 We had this meeting, we had a situation where Gordon was getting expensive, tabs were pretty high, so we had lots of cheap hay and forage, and we get the budget to present that stuff and look like that year. Backgrounding was going to pay as good as it probably ever had, and market increased, prices remained, sound on the feed, and we did make quite a bit of money backgrounding. Last year was a different game, cattle were still fairly high, corn was really peaking and hay was doubling, it's not going over that in price, cattle market fell off and there wasn't a lot of money to be made with steers, some of the money was lost, backgrounding in some cases, the heifers, which were very discounted in fall, actually probably made a little money if you held on to them long enough. Well this year we're getting faced with a pretty strong cattle market, we've got a couple other fundamentals that are a little different. We've got grain prices dropping, and we've got our hay prices back down to where they more traditionally have been. So it looks like it's going to be more of a routine year to make some money, get your cost again in line, put a few hundred pounds on, and there's certainly a margin maybe in growing some cattle. Anyway, the topic I'm going to talk about this year is corn silage, and well-known North Dakota corn has gotten to be a popular crop, cash crop, increased use for silage, and it's kind of a phenomenal crop in that you can produce a lot of material off an acre of corn, which just grows, it's a big robust plant, and so we have more interest in silage for feeding and salvaging some of our grain crops that don't make it, and there's some other factors probably increasing silage interest in that you can put up a lot of feed fast, although it costs a lot to do, it has some advantages. If we think about corn a little bit, it's sometimes referred to as the king of forages, there are two predominant forage crops in the country. It's a very personal feed, very popular feed, and when it comes down to how much beef you can actually produce off an acre from the nutrients or the feed you can raise, it probably stands alone, and it beats everybody else by quite a margin. Safety, palatable feed, feed of a lot of clots in the cattle, it's used for roughing, and not finishing rashes, it's a roughing source, it's used for cow rashes, it's a supplement, and it goes for casting, around that too is found today again, you've got some decent silage with a little supplementation. If we just hit a few of the basics here, and think about the nutritional value of corn silage, it is a highly digestible forage, and maybe it shouldn't even be called a forage, in that about 40% of its weight is probably grain, and the rest is more forage material. So it's a medium energy feed, and when we put a TDN value on it, as you see in the NRC values, about 72%, most of our haves are running in the 50s up to 60, and our grain is in the mid 70s to 90. So it's a medium energy feed, it's a little low in protein. The average book value is 8.6, we sometimes find it at 10 or 9, but it never exceeds that by very much. It's also a feed that's got some calcium and phosphorus in it, probably out of it for maintenance type rations, but for growing gas, we need to supplement the vitamins and minerals. Generally not much of any toxicity or problems with feeding it, but it's safe, other than sometimes under drought that can accumulate some nitrates, and there'll be some caution to test for that. When we're going to talk about some economics of corn silage, it's probably worth reviewing a budget what it costs to grow a acre of corn. Each year our AgEcon farm management group puts together budgets for each region of North Dakota for the variety of crops raised in that region. This year is a budget for North Central and North Dakota in 2013 for growing corn. You can see the numbers in there are fairly high, the inputs are fairly high to grow corn. These technology trade crops such as corn at the seed cost are projected in that budget of $66 an acre. Purpose size 17, fertilizer at 80, and that can vary by 30 or $40 a year just depending on how that fertilizer market fluctuates. Fuel repairs, insurance, interest, some of those direct costs up to $246. In this region the land rent they're using is $50 an acre, brings it to $296. Get in a little bit there for some overheads of your farm insurances, electricity, and your machinery costs the own, and it goes up to $350 an acre. And these are averages and numbers and your individual situation may be better or may be worse. The one number I dropped out of the budget that they put out is the $18 drying charges because for silage that wouldn't be an included cost as would be for grain corn. So it's going to take a lot of money to raise that acre. What are we going to get back from it? We've got improved corn genetics nowadays and the corn yield is quite phenomenal. Talking to growers in this part of the state there's a number of them feel they've got 20 plus tons per acre out of this year's corn crop and most of it has been silage in the last week around here. We did a corn silage variety trial here at the minor research center this summer. They had some hydrates that were submitted by various companies, some various different maturity dates and so forth. And I've got them listed here. This trial was planted a little on the lakeside. It was planted in late May. It harvested October 2nd. It harvested at 63% moisture, which is kind of right on target of where we want to be. It's been 30-inch rows on wheat stubble. It yielded around 14-and-a-half ton on average. There were some hybrids up to 17-and-a-half of grain corn checks put in there to a short maturity grain corn would do against some of the silage hybrids. That was down to 10 ton. So that's one-year snapshot of what corn silage yields were here. And as I said, we know that that can be better than some years, but probably not as good as some people experienced last year. So $350 an acre is a raise of about 15 ton corn silage. We also know that what we hay kind of all summer long, it seems to never end. You just keep haying and haying whenever the sun shines and makes it more hay. Corn silage is at the advantage of a very short harvest season. But it takes a lot of people a lot of equipment to make that happen. And most people nowadays don't go out with their two row choppers and do a lot. We have a lot more custom cuts. He comes in and he puts up the silage and in a few days they're gone. But it comes with a fairly big cost. Unfortunately, we don't have a statewide survey of chopping costs that's current. The last one I found in our extension publication was 2010. I put those values up for you to look at. They're reported either by acre or hour. Field chopping and hauling in that last survey. I had a most frequent rate of $500 an hour. Toxless people this year. They wish they could have got it done for that. Getting quotes of 650, 800, some with fuels, some without, some with trucks, some with extra for trucking. But what I think it comes down to is somewhere $7, $8 a ton is what you need to figure to get it in a pile. And of course that will vary too considerably by situation. Kind of an important point with corn silage. Costs a lot to raise. You get a lot of material. It's got good feed value. You go out there in the field and chop it. You leave very little in the field. And if you do a good job of feeding it, there's very little feeding waste. But there is an area of big concern and that's what weighs in the pile and storage. And that can be high. And there's lots of ways to store silage. Put in a pile, in a bunker, in a bag, in a silo, in a bale wrapped in plastic. And I've got a chart here that shows you that there's some losses in storage that can get as high as 20, 30%. Now there's some things we can do to minimize that in a pile. We can chop it fine, pack it well. We can chop it with the right moisture. About 65% water. And then we can cover the pile to keep it from drying, keep it from rotting. You feed and use the face appropriately so we don't expose the hole more or take it out each day. But there's a loss when you do everything right. And it's probably still 10% of lost dry matter which you thought harvested what actually went through the cow. So that gives you a cost that needs to be figured in somewhere along the way. So what we really want to get down to is what it costs to raise, what it costs for nutrient. So how do you price corn silage? There's a variety of ways to do that. The easy way is just the old thumb. One thumb is a third of the cost of good alfalfa hay. Then it was seven, eight times the price of corn. And as we got more grain corn in our silage, things changed relative to one another. The rule of thumb that floats around is 10 times the price of corn is what silage is worth. So this year, I don't know what you want to put corn in. Is it four and a quarter? Is it three and a quarter? It's four bucks. I used, in my example, $3.75. I think locally here it's about $3.60 on the board. A few outside communities from here. It's probably 30, 40 cents less than that for new crop. So I picked the number. But whatever the number you picked, you can put it in the same context the same way. So 10 times 375 is the size of more than 37.50. But probably a more accurate way to come up with a price is to say a ton of silage contains water, hay equivalent, and grain equivalent. Let's price all three components that their market value add them up and see what we get. Well, a ton of silage is 700 pounds of dry matter. 200 pounds of corn, a five bushels of corn, plus about 420 pounds of hay equivalent. You add them together and you're about $38 a ton. Of course, if you're raising corn, tell them that through your feedlot and cattle you want to get your costs production so you can also price them about what it costs to raise. Earlier I showed you about what it costs to raise an acre of corn. I showed you what approximately it would yield here in minus this year. And we put those costs to raise it, divided by the amount of tons we get. Let's realize that we're going to lose 15% of that maybe in our pile. We end up in that $37 cost again. So that's kind of a ballpark number for this year. But you should base it on what you think your corn is worth. Just because that's what 375 and maybe a lot of farmers who aren't willing to sell at that until corn isn't really available at that. So that might be a little bit underestimated, but it's certainly a methodology to do it. So what we're getting at is is this going to be a cheap feed to feed? Is it one of your best alternatives to feed? It's a good feed. We're going to talk about feeding it later and how effective rations can be made using corn silage. But I put a little table together to calculate what a cost of a pound of energy, which corn is being an energy feed, is compared to other choices for four inches of energy. And I use grain corn, alfalfa hay, oat hay, and grass hay. Based on how much moisture is in it, based on the percent TDM that it has, we come up with a cost sense of a pound of TDM. And you can see the corn silage is at 7.4. Oat hay, I add 7.2, grass hay at 5.3. Alfalfa hay, of course, you get more protein in there. But just on an energy basis, it's 8.7 and corn grain at 8.9. Some of these other feeds have some feeding losses. If you start adding those in, it makes it a very competitively great feed on an energy basis. And like I said before, we can get more TDM alfalfa hay to grow in corn silage because they're limited in our operation that we can probably get within the other feed. So I guess I would just summarize some of these numbers. So pros and cons of corn silage. I think those you've arranged that realize you get a lot of production, high yielding. You can do a lot of things in feeding a lot of cattle in a lot of different ways with it. Once you're set up, it's easier to feed. And as I showed you before, it can be a competitive source of energy if you can get a good yielding. Corn hybrids produce a lot of tons. This advantage is you're going to have to shallow a lot of money to rate it. The inputs are very high. If you don't do a good job of storing it and you lose 25-30% of the spoilage and drive-atter loss, then your cost becomes uncompetitive. And certainly once you make the decision to grow corn silage, your marketing options are very limited. And as I showed you earlier, there is some difficulty in actually determining a price when you're marketing it. So with that, I guess I appreciate the opportunity to be on the program. We have a lot more speakers for tonight. I'm going to wrap it up there. And we can certainly have some discussion where it's appropriate in the next program. We'll take some questions even at this point right now. I guess we can mute our mic and turn the program over and if anyone else wants to make a comment or a question, we can take it right now. John, this is Carl at Carrington. Any comments about potential yields that you've seen in other locations that you were heard of in other locations across the state? Well, my circle of travel hasn't been across the state, but I know I've been west of mine in a strange yield at 22 tons. I've been south, more of the McClain County area, where the grower told me his was 21 tons, over 160 acres. I think east of here, we're at 23 tons an acre. And I'm not sure if those are accurate based on truck load loss, how many lots and loads they think they put in and what they thought was on each truck. I think there's some opportunity to do some checking of yields out there to make sure we know what it really does yield. But here, this was done accurately. We're around 15 tons. Thank you, John. Yeah, thank you.