 Welcome, everyone. My name is Travis Hoffman. I serve as the North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota Extension Sheep Specialist. But as a diversified agriculturalist, I get the opportunity to moderate this evening's presentations. And this evening, we will be joined by Lisa Peterson and Dr. Jerry Stucca on CanEar System to stay in the ranch. And so I've known Lisa for a long time and I appreciate her background in the livestock and primarily beef cattle industry and the understanding of our system and how we can be able to make decisions and bind it holistically for our operations. And so Lisa grew up in Colorado and has been here and as a person and an employee of North Dakota State University System and serves as an extension livestock specialist and also as our North Dakota Beef Quality Assurance Coordinator. As you see, you have a poll in front of you of which of the following best describes you as rancher, consultant, extension researcher or other. And so if you kindly fill that out, that would be greatly appreciated. In regards to our questions, we would prefer that you chose the Q&A box so that we can organize those. There is a chat box open as well, but we'd prefer that the questions go in the Q&A so that we can keep them sorted out if you so aspire. There's also the opportunity to, again, we'll move through those and we'll have a little bit of break in between before we move to Dr. Jerry Stuccas. And Lisa, please help us learn how we can, how our system can sustain the ranch. The floor is yours. Well, good evening, beautiful people. Thank you all for joining us. I assume that a few more people will probably come in as we get going. And so as we get started tonight, I would first of all like to thank our extension livestock team who are with us tonight. That includes Dr. Janna Block. She's our livestock specialist at the Headinger Research Extension Center. And if you're not familiar with North Dakota, Headinger is in the very southwest corner of the state. Dr. Miranda Meehan, she is our, and I'm probably going to slot at Miranda, so I'm sorry, but our natural resource, you know, I call it not sustainability, but that endeavor of, in our animal science department, she also is on our livestock team. She currently serves as our leader. And then Dr. Travis Hoffman. So thank you all very much. It takes the team to make all of this work. And we're very fortunate to have such a good team. And I apologize to Miranda for slaughtering her title. I'm not a good titles person. So as we get started, if you come in, if you would vote on our poll, and then I'm going to end that here shortly as you come in. And I actually might ask Miranda, she's a better polling person than me. Miranda, can I keep that up and keep going, or does it, do I need to end it? So you can keep it up if you've answered it, and it's blocking your screen. You can just check the little X in the corner and it'll, and you can remove it from your site. Okay. We'll leave that up for a little bit. And maybe as people come in, they will answer that. So our team had a discussion here several weeks ago about reports of cows being open and calves being sick. And this has kind of been a continual problem for a few years. And so we had a discussion about where we should go with that if we should do anything. And we all agreed that we should probably somehow address that. And we talked about, you know, what we would do to do that. And so we came up with this webinar series, as you all probably know, meetings are particularly hard in this COVID environment. So we came up with a webinar series and then titled it, Can Your Systems Sustain the Ranch? And really the goal is, what is going on in our operations, both from a cattle standpoint, a management standpoint, and next week, Miranda, Kevin Sedevic and Jana will talk about the nutrition and the natural resource standpoint. So I'm going to lead us off tonight and talk a little bit about the genetics of sustainability in terms of ranch. And I need to give some credit to Dave Lawman and Rick Machin. I have to admit very few of these ideas are my own. I picked them up from them on a webinar that I did, that they did that I was a part of about eight months ago. So what traits are the most highly linked to profitability in a cow herd? And when you really look at it, and if you look through the literature, it's really winning rate. And winning rate is that percentage of cows that have been exposed that end up winning a calf the following year. And so if we want to look at that, in terms of 2020, that would be the number of calves that we have weaned or going to wean this fall, if we have a spring calving operation divided by the number of cows exposed last year. And this all ends up being a pretty holistic function of reproduction, genetics, nutrition, and then calving ease, cow condition and calf health. And Dr. Stuck and I will talk about how all these little pieces go together to make one big system, and hopefully a sustainable profitable system at the end of the day. So the value of reproduction, you know, if I ask producers, what is the goal for your operation? Very few of them tell me, well, my goal is to make the most money, or very few of them tell me that I'd like to get, you know, 95% of my cows bred in the breeding season in a defined breeding season. Most of them tell me my goal is to wean off the heaviest calves in the community. And, you know, Dr. Stuck and I talked, should that be 500 pounds, 600 pounds, 800 pounds, what should that number be? And at the end of the day, all those things are great, but if we don't have reproduction, we don't have any of them. And so if you do a little bit of a literature search on the value, the financial value of reproduction, you'll find that we have been discussing the financial value of reproduction clear back even into the early 1900s. And some of the more recent data says that reproductive efficiency is the most important factor impacting the economics of a cow-calf operation. Benton Glaze, my colleague at the University of Idaho, says that reproductive efficiency determines to a great extent the profitability of a beef cattle enterprise. Trinkel and Wilhelm actually wrote in Nature, the publication Nature, Nature magazine in 1977 that the economic value of reproduction for a cow-calf producer was reported to be five times greater than growth. Sheafalbine, who was at the time working for the American Gelvy Association, looking at a very vast set of Gelvy data said that the relative economic weight of reproduction, growth, and product traits, and when we look at product traits, we're talking about the carcass traits, is four to two to one. And so four in terms of reproduction, so reproduction, and when you look at this would be four times more important than the carcass traits and twice as important as the growth traits. And Burke-Titred is well known to say that reproduction is what the ranch has to sell in relation to the size of the cow herd. And Stan Beavers, who is the livestock economist with Texas A&M says in the grand scheme of things, just give me one more calf to sell. So let's look at the numbers of all of this. The impact of weaning rate or the percent weaned. And again, that is the percentage of calves that you weaned compared to the number of cows exposed in that breeding season. So if in 2019 we exposed 300 cows in the spring, summer of 2019 and then the fall of 2020, you weaned off 235 calves. And I'm going to try to get a laser up here so that we can see. We weaned off 235 calves. That ends up being a percent weaned of about 78%. So to get to that number, we started off with 300 cows at preg check time. We had 45 open. So that was 85% red, 15 open. We lost 10 sometimes in the some place in the gestational period between preg check and calving. So that ends up being 3% loss and we lost 10 sometime after calving. So if that was right after birth or one got struck by lightning or something like that. So that ends up being 3% too. So all told that ends up being about 78%. Now, if you look over here on the right hand side, we're going to keep the 3% that are lost gestationally and the 3% lost post calving the same. But we are going to have more bred cows. So we're going to end up with 30 open is compared to 45 on the left hand side. That equals 90% bread. And that means that we have 10% a loss or 10% open. That ends up being 83% wheat. So what difference does all that make? Does it really matter? So here's some economics of that. When we compare again on the left hand side that winning rate of 78% to the winning rate on the right hand side of 83%. And if you look at this chart across the top of our production costs and most of our data shows that our cow calf producers are between $650 and $850 a cow calf of cow cost a year. Now that's including a return to labor and management and depreciation. So that is across the top here. And then across the left hand side is that percent weaned. And so if you'll remember back here that percent weaned for the left hand side is 78%. It's 83% for the right hand side. As you look at the breakout of this it 78% weaned. The best that we can do for a breakeven is we might make it if our production cost is $700 per cow. That actually that breakeven is at $698, $699. So if calves selling last week across our North Dakota reported markets the average weight last week was $575 and they averaged 155, 155 and 77 cents per 100 weight. This is where that breakeven lies out is that this 156 down here. So that means that if your weaning rate is at 78% you have to have a cow production cost someplace less than $700 to breakeven. Now when we compare that over here to the winning rate of 83%. Again we have calves at 575 pounds. They brought 155, 77 per 100 last week. When we move up that weaning rate to 83% our breakeven now we can get clear up here almost to $750. That breakeven in cow cost is actually $743. So it makes a huge amount of difference in what we can have in terms of cost or what we have to I guess take off the table in terms of cost for breakeven. Dr. Stuckett did I explain that right? Yes, very well. Sorry Lisa, I'm on mute. That's okay. I just want to make sure that that made a little bit of sense. Dr. Stuckett and I talked about how to best explain this earlier today so it makes sense. So all these gray shaded boxes are where we are out of the profitability sector. We don't have a chance to make it profitability wise I guess in this scenario and so we need to be really cognizant I think of this winning rate and you know if we got this winning rate up to 93% we have a lot more options or if you can drop your your production costs down to $650 you have even more options and the best option is if you can combine them both. So all this is fine and dandy and I can hear my dad saying you know how in the world are you going to change this you smart extension you smart academic people and that is a great question because sometimes the numbers and on paper it makes it sound a lot easier to do and I'm sure some of you are pretty tired of hearing us talk about body condition scoring and I want to tell you this is the reason why we talk about body condition scoring so often and I'm not telling you that you need to look at every cow and say that she's this one's a three and that one's a four and this one's a three and oh maybe that one's a three and a half what I'd really encourage you to do is say okay these cows are less than a four these cows are maybe in the four to five range these cows are better than a six and if we're looking at heifers maybe we say these heifers are four and less these heifers are five and six and then up and the way that we encourage folks to do that is to look at the last two ribs if you can see these last two ribs that means that your cows or your heifers are in a body condition score of less than five if you can't see those last two ribs they're greater than a five and that's a such a great place to start and then if you can see that spine or feel that spine they're less than or equal to a three and then the last step here is to look at the thorough and I learned that from the dairy folks that's the shape between the hooks and the pins and so if that shape gets into a strong V like I'm showing here that's a three but if these end up being in a U shape and the flatter they become you become higher in a body condition score so when we talk about body condition score this is the reason why we really push it and why we encourage producers to manage for it so this is some data that came out of the padlock ranch it was reported by churny in 1995 and it looked eight years nine years of data at the padlock ranch in Wyoming and so what they did was that they looked at cattle that were less than a body condition score three all the way to greater than a six at weaning time and then they compared that to the pregnancy rate for spring calving cows and so you can see that if those cows were less than a three at weaning time they're about 76 percent all the way you make a big jump from a less than a three to a four and then another big jump between a four and a five so what this tells us is even as cows gain some condition through the summer we have a better chance for getting those cows pregnant the next year this data looks at the effect of body condition scores on a calving on serum immunoglobulin levels and the goal of this of IgG's and passive transfer isn't that they need to hit a certain level it's one of these things that we need to get as much of that IgG and passive transfer in those calves as we can get and so when you see that you're down here at a body condition score three or at about 2000 but if you can move your cows clear up to a six you end up moving them clear up to about 2300 and that's a great thing that's one of the things that our team sees at calving time is that these thinner cows tend to not only only not rebreat but they also have sicker calves and so here's another good reason to have your cows in good rig so at least a five for a mature cow and a six for first calf heifers at calving time now I'm going to use this data set and the data that comes with it for the next couple of slides so this is from data from Oklahoma State Glenn Salk published this in 1986 and it looked at the pregnancy rate at calving uh excuse me the effect of body condition score at calving time on the next breeding season or the upcoming breeding season and so those cows that weren't a body condition score for calving when they needed to get rebred in the next two months only half of them did when they moved that body condition score up to a five they take a huge jump a 31% jump in pregnancy rate and so you know I think it's a pretty good jump from a five to a six but to get from a six to a seven you don't gain as much now one of the things that I would say just as my own opinion is that in our uh North Dakota climate northern climates I think we gain we're better off to have our cows closer to a seven than a four and so if that meant that you gave your cows a little more nutrition and you're on the bubble of a six to a seven I would be personally happier with that than being down here closer to the four and that's just my own opinion I think it gives the more cushion to deal with our our tougher winter environment so as we look at this data from the left and its impact on improvement and conception rate and then increased revenue per cow you can see that when we go from a body condition score four to five at calving we end up increasing uh conception 31% and that increases our revenue per cow in the herd 262 dollars if we go from a five to a six we increase that uh conception seven percent and we increase that revenue about 60 dollars when we go from a six to a seven you have that small gain a two percent but even that two percent gain is worth 17 dollars and so when we put all that together cumulatively from a four to a seven we increase that uh conception rate 40 percent and we increase the revenue per cow 338 dollars so to put that in perspective if you have a hundred cows you've increased that revenue between 33,000 and 34,000 dollars and so I think it's well worth our time and effort and money to think about adding that condition into our cows so when we talk about cow her genetics and profitability I think it's very tough to measure that kinematic impact of our profitability traits and when I look at most of those um that are tough to measure they include milk energy reproduction and flushing ability and the reason why is that our management and our environment have huge effects there's lots of synergies within that I think that if you looked at all those synergies that would look like a balled up bunch of net wrap it's hard to measure what and how a cow eats on the range I think if Miranda could figure that part out and how to measure it Miranda would make a million dollars in research and that milk EPDs are estimates of the impact of daughter's milk on the production of a sire's grand progeny and so it's not pounds of milk produced by those daughters but the amount of weight that is attributed to milk from the dam and and it's hard to measure the milk production of a beef cow most of us do not want milk cows and if we wanted to we'd be in the dairy business so when we look at measurements to describe reproduction the ones on the left are pretty easy to come to I call these pure reproduction factors so days to puberty so we could sit out there and watch our heifers to the first time that they cycle services for conception that's a this is a big one in the dairy business because those dairy cows have lots of reproduction issues age at first calving we take it for granted that here in the US our our heifers are going to have it two years of age but in South America it's pretty typical for those heifers to have it three to four years phage the average calving interval so do they have every year on the year or some years they calves you know 60 days later and then they catch up what's that look like and then the average postpartum interval on the right hand side we can look at reproduction factors in a systems approach and so the ones that I have been talking about calves weaned per cow exposed the weaning rate these in yellow are metrics that concern me a little bit and if they're metrics that you use that's great I'm not saying you shouldn't use them but here's why they bother me a little bit is because they look at pounds weaned and when we add in pounds weaned per acres grazed per cow exposed per pound of cow exposed all those kind of things we are taking into account some level of milk and I think when we start looking at trying to wean more pounds off of smaller cows something that comes into that is what I call the milk creep and that's adding milk into a cow and letting herself really become maybe pretty tough and conditioned because of it so it is said that you can't manage what you don't or can't measure and so we use EPDs to maybe try to help us measure some of these reproductive effects so I'm going to start out and talking about some EPDs here related to calving these so if you'll remember that the metrics in in that weaning rate include live calves that we have weaned off and pregnancy rate those are the two big ones and so I'm going to look at the first ones of these weaning off and a live calves so the first is calving yeast and our calving yeast EPDs predict the percentage of calves that will be born unassisted these are I guess relatively new and when I say relatively new they've probably been in our breed EPD profiles for 15 years or so we consider them to be a better predictor of calving yeast than birth weight and that's because a cow can have a hundred pound snake but she can't have a hundred pound basketball and so calving yeast direct predicts the percentage of a sire's calves that will be born unassisted now calving yeast maternal predicts the percentage of a sire's daughters who will have an assistant so it's important to remember that one of these is their calves themselves and the other one is their daughters and birth weight predicts the difference in weight of a sire's calves so some examples of these when we look at calving yeast direct these are two bulls that I pulled out of a select sire's catalog the first of those bulls has a calving yeast direct of 10 the second has a calving yeast direct of 18 that's a difference of eight or negative eight and so comparatively a higher number means more calving yeast and I know that that's counterintuitive but you have to remember that that's a probability or a percentage not actual pounds and so bull ones should sire calves that are eight percent less likely to be born unassisted than bull two or if you want to look at it on the flip side bull two should sire calves that are eight percent more likely to be born unassisted than bull one and if you're in a place that has limited labor maybe you have some smaller framed cattle things like that calving yeast direct is probably pretty important to you now on the other side is calving yeast maternal so calving yeast maternal again is comparatively uh comparatively speaking a higher number means the daughters have more calving so when we compare these two bulls again bull one has a calving yeast maternal of plus 10 bull two has a calving yeast maternal of plus 18 that means that when you compare those two sires bull one should sire daughters who are eight percent less likely to have their first calf unassisted so eight percent of those when you compare these two you're going to have to pull calves uh when they're um out of eight percent more of the daughters of bull one than bull two if you look at uh bull two his daughters uh he should sire daughters who are eight percent more likely to have their first calf unassisted and so if i'm uh calving out a bunch of first calf heifers this is pretty important to me one of the things to know though is the calving yeast maternal and calving yeast direct are inversely related uh birth weight so this looks at just sire birth weights of calves if we look at bull one here he has a plus one bull two has a minus four point five and these are in pounds so the difference there is five point five pounds and we would say that generally smaller birth weights are equal to less assisted births but again remember uh uh cow can have a hundred pound snake that you can't have a hundred pound basketball so uh bull ones calves should weigh five and a half pounds more at birth than bull twos calves or on the flip side bull twos calves should weigh five and a half pounds less so some relationships with calving yeast uh e pd so as i had said earlier calving yeast direct is generally inversely related to calving yeast maternal uh if you look at uh big time calving yeast direct leader bulls they're usually pretty narrow made and narrow in the front oftentimes leads narrow in the back and so uh when i talked to hers that have had some calving problems and they've been using calving yeast bulls for lots of generations on top of each other um i oftentimes see that their calving yeast maternal in terms of their sires uh gets to be pretty negative when you compare calving yeast direct to the growth traits those again are typically inversely related now i have some asterisks up here and that comes down here uh to the curve bender genetics and those typically are made up of short gestation length genetics uh in terms of uh not only birth weight but also calving yeast direct birth weight is typically directly related to the growth traits so as you see weaning weight yearling weight go up so does birth weight and calving yeast maternal uh does show some evidence of being proportional to those growth traits as well although that's not a high correlation so let's switch gears here and talk a little bit about body condition um that's a function of the amount of energy intake a cow needs versus the amount of energy that she spends so for a cow to gain condition her energy intake needs to exceed her energy output uh jana gave me this slide and i really love this slide so priorities for energy use i can remember my grandpa telling me a cow will milk herself out of production and what he was saying is is that a cow that is in lactation she will milk before she adds energy reserves before she cycles and before she stores any excess energy and so this is one of the reasons why we focus a lot on milk production in terms of priorities for energy use milk is an expensive trait and so many of you have probably seen this graph before and so on the left hand side down here at one month after calving uh to two months is when we hit milk uh peak milk production and then that tapers off at weaning about seven months after calving and then we start needing more energy to take care of that calf that's growing inside of that cow and so guess what when we're wanting to rebreat those cows this is just about at the time that we're at peak lactation so i put together a list of what i would consider to be EPDs that are related to body condition now remember this is a tangled up jumbled uh ball of net wrap in terms of synergies and so uh the first of these is milk and as i prefaced earlier milk does not predict the amount of milk that a cow will produce serve her dog uh a heifer will produce but it predicts the amount of growth that a calf will get from that daughter's milk and mothering ability and so this really confounds the ability to determine how much energy or how much um nutrition milk is taking in our herd if we just knew that like on the dairy side that a cow is producing 80 pounds of milk a day it would be pretty easy for us to come up and say okay she's going to need this much more energy but when we don't really have that metric in the beef cattle side of our business that becomes pretty tough now doctors doctor remind me at oklahoma state their average registered angus cow today is producing what 20 pounds of milk uh yeah Dave lawman did uh looked at cows in 1998 and looked at it more recently and they went from 20 pounds to 30 pounds basically 10 pound increase in terms of milk production and they actually did milk the cows yeah so anybody who's ever had to milk a beef cow can imagine how fun that research project was but you can see how we have increased that amount of milk production in our beef cows so when we look at milky pds for example and we compare these two bulls and it's a bull one has 35 uh milky pd bull two has 20 uh that difference is 15 and so what that means is that the calves that are born to bull ones daughters should weigh 15 pounds more weenie than those that are uh born to the daughters of bull two and again this is uh an estimated weight from that milk production from the cow but it's not her actual milk production mature weight uh is expressed in pounds this is one of the e pds in the angus profile um i can't i think herford also has this in their e pd profile it's expressed in pounds and it is a predictor of the difference in mature weight of daughters of a sire in mature height e pd again i believe uh it is in the angus profile and i believe also the herford profile is expressed in terms of inches so we would look at this in terms of frame size and it's a predictor of the differences in mature heights of daughters of a sire so uh mature weight it uses an example bull one has a mature weight of 36 uh bull two has a mature weight e pd of 18 the difference is uh 18 pounds so the daughter sired by bull one would weigh 18 pounds more at maturity than those sired by bull two and on the inverse side the daughter sired by bull two would weigh 18 pounds less at maturity than those sired by bull one so you can see that if you were running 500 pounds or 500 cows for example um that would be a pretty significant difference in the amount of weight of cows that you would potentially be feeding uh in the winter in a feeding situation or grazing in the summer in a grazing situation mature height uh the daughters that are sired by bull one would be seven tenths of an inch taller at maturity than those sired by bull two and when we look at those numbers for those two bulls uh bull one is uh point two plus point two bull two is a negative point five so that difference again is about three fours of an inch or the daughters that are sired by bull two would be about three fours of an inch shorter than those sired by bull one um now a really interesting e pd to me and this comes out of the the angus association profile i um wonder if they are far along and for far along enough and it's uh development and analysis to have it really accurate but i i look forward to watching this is the cow energy value or dollars e in and it's expressed in dollars savings per cow per year and it assesses the differences in cow energy requirements as expected dollar savings is between two sires so a larger value in this is favorable when comparing two animals and the components for their dollars in include lactation energy requirements and energy costs associated with differences in mature cow size so this is a e pd slash index that takes into account uh lactation or milk and uh cow size so when we look at uh dollars in uh bull one has a minus 11 uh bull two has zero again we would look at this uh more positive number is taking less dollars and that difference is 11 and so the dire the daughter sired by bull one would cost 11 dollars more to feed in terms of energy than those sired by bull two or the flip side is the daughter sired by bull two would cost 11 dollars less to feed and if you look at this on a herd basis again if you had 500 cows um that can end up being a pretty significant amount of savings over the long haul so some strategies to optimize production manage milk generally our natural resources have not cannot keep up with increases in our milk production for most of our breeds uh watch for that hidden what i call milk creep and so even if we're think we're selecting against increases in milk production sometimes they can still sneak in in terms of increased weaning weight uh marbling is actually pretty highly correlated to milk and mature weight i would encourage producers to optimize weaning in your weaning yearling and mature weights bigger is not always better and one of the things that Dave Lawman talks a lot about is that our milk production keeps going up our cow size keeps going up our carcass weights keep going up but our weaning weights on the commercial side of our business have stayed flat for about 15 years and so have we hit a point in our commercial cow herds that we are increasing the amount of milk at such a level that our natural resources can't keep that milk going and so our calves have hit hit really their top level at where we can be in terms of weaning weight um i don't know the answer and i think it's a really uh interesting research um thing to look at and Dave is really doing that and so i look forward to that be aware of calving these both direct and maternal i talked a little bit about that um it's again don't single trade select for just calving these direct and i know some operations that do that yes we want an alive calf but we also still want to have a cow that can have on our own select replacement females from your oldest cows who meet your uh confirmation targets and i know that this is a little bit different than some other academics and and breeders and breed organizations tell you to do they tell you to select your replacements from your youngest females but we know that the oldest cows in our operation if we have a strong culling uh practice are there for a reason and they're there because they can function really well in our environment and under our management and likewise buy your bulls from people who run cows in a similar fashion in a similar environment than you do that you do um i think that's a good way to build upon that now's a great time to add condition to spring calving cows i think janin will talk about that next week and a live calf and a pregnant cow are worth a lot and i hope our data has shown that my quote and i actually this is what i wanted to call our series and i think my cohorts thought maybe i was a little bit too terse but you can't starve profit into a cow and you can't milk it out of them i think the data has shown this but you can match your resources to your cattle and your management and be exceptionally profitable and uh sustainable and my final slide comes from tessa osterbauer tessa keller uh she's our county agent in grant county in north dakota and she gave me this slide we did a bqa meeting last monday and she had this slide in her presentation and i just love this slide in fact i i think a lot of it and it says long term decisions long term impacts so if we bought bulls in 2020 and we bred our first females this summer uh their first calves the first calves out of those bulls will be born uh in 2021 the first daughters of those calves will be bred in 2022 and they will have for the first time in 2023 if we keep that bull for five years his last calves will be born in 2025 and his first daughters are going to hit peak lactations so someplace between five and eight years of age in 2028 now let's think about this in 2035 at 15 years from now he still can have 10 year old cows in your herd and so is that the impact you want of your bull or do you want those cows to be culled out somewhere around 2028 2029 i'm hoping that we have the genetics built into our herd to allow us to have a lot of 10 year old cows so with that dr stucca dr jerry stucca joins us from a prominent career as a veterinarian and has had a background at spending some time in uh fizer animal health and we're lucky to have him join us here at north dakota state university and help with our stewardship approach and again kind of fits his talent levels and we appreciate uh jerry for uh kind of shifting the transition on how you can sustain the cattle in your ranch go ahead jerry yeah thanks travis i hope everyone can see me it's good to be with you you know there's some advantages to these zoom meetings that means that no none of us has to be on the road but the disadvantage is that we don't really get to see one another which is a pretty big disadvantage but someday i think we'll uh we'll get this thing figured out and we'll be able to to travel and interact and have good fellowship again so anyway thanks for for you all being on one of my good colleagues and good friends i see is on dr mark helton and good to have him on as well because a lot of these things are of interest to him and interest to all the others on that are on this program one of the things that uh lisa forgot to mention is one of our teammates carl hoppy who's not on here but he's with us too we have a small group uh but i hope it i hope and believe strongly that it's a very effective group so and uh i'm just going to talk about some things related to some of these low pregnancy and weaning rates and perhaps finding answer but it's all under this umbrella of kenya system sustained the ranch and and this has been a particular interest of mine and some of my other colleague veterinarians including dr hilton we've kind of formed a little group called veterinarians for the advancement of systems thinking and so it's been a a real focus of mine and of others for some time and so i hope you enjoy the what we have to offer and and i hope there's some maybe some pearls in here that you can take home with you and especially if you've been in one of those herds that had have had some issues with low pregnancy and weaning rates uh this year or perhaps even in past years i uh i'm going to lead off with just a little bit of reiterating what lisa was talking about and i grabbed an old animal science textbook actually beef cattle seventh edition al newman and i had a had a chapter in there from larry cundiff and keith gregory who were longtime employees at the meat animal research center and they said in that paragraph no single factor in commercial calf calf operation is greater bearing on production costs and percentage calf crop and of course lisa kind of showed that you know we could if you go to bull sales or if you're just involved in the seed stock or even even if as a commercial producer and looking at bull catalogs the number of e pd's has uh exponentially grown and sometimes it's confusing maybe as a commercial cattleman all we need is just one e pd and that's related to protect greg rates or weaning rates maybe we get too many in it and it confuses us and sometimes it leads us down a path that that is causing us more harm than actual good i want to i'm going to take off and some of the things lisa was saying as well and so i look at this stewardship business and look at as a beef as a business so basically we know that 50 to 70 percent of the cost of keeping a cow is feeding pasture can be from 700 to 900 dollars per cow per year and up here because we feed more harvested forages we have to feed for greater months of the year although we're trying to improve that as well with many different other options but that cow cost is going to be somewhere between 700 or 900 dollars a year i know other parts of the country can do it for less but this is kind of where we are so the income side of that thing those live calves to sell and it's not that i don't care what they want what they weigh i do but if i have a live calf to sell and he weighs 500 pounds and a live calf to sell that weighs 650 pounds they still have value so that live calf as a percent of cows exposed is a big deal in terms of the income and unit cost of production we also sell market cows and bulls and some use live calves per acre some use pounds wean or pounds of calf per acre some measurement of income is always important to kind of keep us on task and have some indication that we're moving in the right direction the subtractors from the income from income are these those open cows in other words those that fail to conceive no i'll admit that we end up in most cases selling those cows but still that means that there's fewer calves to sell we have some that have early embryonic loss some we have a stillbirth some we have as weak calves some abortions and then there's disease as well that contributes to calf death loss can be scours can be summer pneumonia's we can have pink eye and foot rot treatments and sometimes that carries over even in the post-winning period in which we have some calves that may survive may need treatment and even some death loss at that point i just did a quick grab up so north to go to farm business management data from 2019 and i think it's a i think it's wise to just look at this a little bit let me back up i was going to try and magnify that just a little bit and now i can find my little icons for magnifying i hope you can see this because i'm just going to look at that left hand column there or the that column of beef cow calf average per cow they had 12 farms the average number of cows on on those 12 farms was essentially 300 they had a really good pregnancy percentage of 95.7 percent that's pretty high a pregnancy loss percentage of somewhere around 1.8 percent they call 12.4 percent now maybe they call the opens but i suppose there's always some of those cows that have a little attitude some utter and feet problems some feet problems some elderly ones that it's time to go so their calving percentage was about 94 percent the weaning percentage ended up to be about 90.5 percent and somehow the death loss doesn't quite add up but calf death loss was about 4.1 percent they lost some cows as well so in the end what an important number to look at is not just average weaning rate but pounds ween per exposed female 192 in this case and i'm not sure i think there's some things left out on this particular business management but their feed costs just the average feed cost per year is 349 dollars so if we did the math on that then you're gonna you're gonna end up with total cost somewhere in that 700 dollar range pretty quick so i like to look at it this way i do this for brd for calf health and productivity but i'll also put this together for cow for cow reproduction productivity and health you see i think most of us understand that there's a relationship of some of these management factors some of which we can control more than others but a relationship of these management factors to cow reproduction productivity and health and i think these are and this maybe isn't all inclusive maybe there's some others that i've left out but i think the cow lifetime productivity and a reproduction ability and our health is related maybe starts here at fetal programming what kind of environment did that calf that's going to become part of your herd see while it was in utero what kind of stress was the mother under what what kind of nutrition did she receive during gestation and then that that goes to the next step when that calf is born what kind of a mother was that cow to that calf that's going to be part of your herd and did that calf get up and nurse as quickly as it should have and obtain the immunity that it needed that it needed from that mother that we call um passive transfer uh lisa had a slide in here in in her in her section from kennody done a number of years ago looking at body condition score and and passive transfer and in that study at least that they showed that cows that are in a poor body condition score uh those calves actually absorbed less of that immunity we don't know that necessarily that's that's an issue of classroom quality in some case it can be classroom volume but there is somewhat of relationship with that body condition score and passive immunity as well and then where's our genetic selection pressure at least i did a good job of covering this as well is it for continual growth is it for more milk is it for marbling or maybe is it should there be more selection on some of those traits that we don't always think that are related to profitability like in the angus red angus associated maintenance energy or in the black angus association dollars energy or calving is your stability like i said before we have so many e pd's that it can actually be confusing but if we think about this systems approach there are some that have a greater impact on health and productivity and i'd like to think in terms of profitability as well i have another one in here called cool mingling and sometimes we treat new arrivals into a cow herd with somewhat of a passe response well we'll just dump those cows right in the cow herd and see and not even give a second thought talk about that a little bit later in terms of biosecurity and then another one two three four a fifth one is environment when do we care when's our weaning season do we have really early and which we need a lot more groceries to get that cow and that calf uh in shape for the breeding season do we wean at a time of the year when we have weather that's widely variable with a greater chance of increased precipitation and now in our weaning pens we have a lot of mud and poor pen conditions to deal with next one is nutrition and that relates to certainly the body conditions core this exposure can goes back a little bit to that co mingling and how we handle new entries into the herd we have a biosecurity plan do we have a vaccination protocol that we can follow and finally and for many of our producers and ourselves included is labor there's kind of a lack of labor in our part of the world uh even a warm body there's lack of warm bodies up here and then that's related camera related to both quantity and quality of labor just want to talk just a little bit about this uh systems reproduction program and again relates to the things that lisa was talking about where's your where's your selection pressure and i've used this slide many times but i i related to health and productivity and health and reproductivity selection of genetics to achieve high levels of maternal immunity are critical for managing to managing for health when i look at the goals that i think about in order to achieve this i want a cow that raises me a calf every year that's fertility that's uh preg rates that's weaning rates or so on and so forth for 12 to 14 years and this gets back to a statement that lisa talked about how about those older cows that have been in your herd for a long period of time and the cow every year those there's something special about those cows that you would like to propagate i want basically zero calving difficulty to do the birth weight and shape and that relates somewhat to labor lack of labor if if i'm a single individual and i'm trying to manage five to six hundred cows i really can't spend a whole lot of time worrying about whether even a first calf heifer or an adult cow is going to have trouble calving due to birth weight and shape i want optimum growth and optimum milk and i want sound confirmation now optimum growth and milk is going to be different depending on where we are in this country because the resource is different even even on our place here we have different pastures that that are better than others and so it doesn't necessarily have to be a huge geographical distance in order to realize that there are different optimums it can be optimum by pasture even on the same ranch i use this one this is on another one of dave laman's slide and it um it looks at the genetic trend for yearling weight and you can see where it's gone and i'm not saying this is bad necessarily we've done a tremendous job in the beef industry of creating more from less we actually use less resources to produce more beef all the time but how much is too much um i'm not sure i can answer that question but producing bigger cattle all the time there has to be an endpoint once you decide i guess that's big enough and it may be different for different geographic regions or even different uh regions of a single state or maybe even different regions of a of a single county i uh this is a famous slide for me because i got myself in trouble with the herford association over this one and i it was fully unintentional i can assure you but it's somewhat related back to the last slide i just showed you and i i think the message is this the let the little pearl of wisdom here is that calves from herford lines selected for performance had lower i gg antibody concentration than calves from the randomly selected control line now why would that be what's the reason as we talk about e pd is why that might be true when we select for for growth and lisa showed in some of her stuff that when you birth weight is related to growth the bigger the birth weight usually the more growth you get well the more growth you get you get a bigger calf at birth and sometimes those calves at birth are a little bit slower to get up some of us are old enough perhaps in the audience and dr hilton is too in and remembering what happened when we brought over the first exotics and we and calving difficulties was just normal business we did cesareans and on first calf efforts we did cesareans on adult cows and it was because of high birth weights and so i think some of this even though this is a paper from 1984 i think there's some relevance to this as well that when you select for growth select for performance there's a chance that those calves don't get enough immunity into the system and they tend to be ones that are at greater risk for getting sick and perhaps even dying later on this is the uh slide that that lisa referenced this is the oh our oklahoma state commercial cows milk yield over time in 1998 they had cows in fact i was a little bit off here they had cows that produced about 18 pounds of milk at peak milk yield in may some years later 17 years later they their milk yield was 31 pounds um and remember that's never without a cost those cows undoubtedly are bigger and undoubtedly are going to eat more in order to produce that kind of milk so with a limited limited resource system you won't be able to run the same number of cows per acre as you did with those lower milking cows so nothing's ever free the only other issue i bring up and it's related to milk production granted this is a dairy cow uh article but but the title of it was regulation of colostrum formation and beef and dairy cows journals of dairy science when you get a high level of milk production we know in dairy cattle that the volume dilutes the concentration of immunoglobulins so can i have cows that have so much milk even beef cows when they have so much colostrum that that amount of immunity that's in the colostrum in order for that calf to get what it needs is going to have to that calf is going to have to drink a greater uh volume and i think that may be happening with some of our really high milk producing beef cows today so what's the limit on milk production what's the limit on milk epedes i don't know if i can tell you and again i'll vary a little bit by where you are living in this faith and in the region and in the part of the country and and the part of the reason why it's such a uh expensive resource is that not only do they milk more but they have higher year-long maintenance requirements they're built differently than a cow that has a lower milk epede or lower milk production and most of that is related to the greater visceral organ mass relative to empty body weight and we see that in dairy cows they're made different the cows have no more they have greater ruinal size small large intestine liver heart and kidneys okay so we've had reports of of i guess reproductive failures this fall i guess we do every year and sometimes the answers are not easy to figure out and i know many times we would like to find the easy answer um and it's usually not evident um and it takes more of a systems approach to to try and ask the right questions have the right information from the producer to be able to point in some direction to make a management change and what i've done here is just lay out some questions that i will ask when i'm dealing with reproductive failures what time of the year is the calving season i mean that seems like a kind of an elementary basic question but there are some reasons for asking it if i'm calving in late winter and early spring those cows need more energy in the diet to prepare themselves for for the re-breeding the other thing i'll add in here is somewhat of a caveat i've experienced this several times sometimes we get them yearling heifers a little bit too fleshy a little bit too fat and we turn them to grass and expect them to reed we're turning them out a little bit later and just right on to grass after having been confined and being fed those fat heifers will actually go into a weight loss program and it will dramatically impact fertility so that's sometimes we're having too much body conditions of course not good during that breeding season especially in those young yearling heifers on the other hand if we're calving later we're calving late spring summer calving type of cal breeding season that that brings another set of risk into it in in that if we start having dry weather early we're going to have a deep quantity but also quality especially in late july and august which can impact fertility so we need to keep in mind that no matter when you have and so and many of our producers have moved their calving season later because they don't have as much labor as they used to they're having more cows don't want to have in confinement which leads to greater disease problems but just keep in mind that poor quality out here starts to decline at the end of july and it can impact fertility the calving season distribution is always a good one to look at so people most people keep a calving book and sometimes it's not totally 100 accurate and sometimes you have to read into it more than what's been recorded but if you can somehow get an idea of when the calves are born and you can actually break that into cycles like the first 21 days first 45 days go on and so forth it may give you some information that can lead you into a certain direction in terms of trying to solve what's happened so I say here the information may provide some evidence of inadequate bull power which may be related to dominant bulls lame bulls injured bulls inadequate body condition score and the cows and cow nutrition during the breeding season so it doesn't it's not extremely specific but it perhaps points you in a direction that you need to investigate a little bit closer a large number of cows determined to be pregnant late in the breeding season could be an indication of reproductive disease such as beryl or trich in which case they've had some embryonic loss this is just a simple calving distribution I just pulled up and I wanted to magnify this but I don't think that I can yeah there we go there we go so this isn't one that I'm telling you should strive for we talk about striving to get most of those calves maybe even up to 70% of those cows born in the first cycle this one's just showing a distribution of just slightly less than 50% born in the first cycle and then of those that didn't have in that time where we got 30% of those bred in the second and then a number bred in the third that's just an example what a calving distribution would look like I throw this one in here I got this from my good friend Chance Armstrong at LSU this is a little trick of moniasis organism that can be responsible for some of those cows they might conceive early but then suffer embryonic loss and those are the cows that'll get bred perhaps 60 days later and you'll have a bunch of late late breeding late calving cows as a result of this organism I understand there's a couple of vaccine candidates for this organism one I believe is at LSU and another one I just saw being pursued at Kansas State University so there may be some help for that for that organism there in terms of control the number of calves born as it relates to the number of cows determined to be with calf at the previous pregnancy checking event so this number could indicate fetal loss due to abortions now remember that some of these abortions some of this these calves that are slipped are not noticed usually the ones later will be noticed unless you got a lot of coyotes abortions not noticed or visual abortions and still bursts this can be evidence of fetal infections such as bvd, ibr, lepto, neospora, listeria, fungal infections and really a host of other possible pathogens in addition low conception rates and fetal losses can be due to high nitrates phytoestrogens, mycotoxins like xeralinone, ergot in infords and certainly some grain resources so this list is pretty lengthy but there are some things we can do to at least narrow this list somewhat but just having that number in other words a number of cows born as a relates to the number of cows determined to be pregnant may be able to point you in a certain direction. Cow body conditions scored by age younger cows two and three and those greater than 10 or greater than 12 will carry less condition than middle-aged cows and again we said this earlier we'll have a direct relationship on the ability to rebreat and conceive for the next season those young cows are still growing they're lactating and older cows will have more difficult staining and condition as most of those incisor teeth will be missing for those of you that have mouth a lot of cows and determined age and determined younger cows while you you'll understand what's going on here and sometimes in these cows if they're not keeping up it we may need to sort these sort the younger ones and older cows into different groups to have and endure different groups for feeding just prior to the breeding season. I brought this one up as well because I thought this was a good one to look at we don't necessarily do a lot of this I'll make a couple comments about this but this is actually a cabin distribution by sire and in this part and then this one that they having distribution 21 45 and so on 60 days you can see that there's been one bull in here these are the bulls with the greatest number of calves sired per pasture that happens a lot you've got bulls with that have differences of libido and difference in dominance and they're the ones that sire the most calves and sometimes that can be a actually can be a problem in terms of if that dominant sire is bad or if he's keeping the other and bulls away from breeding at all then you might have an issue with a dominant sire. I threw this slide in here too just to remind us that there sometimes is an end when you have to call enough this this cow here is going to turn 17 she's still raising a good calf good feed and good otter but sometimes one more year is one too many and I'm surprised at her fertility at her age but those are pretty special cows that can keep doing it every year low pregnancy and weaning rates finding answers vaccines are important the reason I put this in there is we don't vaccinate for everything we vaccinate for the things that we think are at somewhat of a risk of being present in the herd and we look for vaccines that are effective and backed up by science and they're safe to use so I've got on here annual IBR BRSV BVD lepto and now BRSV is really not a reproductive issue in other words we don't recognize BRSV as being a fetal related to fetal losses but certainly IBR BVD lepto I've left off Vibrio or Campylobacter for some herds that's still an issue and it may become more of an issue as fewer people continue to vaccinate for Vibrio trick for some herds is a is a risk and so this is just a generalized statement of things that I think are important on an annual basis for most cow herds to vaccinate the cow herds again um one of the other things I want to remind us and this perhaps relates a little bit to our current situation with coronavirus when cat when animals are vaccinated when people are vaccinated it actually kind of reduces pathogen stress and by that I mean it takes a greater dose uh bigger sneeze if you will to to actually cause disease cause infection and cause disease okay so vaccination has several important things to remember other than just decreasing that risk and it reduces the spread of shedding of those infectious organisms for one animal to another now some of those organisms are not spread from cow to cow lepto lepto can be but lepto can also be spread by other wild animals and that's why lepto is usually in most of these cow herd vaccination strategies cow aids and bull aids and numbers by pasture younger and older cows and common pastures regardless of bull numbers will generally have a greater number of open cow so I want to know if I'm trying to find answers for these low pregnancy low weaning rates I want to know where those cows were pastored if they were pastored together if they're pastored separately and the number of cows exposed per bull is important but perhaps even more important is lepto and bull age I use this example older and I talked about this earlier older and more dominant bulls tend to serve the majority of cows of bulls may not be as important as the aids of the bulls in the pasture let's say I'm running two 14 to 18 month old bulls with a single dominant older bull we think we've got three bulls in there you may only have one and a half because a dominant bull dominates the breeding and so that can be a problem it can be okay if if all the rest of the bulls are on their toes and doing what they're supposed to do and certainly all bulls should have a uh seem an evaluation prior to the breeding season and bulls from pastures with low pregnancy rates should be tested again I uh I put this slide in there just to remind us how how that uh bulls have changed over the years I found this old catalog this was from the 50s imported prints of Rowley not a very big animal this was from 1991 and this is from a recent bulls the bulls have changed but we expect them to do the right thing we expect them to be fertile and we expect them to want to breed cows and that doesn't always happen I included some slides in here on on seeming evaluation this picture on the left here let's see if I can is live semen when you get your bulls uh subject to a semen evaluation it's not good enough just to look at the semen in a in a tube and determine whether that bull is good that semen needs to be put under a slide and have some evaluation of motility and it also needs to take part of that sample and stain that sample and determine whether there is proper morphology I see two semen here that look pretty normal another one over here there's some here that don't look quite right so your veterinarian will determine the percent of these semen that look normal and and and will give a score I'm not so much concerned about the score as I am whether they pass or whether they fail this image on the right hand slide is just anatomy of the testicle it's important to remember that it's basically a 60-day cycle a produced semen so what you're looking at is a point in time something could have happened along the way that disrupted that cycle and and caused some of the semen you're looking at to be bad so I certainly usually give bulls a second chance to pass a bovine semen evaluation but I also a reminder to check testicle size I was just visiting with someone the other day who had bought a bull with a 31 centimeter testicle size and that that uh size of those testicles would not meet the standard for any breed that I'm currently aware of as a yearling found this really interesting this is from albert barth who was one of the gurus of of bull fertility he looked at 209 bulls over several years they were all greater than or equal to two years old and evaluated them for physical soundness or scrotal circumference semen quality and serving capacity now we try and evaluate all three of those physical soundness circumference and servant semen quality most of us don't get the chance to evaluate them for serving capacity and yet that's a pretty big deal but we can't really get that done in our current system at least very well so those 209 bulls 72.2 percent were satisfactory when they looked at all four of those parameters 12 percent were questionable 15.8 percent were unsatisfactory the reasons for questionable on unsatisfactory in other words if you had the 12 and the 15 together you got 23.8 percent low serving capacity was 15.8 percentable physically on sound 3.8 small scrotal circumference 6.2 of course semen quality 14.4 so there are reasons and this is related to why semen evaluations are important even though we're not looking at serving capacity we've got somewhere around 25 percent of those that read your physically on sound small scrotal circumference or poor semen quality so please don't yes what does low serving capacity mean what means they don't have much libido lisa they don't want to get after it okay that's a little hard to evaluate for our producers to evaluate but i always tell myself and our producers you got to get out there and look once in a while you can't just assume that everything's happening it may not be so that's as best as we can do there are some ways you can try and measure serving capacity and they did a number of years ago but i don't know that anybody's really doing that much today um this is just related a little bit to my co-mingling comment earlier i'll purchase in addition to the herd should have a testing and vaccination history if not then you better implement some type of quarantine procedures and even with testing and vaccination please don't introduce those new additions into the herd just prior to the start of the calving season or i would even say just prior to the start of the breeding season for new bulls you got to allow those bulls to acclimate to the new environment to uh the new cattle and bulls what we try and do is pen next to home bulls for several days so they can scream at each other for a few days if a battle ensues when you try and mix them then you better separate it and try it later and don't put new under introduced bulls into breeding pastures with others i've got a goofy little uh story here that i'm not sure is true necessarily we did try it there seems to be something to it the idea is putting apple cider vinegar as a pour on on bulls that you're trying to introduce and it seems to uh somewhat negate the must be the smell or something of new bulls that you've introduced and it seems like it really tends to reduce fighting amongst bulls that haven't been together for for a while what's always interesting to me is that even when you separate bulls for a couple days when you put them back together then they have to decide who's the strong one again so it's it's it's a management thing that we all need attention to because we don't want broken legs we don't want an animal hurt that just because we were in a hurry to put them back together we talked about a lot of things today but i i think the important point to make is that when you're not meeting the goals that you have set for yourself for the ranch for benchmark goals for reproductive efficiency for preg rates for weaning weights rates look at the whole system um it's rarely a vaccine issue you know i'll get the comment doc we got too many open cows do we need to change our vaccines um no unlikely unless unless you're not vaccinating at all then that's a different that's a different question different set of questions but it takes a systems approach to try and understand what the problem is what to investigate and and most importantly all for veterinarians and others that are involved with these to be able to listen and to be able to gather the right information but we talked about branch resources nutrition genetic selection pressure where it is environment and biosecurity and these are complicated systems and what on a move in one impacts other parts of the system so but it's a great occupation profession if you will to be in i hope this has been helpful to you i use this last slide here if i may the system with a societal license at least we have a societal license in this country still to raise caliper food and i think it comes to us from a long long time ago or in the vocal psalms it says he causes grass to grow for the cattle and crops for man to cultivate bringing forth from food from the earth that's the system so thank you very much i'll turn it back to uh travis if you will and i will stop sharing this slide if i can thank you appreciate the opportunity uh good job dr stucco um so i'm going to uh moderate these and uh again we're at seven forty nine but we're gonna allow some questions to happen as those come in and i would welcome all of our people to put into the question and answer period but one of one of the questions that kind of comes up is that and this is to both of you is that when we change the cow body condition score from a four to a seven as lisa said is that we can return potentially up to three hundred and thirty dollars um per cow um but where so when we're looking at that body condition score and i guess i'm i'm gonna bring this question in just a little bit tighter from the um first calf heifer to the second calf heifer um is that when can we make those changes and so it's november 24th um do we still have the opportunity to make those changes to kind of pull them back up um obviously we're not at the stage of rebreeding and we know that we lose so many from the the ones that that even had a calf and so how can we look forward to kind of crank it up that body condition score question is yours lisa did you want to take that one you want me to take it you start okay so november 24th we got cows that we think were there a little bit thin still because we still have the calves on maybe uh so they're still lactating they're trying to eat crop residue they might be on some cover crop that's been froze up we might be feeding them out on on crop residue but one of the things you can do is you can take calves off that that's a pretty big step right there once you do that and the and the cows are kind of right i and in terms of in terms of utilizing resources you can put weight on a cow really quickly once you remove that lactation pressure uh if if if you have if the calves are still on them when you feed cows and calves together you have to allow for the calves eating a fair amount of feed at this time of the year so it's not just feeding the cow you feed the calves too now i will i'll add this little thing in there with feeding cows and calves together it's actually a good thing for a short period of time it teaches the calves to eat and so when you bring them in for weaning they already know how to eat and so there's there's a plus to doing it for a short period of time agreed travis when are we looking at calving in you said something about um first cavers so these are yearling heifers that are getting ready to have in the spring or that they are first cavers going on their second lactation well i'm i'm going to say that they're the first cavers that are coming into march i'm going to say that those are past that um you know we we're already pushed past those animals um you know that that are still in uh the the calving standpoint hopefully but i what i would say is the next level of can can we get them back in line now now that even we have something in utero now i think easily you know if you look at a nutrition standpoint and as dr stucca said if they have calves on them it's a great opportunity to pull some calves off and um you know the longer that you are from calving the more chance you have to add that condition and to do more economically um so if you're looking at being a calving operation in march you've got what about four four and a half months from now if you're calving in january you better be getting after that and uh you know in terms of being in north dakotar county agents can help um producers develop rations to get those cows back in shape um and those our county agents generally consult with us and doing that if you're out of state i think the other counties have that uh other states county offices have those opportunities as well but you know i would say start now it's much easier to put weight on a cow now than especially when it's nice weather you know uh i think our and janna you can pipe in here she's the nutritionist amongst us but uh the tipping point in terms of weather is something like 16 15 16 degrees with even with wind chill well we haven't had very many days like that this fall and so it's a lot easier to add condition when it's not cold and i like to do that before it's cold and it's certainly more economical so lisa just a follow-up uh do you want us to add more hay to our ration or do you want us to add more grain to our ration well i want you to test your feed stuffs to see what's in them okay i really want you to do but you know generally if your cows are thin um we're going to need a little bit of protein but we're going to need more energy is the general rule and so and when we talk about i think energy and beef cow diets we're going to need some tdn um and those diets but test your forages test your feed see what you have you know in the north land here especially we're really really blessed to have a whole lot of stuff that we can feed cows pretty economically so here's a fun one that's very philosophical in my personal opinion uh but has anyone looked at the correlation between some production e pd's like yearling weight and morbidity in the feedlot not my knowledge but i um i'm gonna lean on dr stucco to look at this yeah yeah the only the the only one i can think of and that was the one i shared on herford cattle which got me in trouble but it's what it seems like is if you look at enough uh passive immunity literature that we tend to think still that well if they didn't get enough passive transfer of immunity they'll those are the greater risk of getting sick and perhaps dying at a young age well a number of years ago louis perino and then later on brunet dual and others looked at differences in the level of concentration of immunity from passive transfer and actually related it to post weaning morbidity and mortality as well so there is there is some data on that um it's not it's not 100 correlation necessarily but if you want an animal to have the right start um that passive transfer is extremely important and when you look at growth there seems to be some there's a whole lot of parts to that system that are becoming impacted by your quest for more growth and does it impact quality of colostrum in the cow or herself because she doesn't get enough energy and protein in her diet to to form quality colostrum did that was that calf a little bit bigger at birth because he was a calf that had more growth programmed into him genetically and you didn't get up a nurse right away it's a whole host of things that can happen that impacts morbidity and mortality not just early in life but certainly later on as well and in fact there's some dairy research that tells us that those dairy calves heifers dairy heifer calves that receive two liters versus four liters of colostrum at birth those that receive four liters actually milked more even into their second lactation than those that did not so it's it's not just always health but there's other production parameters as well that it seems to be associated with getting the right start absolutely dr stucca and i i appreciate that uh approach to kind of bring things together but i think that if we look at everything involved i mean some some people can make their decision of whether that's a growth related or kind of balancing some of the portion of our production system and that's that's why we've done this webinar and i'm going to uh since i get the opportunity to do this um is that we can kind of evaluate where where we're at and is there anything relative to weaning weight that happens you know that that isn't part of the milker and i know that we talked about milk relative to our our feedstuffs and and our operations as well and so dr stucca you said about moving the calving period from farther on but is there do you recommend or where should we be relative to just kind of thinking about looking at the milk e pd and that this is probably to both of you of making sure that you match your environments right well i'm going to go first and the reason i'm going to go first is i'm going to ask dr stucca a question so and it's related to this so if you have ever heard that the majority of their opens are someplace in that five to seven five to eight year of age does that lead you to believe that maybe they're pushing that milk a little further than where they should be dr stucca yeah no i wouldn't just i wouldn't come to that conclusion necessarily and this is where all of these type of inestigations you actually have to have boots on the ground you have to have eyes on what's going on it could be it relates back to the last slide you had that they they had a couple years in there where they they made some single trait and now i got a group of five and six year olds that are having milkers so that that could be it but typically by the time they reached that five and six year age they've gone through the tough times as a young cow the second caver and if they've made it that far it's unlikely to be milk at that stage okay anything else to add um lisa we're good no i think we're good at i would say this that if we if you're in a situation where for example you think your milk has gotten a little high and trust me it's easy to have that happen my husband and i were discussing this this week that you know we we're pretty we think we're tough on selecting not against milk but certainly watching it and we think it's creeping into our herd as well and um so if you if you're in the position of any of the traits look at the bulls that you have purchased the last however many years five six years that you have daughters coming out of them and just map out on a piece of paper where their e pds for those traits are and then look at the the breed averages and where they rank against those and you know if you think your cows are getting too big look at some yearling weight and say okay our bulls are in 110 112 for yearling weight you know maybe we want to moderate that so we're going to look at bulls this year that are in the 90 for yearling weight range or for milk if you know they're all looking in the 30 range and we want to moderate that maybe we need to start looking at some bulls that are in that 20 range it's really easy to walk into a bull sale and pick what you have at home because we like looking at our own cows for the most part dr scott stucca and uh lisa great question uh why do you feel pay attention why do you feel average weaning weights have not increased in recent years when a lot of bulls are sold for weaning weight e pd i i think it's because we're we have exceeded exceeded the uh resources and what they have to give to these cows um they will only milk so much if you feed them so much you know i we've gone from how weight has definitely increased over the years so we ran let's say we ran 100 cows on a certain piece of ground uh 30 years ago and they were all 1200 pounds which they never are of course but we'll just for our purpose say they're 1200 pound another 15 and 16 hundred pounds we're still running 100 cows on that ground well there's not enough forage quantity out there for those calves to to have the weaning weights that you so desire i just we've outstripped what that ground can produce at least if we're going to still continue to use native pastures now if we want to raise them in confinement that's different we can have huge milk uh e pds probably but then you start running into mastitis and a whole lot of host of other issues with too much milk production as well and so there's a fine line in there but i think that's what's happened is that we've exceeded the resources that we are using to run our cow calf operations on and uh we're just not seeing the benefit in terms of if we if our desires to increase weaning weight dr stucca i would have to agree with that that even as we dig for increase in the weaning weight is that we have probably exceeded some of the resources and potentially some of those would be from at least precipitation that has happened in some of our portion of the state in north dakota but that was very well done lisa do you have anything to add on that particular question so dav lawman has done some work at oklahoma state addressing that question exactly and uh i was looking for a slide that i might have had that um showed that but what his work shows and they had done this also at claysetter at the mark lab usda mark lab is that no matter they could never find a peak in milk production in a set of angus cows and so um they were feeding angus cows basically almost a tmr that was pretty similar to a finishing ration and their milk production was still increasing and um they have a set of herford cows in that data as well at mark and interestingly and i'm a little surprised that the the genetics are so different but in that set of herford cows you could feed those herford cows the same diet and their milk production levels off and so uh in some some part of our genetic makeup of these cattle we have um come to the point that our cows are going to milk to their resources as dr stucca said and when we are in a limited resource situation i think that that is a limiting factor to uh what what our calves are going to wean off now if uh we have some genetically high growth cattle that aren't related to milk maybe that's a little different but i think within our resources um our natural resources are being the limiting factor probably to weaning weight and on the flip side those cows are trying to still produce as much as they can and not building back on their condition absolutely that's very very good and i appreciate dr stucca on shaping the discussion uh towards the reason why our people that have joined us would be best beneficial to join us next week um for our event because i do believe that it's still managing our operations and hopefully that we can sustain our operations and sustain the beef cattle that we have on our ranch and so unless there's uh any further questions um i will welcome that uh those of us give a virtual round of applause to our presenters um is lisa peterson and dr jerry stucca for their help and their portions for helping us out this evening thank you so much everybody and hopefully you will join us in one week thanks so much happy thanksgiving friends remember to spare turkey's life and eat some beef eat prime rib yes sir thank you