 This is Carl Hoppe, extension livestock specialist there at the Carrington Research Extension Center, part of North Dakota State University Extension. Today I'm welcome to visit you about feeds and alternative feeds and cost to gain. This is for backgrounding cattle, and this is the fall of 2022. We're going to be looking at our new crop calves. As we always place them on feed, opportunities exist to feed calves, put weight on calves, and hopefully make a little bit of profit when we're feeding calves. It'd be wonderful if we could make a lot of profit, but one of the things that drive profit is the price of feeds. And unfortunately, feed prices continue to follow the corn price, and if you look, as we'll see in a few slides, the corn price is moving higher here to year. So our feed costs are moving up as well. Even though cattle prices have increased somewhat, our feed prices are moving up as well. Let's just take a walk down memory lane. In 2017, the corn price was $2.88 a bushel, and alfalfa hay was $80 a ton. Putting weight on cattle was actually low cost back then because of the price of corn. Of course, at that time, we thought corn was actually price kind of high, but it was $2.88 cents for October of 2017. Later, the corn price moved up $0.20 to $3 on a penny for bushel. Again, our feed costs all creeped up a little bit, but that was still manageable when you're looking at $3 bushel corn that drives the feed price. In 2019, prices of grain went up another $0.30, slowly cranking up, and of course, the rest of the feeds followed suit as well. Now, in 2020, prices moved a little bit. I believe we had the pandemic at about that time, and you can see the rest of our feeds just kind of follow through. But at the beginning of 2021, the price of corn went from $3 up to $5.75. Alfalfa hay is now at $175 a ton, grass hay at $125 a ton, wheat meds at $190, and maybe soy hulls $165 and corn size at $55. Canola mills at $255 as well as dried stillage grains at $230 a ton. Now, this is the year of 2022, and if we look at the prices, our corn price has gone up again at $6.40. Alfalfa is $1.70, and all the rest of the prices has creeped up as well. It slowly happened, but over a five-year period, we certainly did increase our feed prices. Not quite double, but about 90% of what the value is. And of course, this year, across North Dakota, we had another difficult year with varying degrees of drought. We had a lot of moisture in early May, but as the rest of the season turned out, we might have had a good early hay crop, but as the season progressed, our hay crops decreased. Some places received rain, so it had a good silage crop, other places, not so much. So again, your costs are always based on production and the amount of dollars you've got into it. Everybody has their own unique cost when it comes to pricing feeds that they raise on farm. Today, I tend to focus on feeds out on a market value price, what you could buy it for or sell it for, and we do rations according to that. We do have the opportunity to buy feed in North Dakota. We have a lot of crop processing plants across North Dakota where they produce co-product feeds. Our biggest producer across the state would be the distillers grains, which would be from corn ethanol plants that ferment corn into ethanol. And the byproduct is going to be distillers grains, either dried distillers or modified distillers or even wet distillers. And they actually have a product called corn syrup, which has nutrition analysis, very similar to the other distillers grains. We actually have wheat mills across North Dakota. They're priced very competitively and are available. You prefer to have a pelleted form rather than a mill form in those things. If you're in the Red River Valley, you have access to sugar beet pulp. That pulp is very digestible in a backgrounding ration. Unfortunately, high freight costs kind of reduce the availability of how far you could chip that and still have a competitive feed. If you notice, the western part of North Dakota doesn't have access to all these feeds, like the central or eastern part of North Dakota does. It's not near as available. But like everything, you can always truck it wherever you need to if it is cost effective. These are our co-product feeds in North Dakota. We have five distillers plants. We have five wheat mid plants, flower plants that have wheat mids as a co-product. We have a soybean hull plant. Soybean or the crushed soybeans, hulls are a byproduct. In a few years, we're going to have a couple more plants that have even more byproducts available. We do have a plant that produces wet corn gluten feed, but most of that is already priced out and sold into the Minnesota dairy market. I talked a little bit about beet tailings and beet pulp. There is potato byproducts if you're close to a potato processing plant where they make French fries and hash browns and the like. And we do create quite a bit of meals. High protein meals across North Dakota. For looking for cost comparative, usually the cheapest source of protein is going to be distillers grains. But let's visit about that in a few minutes. When feeding a calf, we figure a 700 pound calf would eat about 3% of his body weight. Now on a dry matter intake, that'd be a little bit less than that, about 2.7% of their body weight. So if we're looking at a 700 pound steer, he'd be eating around 17 to 18 pounds of dry matter. Now, even though we feed feed, we kind of measure by the amount of energy that they consume. They either need 57 megacals a day or 14.12 pounds of TDN, and they need a crude protein in the ration that's up to about 13.1%, crude protein. Now I'm doing some calculations here, and I'm doing the energy cost of what it costs to feed cattle, as well as what it costs to feed protein. But my point here is that the energy cost is the biggest single driver of costs in feeding a calf. So any way you can get energy at a lower cost, that'll still put gain on calves, is going to be your advantage. Now there's an anomaly to all this thing, and that is if we just purchased the feed for energy, it'd cost $1.99. We purchased the feed for just protein, it only costs us $1.43. But in reality, when we purchase the energy, we actually get protein coming along with it at no charge. So you start doing the math, it turns out to be that the amount of protein the calf needs is 0.33 pounds per day, and 1.74 pounds of that protein comes along with the energy that we've purchased. So we need to buy supplemental protein of about 0.59 pounds. The cost of protein is $0.44 per pound of protein, which means that we spend an additional $0.26 a day just to get the protein needs to the calf. So my point here is that energy costs about $2 a day. Protein costs are only $0.26 to increase the protein content of the ration up to where the calf needs to meet its requirements. I do like to make a point about water. Water is definitely needed for our calves, and at $0.02 a day, that's really a minimal cost. Some places where water might be higher than that, but still when you're looking at $2.25 or $2.50 a day for feeding a calf, water at two pennies certainly isn't a big factor. So be sure to have plenty of clean, fresh water available for calves. I calculated here the feed cost per pound of nutrient. I've got three, four feeds that I selected, canola meal, wheat mince, corn grain, and dried distillage grains. That's DDGs. So if you look across here, I'm trying to do the math on an as-fed basis, and that's how you would buy it. Canola meal as-fed would be 38% crude protein. Energy content is 62%. Corn is quite a bit higher than that, but canola meal has a lot of fiber in it, and that's why it's quite a bit less. Cost per ton less or this month is $3.25 a ton. Cost per pound calculates at $0.16. Cost per pound of energy is $0.42, and that was for protein. And the cost per pound of TDN is $0.20. You can do the same math with wheat mince, and again it's 17% crude protein on an as-fed basis. 75% TDN on an as-fed basis, and the cost per ton is $200. That means a cost per pound of only $0.10. And when we do the math for cost per pound of crude protein, it's $0.58. The cost of energy, or TDN, with TDN cents for total distilled nutrients, ends up being 0.133. Corn grain the same way. That's $6.40 a bushel is $228 a ton, and we calculate out the cost per pound of energy, and it's $0.14.9. If you look at the cost for crude protein, yes, that is on the miscalculation. That is what it is, because we don't buy corn for its protein content. We buy corn for its energy content. It's actually low on protein, but as you can see, one of the cheaper costs of TDN. Now, as I look at the dried distillers grains, they're usually priced very competitive. So if you look at a cost per pound of crude protein, there are 0.469 cents, 46.9 cents, which is actually a little bit higher than canola milk. But if we're looking at cost per pound of TDN, it's 0.145. So what I find interesting here is our co-products are actually priced fairly reasonable when it comes to cost per pound of TDN. But as we're trying to calculate the extra energy and ration, we can't just make the ration totally on wheat mids or DDGs. We have to blend it with other feeds. And I'll talk about some different targets of gain and the types of combinations that we need to make that type of gain in a little bit. As you can see here, if we're looking for protein sources, canola milk is the cheapest source of protein. If we're looking for TDN, the co-products in corn are by far the cheapest sources of energy. Let's talk about some feed issues that are unique for the fall of 2022. I always like to point out that we should sample our feeds and feed test. Then take a court sample of your feed and send it to a feed diagnostic laboratory. If you don't know of one in North Dakota, please contact your local county extension agent or myself. I'm Carl Hoppe and at the Carrington Research Extension Center. And we can align you with a company that does feed testing. We usually would do NIR, most recent costs that I ran across would be $21 a sample. That certainly can save you in balancing a ration that has the adequate energy and protein, as well as calcium fosters needed to make cattle grow. Now, we should test for nitrates that's in our forages. Some of our annual nitrates might be high in nitrate nitrogen. It's always good to check that out, especially when you have a season like this year where it rained early on. But once July came around, it was hit and miss for rainstorms. That can always lead to higher nitrate nitrogen as long as you blend it with lower feeds. As long as you blend that with feeds that have a lower concentration of nitrates, you can feed these higher nitrates with low nitrate feeds. I have found out that our test weights for corn this year has actually been pretty good. It turned around and rather than having light test weight corn like we do in numerous years this year, it's actually pretty heavy test, which means we're going to have good TDN values in our hay. Feed quality has always depended upon when it's cut. I usually ask the question, was a hay cut in June, July, August, or September? And obviously as the season goes on, the hay quality decreases. So your best haze are put up in June and then it decreases as the plant becomes mature as time goes on. You can test for nitrates as well through feed tests and that's a minimal charge. Now, some more issues for fall of 2022. We do have continued high feed costs. Like I said earlier about our feed costs are about 90% higher than they were two years ago. I don't believe our cattle prices are 90% higher, but that's one of the issues we have to deal with. If you're looking to buy any co-products or even feed, be sure to source supplies early. It appears supplies are available, but they might be sold out over the next two weeks and you just can't buy it on the spot market. Always plan ahead. Freight costs are high this year because fuel costs are the highest they've been for a while. So be sure to consider freight costs when you're hauling it any distance at all. And grain prices are high. That's just due to international demand. And like I say, hay prices always follow the corn prices because you're buying energy and corn sets the price. Well, here's some rations that I have for calves. This particular first ration is a grass hay diet that's 13 pounds, basically two-thirds grass hay, one-third wheat mitts, and they'll do about two pounds a day gain with a decent grass hay that's of 62, 58% TDN. Your feed conversions are 10 to 1. You can see the ration energy content. And the feed costs per day is $1.51 or costs per pound of gain is 75.5 cents. Now, if we pick up the average day of the gain to 2.6 and use a little bit of alfalfa hay with the grass hay and throw in a little bit more wheat mitts, we can lower our feed to gain and take less feed to put on a pound of gain because we increase the energy density in the ration, and now it costs $1.73 a day, but our feed cost per pound of gain is 66 cents. Usually, as we increase rates of gain, our cost per pound of gain decreases. Here's another ration using less grass hay and more wheat mitts, and now our goal is 2.8 pounds per day. It doesn't seem like there's much difference between 2.6 and 2.8 pounds per day gain, but if you look at the far right-hand column, you can see where feed costs per pound of gain are 5 cents per head per day less, excuse me, per pound less, but with the same feed costs for the cattle. So it's worthwhile to bring calves up on feed and target their gain to know where your most efficient cost per pound of gain is. Well, that's one set of rations. Let's look at some more. Here's one I use alfalfa hay and corn silage. 1.8 pounds per day gain. You see it only costs a dollar and a half a day. Our feed conversions, that's because corn silage is so wet, it takes a lot of feed to put on a pound of gain on an as-bed basis. That'd be a lot different on a dry matter basis, of course. Feed costs per pound of gain is 83 cents. That's the highest we've had so far. That's because of the feeds we're using. Corn silage and alfalfa hay, and it's only 1.2 pounds per day gain, isn't necessarily a cheap ration. Now let's go to another ration. It's going to be 2.6 pounds per day gain using grass hay at 6 pounds, alfalfa hay at 4 pounds, corn grain at 2, and wheat mids at 8 pounds. Those combinations balance nicely for a 45 megacal ration, and our feed cost per day is $1.75 with our cost per pound of gain at 67 cents. But just think, we just changed those proportions a little bit and went from 6 pounds of grass hay to 4 pounds of grass hay, and went from 2 pounds of corn grain to 6 pounds of corn grain, and decreased our wheat mids from 8 pounds to 6 pounds. We could have a 3 pounds a day gain. Our ration would be a 50 megacal ration, and the cost would go up at $1.89, but our cost per pound of gain would actually be the lowest of these three different examples. Now here's another set of rations. Some people in other states would use alfalfa hay and corn grain, alfalfa hay is the queen that provides protein and the ration is rough each, and corn grain obviously provides energy. So we're doing a 2.3 average daily gain. Our feed cost is $1.94. That's like most expensive ones so far today at 80 cents per pound of gain. Now again, that's using corn at $6.40 a bushel and alfalfa hay at $175 a ton. So that's a pretty good quality alfalfa hay and priced accordingly. Well, here's another ration we used just a little bit of alfalfa hay and 11.5 pounds of corn grain, but we had brought out an extra protein supplement that would supply extra limestone of the ration as well as trace minerals and vitamins that go along with a normally balanced protein supplement. You see our feed to gain is better. It takes less pounds to feed to put a ton of gain. Our gain goal here is 3.2. Our cost is $2.56 a day with a cost to gain of 80 cents. So while it costs more to do a 3.2 pound of gain, our actual cost of gain is only 80 cents. Now if you go to another ration just below with a 3.5, you can see our cost to gain gets down to 0.72, but our costs per day still keep going up. It's a real challenge trying to figure out what rates of gain our calves need without getting them too fleshy and decreasing value when we sell these calves after backgrounded calves. The goal usually is around 2.8 pounds per day gain. Here's another set of rations. We're using grass hand distillers grains. 1.7 gain per pound a day would be similar for a good heifer-growing ration, and this would cost a dollar 56 a day, but our feed cost is 0.86 per pound a gain. Now if we increase a little bit of corn grain in the ration, our gain goes up to 2.8, and our feed cost is 65 cents per pound a gain. One of the cheaper ones we've had, if we go down to the next level, we've just picked it up to about 3.4 pounds per day gain, and we got a 0.59, even though it's one of the most expensive ones at $2 in a dime a day, our feed cost per pound a gain is lower. This is a real challenge. If you're going to finish cattle, you need to have an idea of where your feed costs and feed efficiencies are and where your targeted rates of gains are to get your growth. Let me just talk about rates of gain goals. If you're doing less than 2 pounds average daily gain, we're either looking at growing replacement heifers or growing calves for the grass market. It works really well. If you're going to do that and be successful, you either have to have a real market swing for those calves when it gets to Mimei and people want to pay extra for grass cattle, or you're trying to set cattle up so you can market the grass you have as a low price way to put extra weight gain on calves. A little bit of insight there. Whenever you're trying to put cattle out on pasture, make sure the rates of gains in the feed yard are less than what the rates of gains will be out on pasture. That way the calves will continue to keep growing on pasture when it's available. Now, a lot of our pastures would like to produce an average of 2 pounds per day average daily gain over the summer. But as the summer progresses on, the value of our feeds get less, and it takes more, our feed conversions or rates of gain just get poorer. Now, medium rates of gain would be somewhere between 2 and 3 pounds per day average daily gain, and that's a great way to grow cattle without adding extra body condition or fat. If you go greater than 3 pounds per day average daily gain, you have a propensity to put extra fat on calves, and once calves get a little too much fat, they can reduce their subsequent feedlot performance when somebody else buys them. Now, if some cattle are progenically predisposed to handle higher rates of gain, you won't see them get extra fat, they'll just grow. And another point here is if you're looking for grading in a feed yard, as long as we keep the weight on, usually our grades will maintain themselves or if not better. So my point to this whole thing is know what your historical performance of your calves are. If they get fleshy after 120 days, certainly don't put them on 3 pounds per day of gain, probably 2.5 to 2.8. If the calves have got some real growth characteristics to them and some frame, they might be able to handle higher rates of gain for a shorter period of time. Know your calves, know the propensity for gain and the compensatory gain that can happen and manage them accordingly. So, now let's just talk about targeting gain with a balanced ration. When you do that, you get your better gains and your better feed efficiency. Now, I always like to say there's got to be some flexibility in this whole thing because we're going to put weight on. What's our goal? Are we trying to put 3 pounds a day guy, 3 pounds average daily gain for 60 days? That's 180 pounds. Or are we looking to do a 1.5 pound average daily gain for 120 days? That's 180 pounds again too. So, there's different ways you can manage cattle. That's the beauty of backgrounding. It's up to you to decide how you want to manage these, how big the calves come in, what your market date is, look at the futures, and how that plays into it. But the one thing I always try to work on is that when we look at our feed costs, that dictates just where we are at when it comes to putting on our cost per pound a gain for feed. Floor rates again just delay marketing of calves when they get to the same weight. So, that's a great way to change or get cattle into a different marketing window that might have a higher price view. If you're looking for co-products, I certainly provide a co-product list to our county extension agents in North Dakota. I believe it's on the website that you found this video. You can certainly look at what that is. If you're going to be looking for feeds, it's always a great idea to contract them during the summer lows, although some of our ethanol plants have decided we don't contract anymore just because of the way things have worked out over the past few years. Maybe that'll change in the future, but always be cognizant of that. Location and freight costs this year are almost staggering at how they've increased. So, be sure to do costs for feed delivered to the feed yard when you're pricing it. A lot of my examples are priced FOB at the plant, and we just work that way. So, if you're looking at high-fiber and protein sources for backgrounding calves, that's really our co-products. The starches have been milled out of them, so it's high in fiber, which is usually a fermentable fiber, and they're high in protein, so it's a good source of extra protein for your calves. I always like to encourage we have the feeds available in North Dakota at their price competitively by all means, please use them. Let me just sum up by saying good rush and provide great results, especially when you have good feedbunk management. I always like to comment that when we're looking at feeding calves in a feedbunk, I like to look at the slickbunk theory. That's where we get the best gain of calves at about 90%, 95% of full feed intake. So, how do we do that with a group of calves? We just kind of want to make sure the feedbunk just gets slicked up when it's time to feed the calves again. They're looking for extra feed. Of course, when you're starting calves on feed, it's always good to keep them a little bit hungry just so you can pick out who the sick calves are, the ones that may not be feeling well, and when they're not feeling well, they usually don't come up to eat right away. So, good way to find out calves that need a little extra attention, maybe antibiotics. Bedding, I've always found out it's a lot easier to keep calves from getting sick than it is to treating them after they've gotten sick. So, if it needs bedding, they have a comfortable place to lay down on. By all means, please do that. A little extra comfort there when calves are just placed on feed, certainly works. Of course, water is always different. Please clean it out and get it clean. And for some reason, cattle always have to rinse their mouth out before they take a drink. And of course, our water bowls always get a little bit dirty. Caves don't like to have multi-feeds when they're young. Old cows can handle some multi-feeds calves that can create a digestive upset in calves. So, please consider about reducing giving multi-feed to your calves. Like I said earlier, it's always good to keep calves healthy in one way to do that. Make sure they have a good environment to sleep in, windbreak, bedding, feed provided at the same time every day. Cattle are creatures of habit. They like to be fed at the same time. When you increase the energy density of the ration, do it slowly, and you can use something called a step-up ration. That's where nutritionists will have a certain megacal ration after the calves are adapted to that ration. They'll step it up to a higher density energy ration. And that's what they call step-up, and there might be several steps to that change in feed delivery. By all means, please use a balanced ration. You just can't kind of swing it and think you can make it happen. Just by saying, I think our feeds are about this good this year, we're going to feed them that. Cattle like to eat what they have been eating so if they came off of grass, they'll want to eat grass. Grass doesn't necessarily put on a lot of weight in the fall time. So they at some point have to either find out what a higher power, excuse me, a higher energy feed, more power feed to put weight cane on the calves. And of course, we've got to think about our weight cane goals. And usually a better weight cane decreases our cost. Now, if we want to improve our feed efficiency, we can use ionophores, bovetech remensin. They certainly provide a 5% to 7% improvement in feed conversions. Implants, that'll increase average daily gain and improve feed conversion as well. If you had coxidiosis, you might want to include something. If you've ever put, let me put it this way, if you've ever had coxidiosis, you will add things to the feeds. You don't have to deal with coxidiosis. Dequinate or impolium work really well, prevention. Ionophores do provide some control. So, in summary, in fall 2022, feed prices are high again this year. And like always, higher average daily gains usually have the lowest cost per pound of gain. I provided a whole bunch of rations for you to consider and there's even more combinations you can have based on what type of feed resources you have. Remember, co-products are high in protein which is great for backgrounding calves. And they're high in fiber which prevents acidosis in calves and can balance a good ration. So, good feeding management leads to good calf gains.