duodenally cannulated steers. And this diet was the treatment diets were the same for this study except silage was used instead of hay. So there were four periods in this trial and there were 14 days in each period. The first seven days were the adaptation period where they got accustomed to their new diet. And the second 14 days was used for collection period. Collections included duodenal collections, fecal samples, as well as ruminal fluid collection. And those samples helped us determine digestibility, fecal output, as well as ruminal pH and acid concentration. So in the feedlot portion of the study, we actually didn't find any difference in a feedlot performance with additional roughage in a wheat-based diet. In a metabolism study, additional roughage also did not affect dry matter intake or digestibility of dry matter, crude protein, or fiber. And as expected, ruminal pH increased with increasing roughage. And it also decreased the amount of propionate in the rumen. Propionate buildup can actually lead to is one of the factors that leads to acidosis. So given these results, we rejected our hypothesis that feedlot performance would decrease with increasing roughage. And we also failed to reject our hypothesis of ruminal pH increasing with additional dietary roughage. So a little bit of a recap. Our data indicated that roughage inclusion in wheat-based diets, including modified distiller's grains, increased ruminal pH without having an effect on feedlot performance. So this indicates that producers that are feeding wheat with combination of modified distiller's grains with solubles may not need to increase the additional increase roughage in the diet since we didn't see any acidosis in our cattle. However, more research should be done on lighter weight cattle that may be less accustomed or acclimated to high grain diets as the cattle that we received for this project was around a thousand pounds. So they might have been on higher grain diets for a longer period of time. So maybe the wheat didn't affect them as easily as lighter weight cattle would have been. So those are the results that we have found. So I'll take any questions that you guys might have now. Yep. When you increase the roughage, wouldn't that reduce your cost of feed? Yes, essentially. We would hope so. There's a trade-off. I mean, you don't think the performance is the same. Yep. But you increase the roughage, you're lowering your cost. Yes, absolutely. It's actually positive. Yep. So essentially, producers could do that and increase their roughage and still keep the same performance.