 Well, I do want to appreciate you inviting me here today to talk. I'm actually in Bismarck, the Burleigh County has their soil health workshop today as well. And so I was down there this morning. So today I'm going to talk about nutritional quality of some of these selected annual forages using cover crops. And what I want to show you is some of the work we've done over the last four years where we did look at livestock performance. And we did have nutritional quality analysis done on a number of these plant species. Some of these plants would have been planted as monocultures or that have been planted within a cover crop or cocktail mix. And so what I want to do is show you a little bit about the quality you're looking at and where they fit. One thing I should remind you is that most data I'm going to show you is was designed or is designed for late season fall grazing. So most of these would have been seeded in late June or July with the idea of getting about 60 to 70 days of growth before we graze it. So quality is really designed to provide a high quality feed for late in the growing season. So if you have any questions, I don't know, Carl, if you have any questions just jump in. Otherwise I'll go to the PowerPoint and you can follow along with me. Can you all see it fine? I'll take that as a yes. What we did on the study sites, we had a study area near Central Grasslands Research Station near Streeter. And a second one, we did a one year study up by Milo, north and west of Kandu. The Streeter study site, we looked at eight different forage types, either planted as a single crop or as a cocktail mixture crop. We did compare, most of our data on Streeter is compared with native range. Remember the philosophy on this is we are going to graze these crops from mid-October to mid-December. I'm not going to show you the results of that part of the study today. I'm going to concentrate on the nutritional status. We looked at some warm season crops. They were all seeded in early to late July. We had some spring seeded cereals. They were seeded in mid to late July. We did look at the brassicas. They were seeded in mid to late July. And we looked at a number of combinations of legumes. If you look at some of the recommendations, especially with NRCS funding, some of these cover crop mixes, they all require legumes in their cocktail mixes. We do struggle with legumes in our trials. We have a tough time getting legumes established with any kind of production value late in the season. I'll show you those numbers as we go through. At Milo, we did a one-year study with the county agent in Kandu. That was crystal martindom. We looked at 16 different annual forages, plus two separate cocktail mixes. We looked at four warm season annuals, eight cool season annuals, and four legumes. We had the same type of combinations here that we saw at Streeter, with the exception we added some winter cereals in this. These were planted anywhere from mid-May for the cereals to mid-July for the brassicas. And the winter cereals were seeded in early August. What I want to show you first is the forage production and costs. We can talk about nutritional status of many of these plant species, but you need to understand what the production potential is, as well as what the costs are when dealing with these plants. Some of these plants can get very expensive to establish, especially if the production is low. I'm going to show you some of the production and cost values to start with. I'm going to show you the Milo data here. We looked at 16 different species. This graph shows you the warm season grasses. You have foxtail millet as the top one. Then you have a sorghum sedan brown midrib, which is your second one. The third one is a foxtail millet German, and then a sedan grass, which is Piper. The bottom three are all spring cereals. We looked at oats, barley, and triticale. The second column shows you the pounds of production per acre. The third column shows you seed costs per acre. And the last column gives you the value of the seed cost to produce 100 pounds of forage. I would have done it by the pound, but then the numbers are pretty small, so I put it at a scale of 100 pounds. The most productive annual that we had in this trial was sorghum sedan, which is not unexpected. It produced about four ton an acre. It was actually a cheap grass to establish in terms of seed costs. You assume when we look at seed costs that your input cost should be the same no matter what you're planning. So we'll look across the board at seed costs. It costs us 15 cents to produce 100 pounds of forage for the sorghum sedan. Our cheapest mix, our cheapest species was foxtail millet, Siberian at just under three ton an acre at 12 cents per 100 pound. All of our grasses were fairly economical. One thing that will stick out here, of course, if you're looking for a cheap mix, that gives you the greatest amount of biomass produced. On this trial was the sorghum sedan, brown midrib variety, our plant species. If you look at our cereals, you know, we've been, the forage barley and triticales have been popular the last few years, but you'll see they're not the cheapest by far plant to incorporate into a mix. You're looking at the production across the oats. The barley triticale were virtually the same. Give or take 5,000 pounds. But you look at the seed costs on the barley and triticale at $35 an acre versus nine and a half dollars for the oats. So you're looking at a seed cost per 100 pounds of 21 cents for the oat, where you're looking at a 65 to 70 cents for the barley and triticale. It's a little tough to pencil out the barley and triticale in this trial. We found very similar results at Streeter when we looked at barley and triticale. Those two just right now seem to be a little bit too expensive. You don't get the bang for your buck on those two species. If you look at our legumes at Milo, we looked at four different legumes. We looked at a ford soybean, a hairy vetch, field peas and cow peas. And if any of you have been in the cover crop business the last few years, you'll notice that one of the more popular ones that's been pushed are the cow peas. We've tested cow peas two years in these studies. It is by far the most expensive legume in a mix, and it gives you the least amount of production among all the legumes. I'm struggling with the cow pea in these cocktail mixes. It's very hard to pencil it out. It costs us almost $12 per 100 pounds of forage produced for the cow pea in this trial. By far the most cost-effective legume is the forage soybean. It's an expensive legume at 50 bucks an acre, but we produce slightly under 3 ton an acre at 85 cents per 100 pounds. We did test the forage soybean in 2010 at Streeter in our cocktail mix and like most of our legumes, it was not very productive. When you see these warm season legumes in particular, but even with the cool season legumes, when you see them in July in a mixture, they just don't do very well. So the legumes are a little more expensive. The idea is to get some soil health benefits out of these legumes with nitrogen accumulation. However, if you're not producing the biomass, it's tough to do that in these trials. So you'll see the cow pea sticks out as not a very cost-effective legume. The last slide shows our other annuals we looked at. The top two are our turnips. We looked at the paus à turnip, which is your forage turnip, and your purple top, which is basically your bulb-producing turnip. The forage turnip is a little more expensive for seed costs. In this trial, even though our forage turnip produced more biomass, there was no difference in terms of cost per 100 pounds of forage produced at 36 cents. But if you're looking for a high-producing variety, you always go with the paus à turnip, because it's going to give you more above-ground biomass to consume. The theory under the purple top, of course, is it produced a large bulb that does give you divots in the soil. However, if you ever go to a turnip field the following spring, the turnips are virtually gone. They have a high nitrogen to carbon ratio. When they break down, there's hardly any carbon left. And even that big turnip, when it's looking at a diameter of about a foot, there's not a whole lot left. And so the benefit that is perceived from the purple top, I think is actually not there. I think you get more benefit from the paus à, because the bulb is smaller, but it's more of a tamperate. So you get a deeper soil profile that this root's going into. I don't have any data right now to show that. We're looking at that at street right now, looking at the soil health benefits. But right now, I lean towards the paus à, because it gives me more of a viable feed source for the cows. If you look at our best cocktail mix, it was cocktail mix number one at 61 cents per 100 pounds. That mix was a turnip, radish, oats, millet, harry betch combination. If you look at our cocktail mix two, it was twice as expensive, and that's because we had cow pee in there, and we also went from oats to triticali. We doubled our cost, but had no difference in gain in terms of pounds produced. So when you look at these cocktail mixes, it's critical to look at your costs on these so you don't get too expensive. Radish, of course, is the other popular brassica used in these cocktail mixes. Produced by itself, about 1700 pounds an acre. Costs about 20 bucks an acre if you do it by itself. And it comes about a buck 18 per 100 pounds. There's a reason we don't promote radishes as a plant by itself. It costs you more. It's cost effective as a turnip. It makes a really nice addition to a cocktail mix because you only put it in a pound in so your cost is low. In the ratio when you get that long tuber that gives you some punching through the soil profile, if you need to have areas where you need to look at pans, kind of break through pans, the radishes work phenomenal in those scenarios. Our last two are our winter cereals, winter rye, winter triticali. This did a little deceiving because we only took the fall production off of it. Obviously, if you're going to look at the winter cereals, you want to use them in the following spring. We produced about 1000 pounds in the winter rye and about 1500 pounds for the winter triticali. If you're looking for a winter cereal strictly for fall use, the triticali or winter wheat are superior for production compared to the winter rye. It's true of most literature in the Northern Plains. You're looking for something to carry over the following spring. For biomass produced, the winter rye is superior in terms of overall production for the two seasons. It will be the most cost-effective among the two. You see 30 bucks per acre versus 50 pounds. The trick with the ryes, you have to understand the value of what you're going to put following that rye for a crop. Ryes do have an allopathic chemical in the plant that can affect the growth of the following crop. You should not do a warm season annual following winter rye. They don't do very well. Corn in particular, even your sorghum stands, in one of our trials, even our turnips didn't grow real well following rye. So if you're going to go with certain species, you need to know when to plant rye and when not to. Any questions on that? Because that's usually a common question I'll get on when to use which cereal for a winter cereal. I kind of highlighted these costs. The winter rye, winter triticali is about three to three dollars for 100 pounds if you just look at the fall use of it. The last set of data here on production is the stuff from Streeter. This is an average of the four years of this study. Our foxtail millet is our most producing annual in a single crop system at about 4,000 pounds on the average. I should make a point that our Streeter trial is on marginal crop ground. It's basically a shallot or gravel, gravel soils with some slope. So they're designed to look at this crop ground that doesn't produce very good crops. So we're looking at alternatives to get more money off this resource. The Milo study site was actually a really nice loamy soils, pretty good soil producing land. Our turnips produced on an average of about 3,000 pounds. The difference was about 20 cents for the millet, 24 cents for the turnips over the four years of this trial. Our cocktail mixes, because of the cost of the legumes, was almost twice as much or was twice as much of a cost compared to the annuals in this trial. What we've been trying to do over the years is try and cheapen up our cocktail mix to make it more cost effective for the producer while producing some kind of soil health benefits as well. And the struggle has always been the legume to put in there. You look at our native range, we average almost 3,000 pounds per acre on our native range in this trial. So from there I want to look at nutritional status and there's a series of slides. And they kind of follow each other the same format. We're looking at our nutritional status. I'm going to show you two slides from Milo, and they're kind of noisy slides, but you should build up with the handout and look at it. You'll see what I'm trying to do here. What I'm showing you in this slide is the crude protein value of all of the species we looked at. And so your left is percent crude protein value from zero to 30%. The bottom is the species that we looked at. And then the blue line is basically the minimum requirements of a 1,200-pound non-lactating cow as designed for that second trimester when she'd be grazing. And if you look here, those areas that are at the adequate level would be your warm season crops, your millet, your sedan grass and sorghum sedan. As they cure out from a hard freeze, they tend to be kind of marginal just above the requirements of a lactating cow. And in our trials at Streeter, we found that they were also the poorest in terms of livestock performance throughout the four years. The cows still gained weight on the warm seasons just that it didn't do quite as well compared to the cool seasons. You look at our turnip, which is our next one there. We're over 20% protein on our turnip on this trial. Our radish was about 18%. And then your legumes range anywhere from 20% to 25%. The exception of the forged soybean is a little more fibrous. And that's added about 14%. And then you look at your winter cereals. That's the value for that late fall grazing at about 20%. To follow up on that, we didn't do energy at Milo, but we did do fiber content. And my blue line here is designed to show 30% fiber. And the reason I have that in there is, obviously, as you have a functioning rumin, you need to have enough fiber for that rumin to function properly. And one of the flaws of the brassicas is they're very high in water. They may be high in nutrition, but they don't have a lot of fiber. They may not supply fiber to these species, or you're going to have some digestive problems with these cows. You'll see the fecal tissue will be very loose and runny. And it's something that we recommend if you have turnips by themselves to provide a straw-based diet with it. And I'll show you some of the data on the turnips in the next slides here. The other ones that tend to be low in fiber are those winter cereals for fall use. You see, we're looking at about 27% fiber content on winter rye and triticale. And so you can have some issues with bloat as well. But they're kind of marginal for fiber content, and just something you need to be careful with. And if you're feeding on a monoculture of these species, that you need to have some fiber with them. And these kind of point out in these slides, and you'll see where they're kind of marginal for fiber content. And eventually, as they dry down, as they freeze down, the dry matter does increase. And I'll show you on a slide a little later on the turnips in particular. So I want to start with the turnips. They tend to be one of the more popular annuals we're using today in our cocktail mixes. This is a picture of purple top to your left, Pajaw to your right. If you look at it from a roadside, they look the same. There's very little difference between the two turnips until you walk into the field. And there is a little bit difference in the leaf structure. The Pajaw turnip will have a much larger leaf in the purple top. And then of course, if you look at the bulbs, they're quite different in terms of the size of the bulb. Purple top gets its name because the bulb has a purple color at the surface where the Pajaw color is always white or creamy in color. Here's some pictures of to your left is purple top and to your right is Pajaw. If you just look at the base of the bulb itself, you can see how on the purple top there's just not as big a foliage base on that turnip. So you can see it's put a lot of energy to the bulb versus the Pajaw. You can see the big leafy base on that Pajaw turnip. It has a nice long taproot. And I prefer the Pajaw over the purple top in a livestock grazing scenario. If you look at the nutritional status of the turnip, this is an average of the four years of the Central Grasslands Research Station. All my graphs look the same from now on. This is a crude protein graph. To your left is percent protein. To the bottom are the dates. We collected every two weeks while the cows were on pasture. The blue bar will always represent the minimum requirements of a dry cow on an average of 1,200 pounds during your second trimester. The gold bar will be the quality of the plant. In terms of the turnips, you see the turnips maintain that quality throughout the grazing season. One of the few species that will not decline as it senesces, because it doesn't senesce very well. It maintains leaf tissue very well throughout the season. We averaged about 14 to 15 percent from the 1st of October to the 1st of December for this plant. So you can see why it's popular in these mixes. It provides a high quality feed source for these livestock. If you look at energy content, this is a very high energy plant. We're looking at 85 to 90 percent energy. This is an in vitro dry matter digestibility. Very high nutrition. It's very similar to corn when we start in terms of 90 percent in the first part of October. So you'd expect these cows to gain weight on turnips. And on our trials, over the four years of our study, our cows typically gain two to two and a half pounds a day on these turnips. And it wouldn't be uncommon to see over a 60 day period them to gain 100 to 150 pounds and put on a full condition or condition score on this trial. Now 2010 was a little bit odd in that we had a lot of snow from about the 1st of November on. And our cows did not perform as well in 2010. We only averaged about a pound a day gain in 2010. They still gained condition, about a half a condition score, but they didn't do as well as 07 through 09. So you're going to have to deal with these weather conditions and some of these scenarios. If you look at calcium dephosphors and these slides might be a little difficult to read, some of them are going to clarify them for you. You still have your left side as your percent composition, your dates to the bottom. The gold bar is calcium and the top bar is actually the calcium content. The bottom dotted bar is the minimum requirements of a dry cow. The pink bar is phosphorus so the solid line is the phosphorus content and the dotted line which is very close to the minimum requirements of the gold one is the minimum requirements for phosphorus. The brassicas are extremely high in calcium at almost 3.5% calcium throughout the whole grazing season. That's even higher than most of our legumes will ever achieve. If you look at the minimum requirements it's 0.15. So it's a very high quality in terms of calcium. It's also produced about 0.4 to 0.5% phosphorus in the diet and we're almost too full what the requirements are for these cows. So the calcium dephosphors, I was a little bit worried about the calcium dephosphors ratio on these plants but it's still about 8 to 1 ratio so we're in a nice safe range of what I call the upper end range for calcium dephosphors ratio. As we look at the turnips this is one of the few ones that you need to deal with this fiber issue and what this graph shows you is the foliage composition and the root composition of the turnips. And to your left you'll see the foliage composition of purple top over the two years of this study averaged about 30% of its growth occurs above ground which means on an average 70% of this plant puts its energy to bulb production. If you look at the pausage on an average it's 60 to 70% of its growth is above ground so 30 to 40% is put its energy towards the bulb. So you can see it does produce most of its energy above ground. If you look at to your right is the dry matter composition of the foliage. So you have 0 to 70% dry matter on October 4 for the two years our dry matter was 18% to start. That's extremely low for a single diet for these cows. By the third week in October we're about 20% and as we got a hard freeze that dry matter increases dramatically by the first week in November we're at about 45% and by the end of November we're at 60% dry matter and we feed free choice barley straw to these cows while they're on turnips and they will eat a lot of straw for that first two weeks. By the mid-November they graze very little of the straw they feed on very little of the straw and their diet is almost solely turnips. So you can see the value of that whether you add a standing residue for them to graze you need to add a residue or a fiber content for at least two weeks after a freeze then the dry matter is high enough where they're fine without it. So if you look at these numbers this kind of this is the O9 purple top versus Paja and you can see we produce about 45% more above ground foliage on the Paja versus the purple top. The big thing that NRCS was really high on was this below ground biomass production purple top produced on our studies an average of 270% below ground biomass compared to the Paja and so you can see why it was popular I still think they're missing the turnips from there I'm going to talk about the radish the radish is a very popular one using the cocktail mixes one thing about the turnips I didn't talk about but you know our turnips get about 60 days of growth before a hard freeze and we never see any flowering on these turnips however the radish will start to flower at about 30 to 40 days and you see in this picture here you got a flower a bolt of a flower usually occurs to mature out and of course the popular part of the radish is the bulb or this long carrot like tuber which grows about half of its growth is below ground and about half of its growth is above ground if you ever have any whitetail deer in your area the whitetail deer absolutely love the radish and they will seek this out they usually bite the top off and they graze that radish into the ground before they go it's also very similar to the brassic to the turnips in terms of its nutritional status our protein value ranges from 14 to 18% across the growing season for some reason the radish actually increased every year except for one across the growing season in terms of quality and well above the minimum requirements of a dry cow you look at the dry matter digestibility once again very similar to the turnip at about 85 to 90% in vitro throughout the grazing season while we're on pasture here and last is the calcium to phosphorus ratio both calcium and phosphorus were well above the requirements of a 12 and a pound dry cow the calcium and the radish actually declines throughout the season from about three and a half to 2% of the plant material and it was consistent across the years most plants calcium actually increases as it matures radishes that actually declined the one that we've been studying the longest is the foxtail millet we actually had it in a swath grazing trial two years prior to our our standing crop trial our standing crop trial of course is designed to look at single cropping versus dual cropping to your right is some cows grazing a standing crop millet one of the flaws of these warms and crops is when they freeze down the palatability declines dramatically and we see a lot of waste on these on this plant we actually give them about seven to nine days of grazing with a hot wire that we move every seven to nine days try to try to minimize waste and the cows really do pick through this through these millets and we on our first year that we actually tested this we had about 40% waste of our millet in our trials compared to the turnips right about 18% waste our cocktail mixes we have about a 30% waste in the trials to look at crude protein value of foxtail millet look in our trials foxtail millet because it's not seeded till July it heads out very close to freeze up excuse me and so the dry down material stays above 8% throughout the grazing season it starts at about 10 to 12% in October on a really wet year in a long winter in the long summer months we've had it as high as 14% in the first part of October and it does decline as it freezes down from 11% on an average to about 8% on this trial but we're still well above the minimum requirements of a 1200 pound lactating cow you look at energy our energy starts on an average about 70% in October and declines to about the mid 50s by the first part of December still above the requirements of a dry cow you look at calcium and phosphorus our calcium content like most grasses it's quite a bit lower than the brassicas ranges from 0.35 to 0.45% of the plant tissue which is still well above the requirements of a cow like most grasses though our phosphorus become deficient when we start the trial the grass is still green and our phosphorus ran about 2.27% however by mid October we're already below the minimum requirements of even a dry cow and we maintain below the requirements throughout the rest of the grazing season in the mid December before they come into the lots it's questionable these cows can mobilize phosphorus for that short time period but just to something you will be deficient so if your cows come into these systems deficient you might have some long-term problems with phosphorus deficiencies and we'll let Carl talk about that later if we want to talk about deficiencies and how that affects the cows right Carl yes sir not a problem if we look around mid-ribs in 2008 primarily because I figured I could get more production or more bang from my buck compared to the millet so we added this in our cocktail mixes to give us some more producing a higher producing grass that should be more palatable late and also give me more quality because it's in the cocktail mix I can't tell if we're getting a better use of it it appears the cows are grazing it more readily than when we had the millets but the brown mid-ribs to give you a higher palatable plant so I'll show you what we have for numbers and if you look at the quality it does stand true from what we saw in the research on the brown mid-ribs our quality runs from anywhere from 12 to 14 percent protein compared to the 8 to 11 percent on the millets so we did get a higher quality diet here for the cows in reality they both met the requirements of the cows whether we get a higher quality diet it's kind of questionable but the costs were very similar in terms of pound produced to the cost that it cost to put it in if you look at the destability it's much more superior to the millets to the destability starting at 80 percent in October to about 72 percent by December 2nd remember the millets they were already at 70 percent in October and dropped down to the mid-50s by the first look at the calcium the phosphorus the sorghum sedan did give us a higher phosphorus content and we always were by the minimum requirements over the two years of our study or actually three years of data in the street trial also our calcium content was quite a bit higher you got to remember this is on the same ground so this plant is scavenging calcium better than the millet did from these soils and it's also doing better as well and millets are known to be pretty good scavengers for nutrients but I don't know if that's true when it comes to the minerals it might be probably better obviously with the nitrogen but the minerals they don't do quite as better as good as the sorghum sedans before I go in the legumes I forgot to put in the data sets on the serials which would be our oats Trita, Kaylee and Barley Central Grasslands Research Station annual winter handout which is going to be next week and we have those in there for the serials our serials since they're planted in July always were high nutritional value they run about 10 to 12 percent protein and about 60 to 70 percent digestibility throughout the grazing season and I apologize for that I should have had them in here but they do make a nice obviously a nice mix to put in these and they run into lately as strictly an oat and that's strictly a function of cost it's by far cheaper than Trita, Kaylee and Barley and it gives me a greater return on my cows in terms of a daily cost to feed these cows if you look at the legumes Kevin I've got a question here before we go on this is Tim up in Bodno on the sorghum sedan grass crosses how did you manage the prusic acid concerns after the frost was that a problem did you let the stuff dry down before you graze it what did you do with that it's a good question I've been asked that question because we used that you know we never let it dry down and in fact we're grazing by mid-October and in two of the years it was still green when they went to pasture but the sorghum sedan is seeded at four pounds an acre in the cocktail mix so it makes up about 15 percent of the plant and we have never had a problem with prusic acid toxicity and in fact what we've found is the cows actually don't select for that first they will select for if you have oats in the mix and the oats will be headed out they will select for the oats first they will then graze the turnips and they will select they will they will they will take parts of the sorghum sedan and so we thought about that and we've never had any problems with the sorghum sedan when it freezes down I've always been a cautionary when you freeze down you can get a higher concentration in the plant tissue but the plants are about two there are at least two feet tall Tim before they go on pasture and usually the recommendation on the sorghum sedans for prusic acid is two feet or more and my gut feeling is without having tested is my prusic acid is probably low enough anyway and that's a great question I think I might do in 2011 is actually test the sorghum sedan for the level of prusic acid and if a producer called me and asked me about that I would I would answer it the same way I would say be cautionary of the prusic acid potential or at least to make sure you got two feet of growth but we've been over the three years we haven't had any issues with it and we graze on the average go on Tim oh it might very well be then because it's incorporated in a mix do the selectivity of the grazing of the cows that they're going to the other stuff first and by the time they graze a frosted prusic acid plant it might have kind of dried down and cured out so to speak yeah although you know they're forced to consume seven to nine days so they'll have consume sorghum sedan in that first week because they'll they'll consume all of that we haven't consumed try to consume biomass then we move the fence so they would have graze the sorghum sedan in that first week I think the difference is the level that their consumption at any given time is small compared to the rest of their diet and so it's obviously being diluted down to some level even if it was high the consumption probably dilutes it down I'm guessing here Tim to some level but we've never seen even symptoms of it in the cows but those are all good questions and concerned questions and you know the literature also on the brown midribs is they tend to be lower in terms of crucifix acid as the older sorghum sedans as well so but I think next year Tim I think we'll do that we'll test those sorghum sedans to see what our level is thanks for the questions thanks for the questions we have to walk through security if you look at our legumes this is Calpe it's the winter annual warm season legume very popular in NRCS's mixes it is also our poorest quality legume bar none of all the legumes we've tested of course with this green its quality is about 15% but when that dries down it the quality crashes we're looking at about 7% by the late part of October and about 6.5% by the end of November it was our lowest quality legume in the trial if you look at the destability the destability becomes borderline by the end of October and it actually can become deficient late in the season on the flipping trial but it is very highly nutritious while it's green so if you're looking at planting these legumes and you're going to graze the Calpe obviously during the growing season this would not be a concern but if you're looking at a legume to graze late after a hard freeze this would not be a choice that I would select for look at calcium to phosphorus ratio like most of our legumes are going to be efficient in terms of the calcium and phosphorus both levels were above the minimum requirements throughout the grazing season do you really mess with their equipment because you're probably one of the more popular legumes used in the cocktail mixes today is the Harry Betts this is a cool season legume annual cool season legume often time is used in spring mixtures as well the beauty of Harry Betts is it re-grow is nice so if you can take a hard mix or your mix you can use it for late in the season the picture to your left is obviously a Harry Betts planner with a wheat into your bottom I believe it's Harry Betts planner with oats if you look at the nutritional status of Harry Betts it's by far superior to the cow pee 18% in the first of October to almost 13% in the end of November well above the requirements of lactating cow there are trials that show Harry Betts you'll also see it come back the following spring as well and some of these depending on how it's utilized look at the destability at average give or take about 70% throughout the grazing season you'll see most of these legumes we used once in our trials the reason for it was we were trying to find a legume that would fit the cow peas and regular soybeans were a bust it was cheap but it didn't produce a lot of biomass it became a weed the second year of our trial of course Harry Betts would use it no nine and that probably was our best option in 2010 we actually used ford soybean based on the results from Milo it appears to be the superior producing legume but like most warm season that didn't do very well in our cocktail mixtures when they were seated in July I didn't show you the ford soybean data Harry Betts in terms of quality if you look at calcium calcium was high in the Harry Betts and it did decline dramatically throughout the season of course phosphorus was very similar at 0.3 to 0.35 throughout the season in 2009 the last one what we did is compared with native range so we grazed these cows from mid-October to mid-December on native range as well and this was typical native range in the Catoa around the Central Grassland or June Grass Dominant so when we have some long winter or long fall cows have a very high nutritious diet until it freezes down and I'm going to show you the quality numbers here but one thing we did see on this trial is the cows did very well on native range in 2007 2008 and 2009 they averaged over two pounds a day gain also in this treatment in 2010 they were digging through snow a lot more but they still gained about three-quarters of a pound a day on native range the one treatment that was really a bust in 2010 because of the snow was the Foxtail Millet our cows actually lost on an average a third a pound a day and lost over three-quarters of a condition score in 2010 with the Foxtail Millet and so that it became risky when we had a lot of snowfall our cocktail mix did probably the best among all of them in terms of nutritional performance in 2010 because they gave us a better diversity of diet in 2010 but it was native range didn't do too bad as well however if you look at the quality of native range and this is a flaw of clipping data minimum requirements as you can see in the blue bar crew protein value in native range was adequate when we started the trial and became one in almost two points deficient in terms of protein however the cows gained weight on these treatments which tells you the cows are selecting for the green and I'm being around on this in the dryer the browner tissue no it's too late for that now okay Dave Dave could you mute your you're in 306 and you're it's bridge for 306 using the feed thanks Kevin I was on the phone to lend a macaw to try to get Dave to mute or somebody to mute that microphone hopefully they'll do it if you look at the percent the disability of native range once again that was deficient by the first week of the trial and stayed deficient throughout the season and traditionally we would typically say native range is not going to provide a high enough quality diet throughout much of the season but in our trials the cows actually did pretty good and last calcium is actually usually quite adequate for native range at 0.4 to 0.5 but if you see phosphorus here phosphorus is quite deficient on native range so most of the second half of the grazing season for native range in our trials we were already probably 30% deficient by the first of October and probably 100% deficient by the end of November and so phosphorus deficient will be an issue on native range I got just I'm going to end my talk I'm going to show you some pictures of single and dual cropping in 2008 to your left this is a turnip treatment and to your right is our dual cropping system which is Ford Marley with the turnips planted into him and what we found in our trials if you do a dual cropping system and you don't burn down that foxtail Marley or your oak germination is poor and success is terrible we produce about 10% of the biomass that we would have on the single cropping system so what we have figured out by 2008 is we have to burn down that crop once we harvest it look at this picture this picture shows you the fence line there on both sides would be the oat crop in 2009 and the green part is where we sprayed roundup and obviously the brown parts where we did not spray roundup and we did get a catch of course of the crop when we burn it down and actually in 2010 where we had an adequate moisture supply our dual cropping system our production on our second crop or our cover crop was almost as good as a single cropping by itself which made a very cost-effective as a dual cropping system but my point on the dual cropping systems if you don't have any moisture and your ground is marginal it is very risky to put a second crop on there because you're not going to get the return and if you do you need to spray that down so you kill that first crop or it will take the rest of the moisture out of that profile and you're going to have a poor germination of that crop so from there I can open it up for any questions if I have time I think the real issue are there any questions for Kevin? yes yeah please we got a question here Kevin at the Carrington RE Center Kevin did you notice any problems with volunteers the following year in certain crops or do I just suck at farming and don't know how to farm no I'm sorry I can't get my picture my face up here but the only volunteer we had was the Red Clover does Harry Betch because that comes back is that a problem? Harry Betch will come back the following year however in our trial you know we consumed we grazed that all off and because you're sitting it's fairly late we didn't see any volunteer Harry Betch well I mean we shouldn't say any but it was less than 5% volunteer in the Harry Betch the Red Clover we had almost 100% you know volunteer the next year but it's a biennial plant so I expected that on my mix so the only volunteer we had was the Clover Harry Betch to some small degree the rest of the plants we had very little volunteer we did have a little volunteer actually surprisingly of the Foxtail Millet because it does go to seed and we saw some Foxtail Millet to fall in here but it was less than 2% got a question up here about no yeah I was just wondering if you've looked at using malting barley in under your mixes and if you haven't why not just because it seems to be so much of a cheaper option than the Forge Barley that's a great question I absolutely agree with you you know we did the Forge Barley because the Forge Barley you know were popular in the late 90's into the 2000's and there was newer varieties released so we tested some of the Forge Barley varieties to see if the newer varieties were more effective but the cost is very prohibitive in my view and I think if I'm going to put a barley in there I would go with more of a traditional grain barley because your cost is much cheaper and if you look at some of the literature on the grain barley versus the Forge Barley there isn't much difference in terms of quality of the feed however the Forge Barley tends to be more productive but it's only on an average about 15 to 20% and it by no means covers the cost of the seed so if I was going to go with the barley economically wise I would go with the more of a grain barley good point any other questions? we have another question at Carrington Kevin can you just speak out loud what seed mix would you recommend to try another crop after barting for 2011? did you hear that? I did not Carl what? can anybody what seed mix would you recommend in 2011 to fall off after barley Kevin? after a barley grain crop or a barley Forge crop? barley grain one thing I've noticed when you're following an actual grain crop is your growing season is shorter and it's cooler and I've almost eliminated all warm season crops as options just because I don't know if they can pay for themselves but to me a good mix following that would be a turnip radish oats combination we put the sunflowers in all of ours because it's cheap and it gives a nice little diversity in there but I would go with the brassicas I'd go with oat or an oats because it's cheap a sunflower and if I'm going to put a legume in there which I'm still struggling on trying to find the right legume I would go with any kind of cheap legume that you can put in there trying to think of what else I'd you know to me that would be my cheapest and most productive mix if you want to go with the warm season you know I would probably go with a millet especially the Siberian millet because it requires the shortest growing degree days to produce a pound of grain it's about 50 days for the Siberian it's about 70 days for the common and then of course sorghum sedans about 70 to 80 days so if you want to put a warm season in there it would be a foxtail millet the Siberian variety and it's cheap can I answer your question? yes it did thank you are there any other questions for Kevin?