 Another big aspect of this backgrounding decision and execution is trying to figure out how to keep these calves healthy and minimize the risks that we're going to have from some disease or some death loss or some illness in our weaning pens. And so joining me also on tonight's program is Dr. Carl Dahlin. He's our state beef specialist at North Dakota State University. He's located in Fargo and he's going to talk to us a little bit about what we can do at this stressful time of weaning to maybe prepare our calves and to get them adjusted so we have less problems and less risk. So Carl, I just ask you, we've got some social and we've got nutritional and we've got environmental stressors that all come at weaning. What are we going to do to kind of minimize those that might at least minimize some of our risk of illness or sickness in these calves? Yeah, and that's a great question, John. And with all those stresses combined at weaning, the first question that we need to ask is what are our capabilities and this varies from operation to operation, but what are our capabilities to actually spread that stress out? And so we look at things like if weaning is associated with going out to a remote pasture and taking these calves away from their moms and putting them on a truck and putting them in a new pen and everything at the same time, is it possible that your pairs actually need to come closer to home? That's a viable option. You know, the other thing in terms of the stress with weaning, so we remove a calf from its dam, so that's an immediate social bond that's kind of broken there, and then we also have a change of diet, change of environment. So is there a way that we can block those out a little more? So there's strategies of fence line weaning where these calves would have access to the social aspect of their dams on an opposite side of the fence and obviously we limit the milk access at that point in time, but it does spread that stress out. Another option along those lines is to look at little plastic nose clips, the kind of anti-suckling devices, and again, so that calf can be there, can have that social bond with its mother the entire time, it just can't drink that milk. Another thing that comes back to all these stresses happening at the same time, if there is castration or dehorning that still needs to be done, let's spread that out away from our weaning, so we're not putting that stress on top of the diet changes and those type of activities. Another thing from a social side, when we're dealing with commingling of calves, and this has a little bit to do with starting calves on feed, commingling of calves creates a new dynamic in the social hierarchy, so we've got calves who didn't know each other before, all of a sudden we're putting those groups together, all of those animals have to go through and figure out who's dominant and who's submissive, that type of thing. So if we can avoid commingling at that point in time, that is best. Now, if we do get into situations where we have to commingle, then we can get into some preconditioning strategies that are almost necessitated at that point in time when we do have new calves. When we think about it, if a calf has got an immune challenge or a challenge of some sort and every group of animals has those challenges, putting this calf with a new calf that's got his other set of challenges, now all of a sudden the whole group is exposed to those type of challenges. And from an environmental standpoint, if we've got all of these calves in a very tight area, that can create, again, just more exposure, so can we spread those calves out, can we get them very comfortable, talk about bedding, talk about clean water and palatable feed? You know, you bring out some real good points and of course the one of them is, you know, with calves losing his main nutritional source, should we be giving them a little supplemental feed? Does creep feeding ahead? Those have just got to be a little bit beneficial if they fit our system of doing things, right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, creep feeding, again, what we're doing when we're weaning, especially if you can put the same type of feed that you're putting in a creep feeder, we can have that for that calf in a bunker or maybe a creep feeder in the pan or a little pasture that he's in after weaning. Anything that we can do to have some type of similarity from his pasture conditions when he was with his mother to now being weaned, I recognize this feed, you don't have that delay in intake as a result. Weaning is usually kind of by calendar for most of us, you know, we like to get our calves weaned the third week in October, right before deer season or whatever date that is that fits when we calf. We don't control the weather. What we do have a little control over age of calf. Give us a little thoughts on weather and when we maybe need to just say the weather's not going to be fit and if age of calf has any real impact, should we let them get a little older? Young weaning, okay. We'll start with the weather. You know, if a beautiful day like today, it might be 60 degrees outside and we don't start to think about the fact that we can have cold stress. The biggest enemies of cattle in terms of weather, cold, wind and moisture and any combination of those three can add up to be really, really dangerous, especially when you have a calf that's already stressed because of the weaning process. And so when we think about when to do things, we can look at our forecast. I know that we've weaned on Thanksgiving every year as far as I can remember because the kids are home on that Friday. We got more help. So if we've got a big weather front that's coming in and we know that we're going to have wet sloppy conditions, that's not the best time to wean. So if we can go ahead and then if we know weather is coming and we still have to wean, we can take some active steps to do that. The biggest thing we need to do is we need to keep the wind off our calves. So if we're in an area where we don't have some type of shelter belt or barn for those cattle to get into, certainly put up windbreaks to block that wind, provide good clean bedding for those calves to get in and get dry. So that's kind of the weather thing. In addition, if we start to have stress and we start to have weather, and our cattle are in confinement or close quarters, that's that much more exposure to any pathogens that those calves have. So kind of reiterating your answer or the answer to the first question, spread those calves out, get them some space, and that can certainly help in incremental weather. The other side of that question, you are asking about the age of calf. Now as a whole, age of calf in terms of an immune response or that type of aspect doesn't have a really big impact in terms of their susceptibility to diseases at that point. What is more of a concern is that the younger calves are typically relying on a higher proportion of their nutrients coming from milk from their mother. And so for a younger calf who's relying more on milk from its mother compared with an older calf who may not be getting as much milk, the dietary change in that young calf is much greater, more of a concern compared with the dietary change of that old calf. He was only drinking a little milk. He's just got to go on to that diet. So it's not quite the same concept of those two ages of calves. There's undoubtedly going to be some stress and we'll do the things we can to minimize it in handling in an environment and nutrition and stuff. But we've got to have our calves prepared to have strong immune systems. And I think the immune system gets built up by good nutrition and a good vaccination program. You've got a few things that we should probably think about in those regards. So we've got these calves with good functioning immune systems when the stress hits. Yeah, and so again, it has to do with a preemptive approach. There's scenarios where calves get weaned, they haven't had any shots and they get weaned and we run them through or maybe they get weaned and they haven't had any vaccinations and we give the vaccine sometime after that. What we want to do is preemptively prepare our cattle to deal with that stress and to deal with these challenges. So the best way to go about doing that is to go off the label, go in before we wean these calves, give these vaccinations, read the label recommendations two to three weeks before that weaning event that gives the immune system time to prepare for that next shot, which is a booster shot. We can go ahead and give that shot at weaning or slightly thereafter and we have a much better immune response. When we have all of the stresses combined at the same time, giving a vaccine at that same time quite frankly is ineffective in some cases. Back to these palatable rations, we've got to be able to get feed that these calves recognize. It really helps if they've seen it before. What that means typically, these cattle have been out on grass, some of the best grass haze that you have to get those cattle up and eating on those rations, putting in new feedstuffs. Many of these calves have never seen fermented feedstuffs before. Put those components in gradually, allow their function to transition to new types of diets, will certainly pay dividends. One of the biggest things that people can overlook is our water sources. Water is an essential nutrient for our cattle. It needs to be a clean water source. If you've got fountains out there and these pens that we're backgrounding in, sometimes calves have never seen a water fountain. How do we get a calf who's never seen a water fountain to drink from it? If we've been used to drinking from streams or those type of things, sometimes we have to make slight adjustments so that we can hear the water trickle into the fountain or something that reminds that calf or lets him know that this is water source, I need to go here to have a drink. The other thing, you know, if illness does happen, we need to be prepared to take corrective action and take corrective action right away. We know that the sooner we can treat sick calves, the better their response is, the better their recovery is, so the earlier we can catch those calves, the better off we'll be. Well, hopefully those producers are going to go into the backgrounding and handle their cattle well. Do these steps like you've suggested to, you know, take some of the stress levels down and prepare the calves a little better. We thank you for joining us on our backgrounding program. If you've got any last thoughts, you're welcome to share them with us as we wrap up this section. Yeah, you know, I guess just to kind of wrap up overall, you know, it is a stressful time. How can we go ahead, spread that stress out, do everything we can to get a maximum immune readiness in these cattle and then treat them right, and they'll pay big dividends in the future. Thanks, Carl.