 Again, Carl Hoppe here at the Carrington Research Extension Center, always appreciate the opportunity to visit about cattle, anytime, if you ever call me, you realize that's always the case too. So, we've had a dry lot cow herd here at Carrington for more years than I've been here obviously, and that's been 31. I'm always intrigued. I've got my colleague here, Verna Anderson, who's been managing, who is the researcher down here with his dry lot cow herd for decades, and he should probably be giving this talk about the history of where the dry lot cow herd came from and why we're here with this. So, I'll give my version of it, and Verna can provide the opportunity to change the story as time goes on, but early in the 70s, they decided to put a cow herd down here in this irrigation station. I'm always intrigued with that comment of irrigation station in North Dakota. Since I came here a long time ago, it always rained. Lots of rain. Why do we have irrigation? It rained every week an inch. It felt like Iowa where I came from, so it was wonderful living in North Dakota. And now we've turned into what we see as a drought, and I understand why we have irrigation out here in North Dakota. So, originally, they were going to put these cows out on irrigated pasture and Gray's irrigated pasture. The story I understand is the cattle trump too much grass into the ground, so let's harvest the feed, haul it to the feedlot, and get more productivity or more grass, more forage off of the field that way if we irrigate it and harvest it. Nowadays, we'd say, well, wait a minute, we need to rethink that idea because we could add a lot of organic matter to the soil and turn it back into the soil and improve things differently, but that's the history of why we have a dry lot cow herd. This herd has been dry lot for 40 plus years. Originally, it was a Hurford herd, crossbreeding came in. If you look at the cow's ear tags, and it's a red ear tag, that means it was sired by a red Angus. If it's a green ear tag, it was sired by a Simital, red Simital, so we've got a red Angus, red Simital cross. If there's a blue ear tag that might be out of South Devon, you might see some tiger stripes in the cows. That's from years and years ago of using Territay in the cow herd, but as you can see, these are fairly decent productive cows, just like most of our cow herds out there. And of course, they're usually friendly up the feedbuck until there's a whole bunch of people around here, then they obviously drift away like they normally do. Our cow herd is kind of unique. Well, we're a spring calving cow herd. So it's kind of like your own cow herd at home. They're dry lot, they're fed here in the winter time, except in the summer time, in May and June, they're not hauled to grass, they're kept here in feedlot. As you can see, we control the flies, the cattle are in good condition, the cattle look fine. There's really no difficult secret to it, other than you've got to provide a ration to the cattle that meets their nutrient needs. In other words, cows that have a lactational demand, which these are, you need a ration that's 10, 11, 12% crude protein, TDN, 67, 62, oh, I shouldn't say 67, more like a 58 to 62 TDN, depends if you want the cows to gain or not. My point here is if you ever go out in pasture and select what the cows are grazing, they're grazing a grass out there that's probably 14 to 16% protein if they have their druthers, and they'll select something soft that's probably a 62 TDN feed. So cattle select out on pasture really good feedsteed when they have the choice. In a drought like this, they eat whatever they can, lose some weight. Well, that's what will happen to the feed yard here, you've got to provide the adequate amount of feed in the feedbunk, so they maintain their weight, usually a half a pound or a pound a day gain maybe, at least maintain their weight. If they lose weight, then you will run into risk of having cows not breed back. Just like out on pasture with a drought. What's going to happen this fall? We might see a lot of open cows because of the lack of feed out there at this point. We'll just wait and see what happens. But in our cow herd, when you manage the feedbunk correctly, they'll perform quite well. Now remember when you're feeding the cows, you've got to provide some feed for the calves too. So having a slick feedbunk like this is kind of where we go, but there's a creep area over in the corner where the calves can go ahead and graze or eat feed, I shouldn't say graze, but eat. You could set up a grazing area if you had to feed a lot with a pasture nearby and let the calves escape out there and enjoy a little exercise in green grass. But normally a creep area is what's needed to provide some feed. Tim, I'm going to ask Tim what he fed cattle this morning. Let's see, if I remember right, corn at five pounds? What's at six pounds? Straw at six pounds. So rather than, we don't use hay here anymore. We use straw or stover and we put up a lot of straw. It's hard to find hay. So we've always traditionally just gone with the straw. Distiller's grains, right? Modified at 13 pounds of modified, that'd be about six pounds of dry. And then 30 pounds of corn silage that we harvest in the fall and use throughout the whole year. So that's a pretty simple ration for ingredients. You've got the corn silage for the energy and the corn for energy. You've got straw for some extra fiber. And you've got the distillers grains, which we probably get out of spirit wood or castleton as a protein source, but also doubles as an energy source too. And you'll notice that there's a round bale of straw sitting out in the feeder. That's kind of the buffer out there. Cows get bored when they're in dry lot. Rather than licking the hair off other cows, they're licking dirt off the ground. If you've got a round bale of something out there that's not really palatable, but definitely there for them to chew on if they really feel like it, they will and it prevents some bad habits from being developed in your cow herd. We do control the flies. Did you spray for those? Okay, periodically they're sprayed. Do you use wasps or anything like that? Not yet, probably have in the past. Okay, some places do, some places don't. Cattle look pretty happy, pretty content. So, we're basically a spring calving cow herd, your cow herd, but we had no grass to take them to. We've been doing that for years. For people that are flooded out, droughted out, or lost their pasture, whatever the case is, you don't have to sell cows if you don't have grass. You can dry lot them. A lot of different ways to feed them. We've talked to any in-extension Asian or nutritionist on how to feed them and they can certainly help you through what needs to be done. Nebraska takes a different view when it comes to dry lot cow production. Why do we calve in the spring? That's when there's mud, that's when there's cool temperatures. Why don't we calve in the summertime or maybe in the fall when it's easier? Why don't we calve in an off season so when these calves go to market, they hit a youthful age at the market high rather than a market low. So, if you're really into dry lot production, you realize that you don't have to be on a spring calving cow herd. You could switch them to fall or summer or winter, depending upon where your location is, a number of barns. That could certainly work for your dry lot too. A lot of different choices. Once the calves are weaned, they're of course putting their pens here and fed. The cows are going on a diet that's not going to make them gain weight, just maintain weight if they're in good condition. Just maintain if they're a little thin then add some extra energy to the ration. No big secret works really well. We provide a mineral mix as well for the cattle, we provide them with AD&E, depending upon if that's not in the ration. Balance for trace minerals as well. No big secret here. It works. The real problem though, and I have to give the disadvantages, bring it up trial here a few years ago, comparing to pasture and cows in the dry lot. Performance of the calves are the same. But when you start doing the math, our pasture prices have always been substantially cheaper. The one our feed prices are into a feed bunk. I didn't say the cows were unprofitable, I just said it was cheaper to feed when you have cheap grass. At that time you could afford to go up like $40, $45 an acre for grass before it became just as competitive to go into a feed bunk. Now this year, with double the feed prices, I don't even want to do the math to find out how expensive it might be to feed cows. So that's another challenge, and you can see why guys aren't feeding cattle as such and going out. I should stop here, but one more comment, and that is early weaning. We wean in about five months of age, or six months of age? Around the 20th of September. 20th of September, and it's a March calving cow herd. Usually I always figure they do calve. You know, most of us, if we wean in November, maybe December, we got a 200 day weaning date for these calves in dry lot, you can wean early because they're already trained to the feed bunk. How we usually go about six months before we wean. If you need to early wean, that's another whole story, but can easily be done in the feed yard. With that, if there's any questions, I'll take a couple or I'll give it back to Mary then. Yes, sir. Are the cows here year-round? Are the cows here year-round? Yes, they are. They might migrate from this pen to one of the pens up there during calving season, but then they come back. How do we breed the cows? We use bull. I think they have used AI over the years too. Did you bring the bull right into the pen here? Yeah, is he still in the pen? Yeah, he's back there. Yeah, he's still there. He's doing his job. He's always behind the herd, right? No, well, they're on the farm year-round, but we what, have a 45 day breeding period or up to 60? 45 day breeding period.