How To Sign Nebraska Banking Form

How to industry sign banking nebraska form later

good evening everybody uh thank you for joining this webinar tonight um we'll be discussing for development and nutrition my name is grace whitlow and i'm a knowledge transfer manager in the uh hdb's beef and lamb team and tonight we're going to talk hearing from dr rick funston rick is a professor and reproductive physiologist at the university of nebraska he divides his time between extension and research his research on lighter heifer development is receiving national attention as well as his research on fetal programming effects on post-natal car performance including carcass characteristics and reproduction um he also provides subject matter expertise for educational programs in cow-calf production management for the west central district and statewide expertise in beef reproductive management groups um so for the plan tonight um rick will take us through his presentation and there's going to be some time for questions at the end um i'll also take any other questions if we don't have time later on after the webinar um if you do think of a question you can type it into the question box at any time i'll just see um if you can't see this box you may need to click on a little orange arrow to open up the box then click on the questions drop down and you'll see where you can type your question in and as usual you will all be muted throughout the webinar so don't worry we can't hear you um so please also use this box to let us know if you're having any technical problems as well um and we'll do our very best to help you um my usual advice if you are struggling is just log out and log back in that seems to do the trick um so to kick us off i'm just going to start with a poll um and it'd be really great if you could take part um so i'm just launch up the poll now so the poll is do you currently carve at two years old i'll just give you um a minute to fill that out uh yes we're getting some great participation on this poll so thank you okay that's about a minute um so uh from the poll you can see that around 54 percent of you have said yes you do carve it to 29 no but you would like to so hopefully this presentation will be helpful for you uh and 11 no and don't feel confident in doing so um but so with that in mind uh without further ado i'm gonna hand over to rick and present his presentation that's over to you rick thank you okay so you can see my slide full screen yep so a little background um what was your colleague's name that came over here a year or two ago sarah pick terribly that's she was uh seeking advice on production practices that might be implemented in your country and i believe contacted lee leachman in colorado and she spent a couple days with me and i took her to some ranches and that was the question was what the poll was on uh having his two or three and the number she presented was only 35 percent capped as two and looks like the audience tonight would be more than that but um i will just say i'm we have not done a lot of comparison between the two systems there's a lot of papers or some papers written on it back in the 70s when it switched practices to cab as twos rather than threes bob short was one of the famous bobs at mile city montana did a really nice paper on calving at three versus two an economic advantage far outweighs calving earlier provided you don't have um a lot of dystocia or calf death loss those things which which really aren't an issue with today's genetics and epds that we have reliable calving ease animals so all of these studies would be calving at two-year-olds so here's a shot of our goodmans and sandhills laboratory which is a 13 000 acre ranch in the sand hills many of these studies were done with these composite sem angus semental angus primarily red composites okay so i'm at the west central research and extension center if we look at a map of of uh nebraska it's down to the middle center where the confluence of the north and south platte rivers which come out of the uh out of colorado and all those stars indicate locations we have beef cattle research pretty pretty interesting agriculture is number one in our state uh more miles of river than any state in the united states more irrigated acres than any state in the united states and there's more variation in precipitation from the west border to the east border than there is from the the eastern border which is the missouri river to uh to the uh atlantic ocean so just a map of the goodmans and sandhills laboratory the number one cow calf county is uh above that red [Music] star it's cherry county more more cows and calves than any county in the united states so beautiful place we did have a reasonable year last year due to early precipitation but it surely dried up and we had a terrible winter storm last week but today we're we're basking in 40 degree temperatures so interesting i moved here from north dakota or a time ago and football is very important to the state we have no professional football team but we do have our beloved huskers and some other atmospheric events that are rather unsettling at times so known for a lot of great research on beef systems work which involves heifer development as part of it but looking at uh production management decisions and not only how the its immediate impacts on on the production system but how does it impact those animals going clear to slaughter going uh to fertility and the heifers feed efficiency not a lot of institutions doing real production relevant work because it's difficult to get funded but it is important to our producers in in the state and across the world i i'm a reproductive physiologist and this is the most important trait in any of beef production if we look at efficiency or improving efficiency if we look at the second paragraph by simply increasing number of progeny per dam through either selection heterosis from crossing or better management will increase efficiency of production you know it's absolutely a numbers game and i have an entire talk on how to how to achieve this uh improved efficiency and a lot of it involves not only pregnancy but when animals become pregnant now to get to our topic tonight uh we often don't think about this but our second biggest cost in beef production is uh depreciation behind feed and it's a pretty simple calculation and it involves what we're going to talk about tonight what about the replacement cost whether it's purchased or raised minus the salvage value divided divided by how many years it's in the herd so longevity is very important to this equation as is um as is uh what what that replacement costs to put into the herd and then what you get for them as a salvaged animal whether it's a late bread or or perhaps it's a uh an animal that that didn't get pregnant so the average cow age is only five and a half years i'd it's probably not much different in your country so those cattle in a sixteen percent uh bred heifer replacement rate we see a a lot of younger animals in the herd and uh what if we were able to change that from 20 to 15 replacement rate we'd have older cows that wean heavier calves we'd have more pounds to sell and those older cows to a point um breed back better so before we get into some management decisions i guess you got to ask yourself what is the appropriate replacement is it really raising a replacement heifer purchasing a bread heifer or purchasing a pear or something that's had a calf or two one of the most overvalued animals and and largely i'm not disappointed in this because i sell a lot of first caf repairs but a lot of uh the highest valued animals are those first calf heifer pairs that can be a challenge to breed back now there's been a lot of economic analysis looking at buying versus raising replacements and jack whittier did some nice work when he was at colorado uh he recently retired from nebraska but basically showed it was a wash i mean you could basically buy source bread heifers about as cheap as you could raise them whenever everything was considered the one thing is absent in that analysis though that i've been talking a lot about is if we don't keep replacements we we could then go to a terminal sire system so we don't have to worry about calving ease which gives up pounds of calf wean that terminal system can have a huge impact on on an operation so i don't know what the critical number is probably most producers shouldn't be raising replacements or even on their own herd because of what you're giving up with genetic potential i think i asked jim graham who's an economist from texas what that magical number was and he said 250 had a cow herd needed before you could consider raising replacements and i thought wow that's a lot of cows and that's way way above the national average and he says it comes down to economies of scale how many bowls do you need for 250 head you know it's where they're having partial use of a bull you probably need uh what uh maybe 10 10 moles in that or well for that replacement rate of 15 percent that would be 45 heifers sorry so you'd only need you know about uh three or four bowls or three bowls i guess so this is our cheapest feed resource and we're opened up again we were at a point of 16 inches of snow sitting on top of this but corn residue and we've done work developing heifers on on corn residue as well jim gosi set up a replacement selection criteria get rid of the daughters of bad marked cows and what are they they need help calving they calculate they fail to wean a calf they need help nursing they wean a light calf and have attitude problems and beyond that um get rid of the big ones big birth and big frame cattle call the youngest those born late in the calving season select daughters of older cows and that might be counterintuitive to what people call genetic improvement but jim's jim's the defense was you know that cow has been in a hurt a long time reproduction is lowly heritable maybe if we select phenotypically ultimately all the genetic side together of those animals that are doing the best in your environment maybe we'll select for for better replacement females and on a on a heifer we don't want them all pregnant and that's counterintuitive to some people as well but if we get them all pregnant we're probably not putting any selection pressure on them um we shoot for uh you know 85 90 pregnancy rate anytime if if a beef female is not pregnant the only time she stands a potential to be profitable or she never did get pregnant these yearling heifers run in in a lower input environment are yearlings and that has been a very successful enterprise on many many ranches in the united states and then open female is not necessarily a liability so then we need maybe some pigmented eyes and utter if we've got some white on the cattle and then we got to have animals to be able to eat some of this poor quality feed that that our beef industry exists in because we aren't in great competition with other industries we think a lot about reselecting that replacement female but really on a commercial scenario that one b female her genetic contribution is inconsequential compared to what the sire contributes because of the number of animals that bull will sire and then his relationship with those heifers so we got to put the genetic selection on on the uh sire and not worry so much about the beef female if she gets pregnant in a timely manner early in the breeding season and that's what we're going to get into and one of the indicators of a more productive animal whether it's a steer or heifer is when they were born born in your calving time period those heifers born in the first cycle were heavier pre-breeding they're more cycling they had higher peg rate had more calvin the first 21 days they weaned a heavier calf and they bred back sooner so out of everything we can select for barring knowing nothing else about a b female we need age is very important an agent and one other criteria we'll get to in a second so how do we get those animals to be born early well i don't know what products you have available to synchronize in england i guess i should have done a little bit of homework but uh too busy shoveling snow i guess but for anything that's had a calf this seven day co-sink plus cedar is really hard to beat now missouri has come out with my phone's been ringing off the hook and i chewed them out for developing yet another protocol but the seven and seven which is a 14 day protocol um there's some evidence that uh that has a slightly greater conception rate but still the numbers are pretty small and then anything that's um not had a calf i like the longer term progestin i don't know if you have mga or cedars available but the 14 day cedar or the mga prostaglandin protocol invite you to write down that repro website we used to house it here at north platte but it's part of a national reproduction task force befreepro.org it has all of these synchronization protocols and a lot of the proceedings from national meetings that are on a variety of subjects so hopefully you can listen to them slides are there the one protocol that isn't there is one i recommend you know a lot of times we only associate synchronization with ai well and i believe this firmly that over half of the benefit of an ai program is the fact that they're synchronized so why don't we do it with natural service it's a simple protocol turn the bulls in five days later give prostaglandin we've done this at the goodmanson ranch in a 45-day breeding season for a number of years now and we're running in the 90 plus pregnancy rates mile city uh did this when i was up there but 32 day breeding season three different calving herds over eighty-five percent pregnancy rate very simple you won't abort the animals being bred that short a period and that's a question i often get the other question i often get is how many more bowls do i need and you don't need more bowls so you just uh 1 to 21 to 25 on a running age bull and then rule of thumb that bulls age in months as a yearling he can breed that many heifers or cows the other thing i said as an indicator of of what we select for replacements my advocation is to read them all expose all the heifers only keep the ones born in the first cycle and then the others are marketing opportunities whether they're pregnant or or they're open and this is some bob cushman data from u.s meat animal research center just showing that when that animal got pregnant her first time if she got pregnant in the first 21 days she had greater longevity and by the time she weaned her sixth cap she had weaned another calf weight equivalent so very very very important um event of when they get pregnant their first time i i often get i was in discussion with producer the other day says well i i i'm just gonna have a 30-day breeding season and and then like you said just just keep those that get pregnant in that short period i'll be selecting selecting for fertility i said yes you will but is that bread female bread late outside your desired calving season is she worth more as a marketing opportunity than someone else and that's a question we have to ask and we have to um we have to you know speculate what a bread animal or an or an open animal is going to be worth i got a big ranch i work with every year that up until this last year didn't turn cleanup bulls out after ea he said those yearling heifers are worth more and get them off the ranch they're worth more open than they are to mess with the bowl and they put bowls with them last year and they said we're not putting bowls with them this year just just this touts the benefit of ai but i would say it touts the benefit of synchronization those that were were bread ai their lifetime weaning weight and number of calves weaned due to the time they became pregnant was much greater than those that were with natural and those animals that get pregnant early they have a longer postpartum interval to get pregnant again it takes the profit from too early calving cows to cover the loss of one leg cavity and a cow that calves in her first cycle her entire life will give you essentially two more calves you know a lot of things this is some older data about bellows there were three bobs at mile city bob bellows bob short bob stag miller kind of the founders of reproduc ion but these were all things that bellows outlined events that had to happen and and what needed to happen between those periods for successful breeding and conception and one of the most important periods there we have very little control of but it was from um from postpartum period to weaning we tend to manage the weaning period to breeding but what do we do from calving to weaning and that series of events happening during that time really has a huge impact on that heifer what started way back um gene deutscher challenged this two-thirds of mature weight uh the older data said if you don't have them grown up to two-thirds of mature weight you're going to have more dystocia uh more death loss and not as good a preg rate well was that true today is that true today or 10 years ago challenging this down to 53 percent of mature weight no difference in pregnancy over to the fourth pregnancy uh no difference in in uh retention it's been a concern of how that heifer is reared does it affect its longevity no and i just tell people my gosh uh do the math if we have and this may not fit your breeding season or calving time but we wean in november and breed in may that heifer never has to gain more than a pound and a half a day but a lot of times we haven't gained in two and three pounds a day locked up in a feedlot somewhere work then became what about pattern of gain um showing that that blue line they did it with less speed and uh 12 less feet no and no difference in pregnancy rate or time of conception actually first service conception rate was greater in those in that late game so they actually they actually exhibited a what we call in sheep a flushing effect going from a lower gain up to a higher gain now it's interesting and longevity was greater and those heifers developed in an environment more similar as the cow herd we've done work in a dry lot corn residue a lot lower input in on corn residue people said well those are crossfit animals you say are more fertile what about more straight angus that's what these were those on corn stocks were lighter had breeding which ones bred better um there were less cycling so we'd expect potentially we we um not damaged but we didn't develop that effort to a point she was pubertal so just some gain periods those in the corn stalks below two pounds well below and uh weight at preg check you know they catch up provided they're given the resources pre-calving they were almost as heavy which bred better those lighter heifers bred better and that leads up to some really interesting work going on we tend to think of that heifer development period from weaning to breeding but what about from breeding until um establishment of pregnancy so look at the heifers on corners do gaining less than a pound a day in a dry lot we weren't pushing them hard and then they went to pasture to the same pasture after ai and i bring them into ultrasound about 50 days later those lighter heifers outgained those heifers locked up by a pound a day so they made it back and that would be my argument for why they bred better what they exhibited on the same pasture grazing side by side some of it was compensatory gain no doubt but we have simulated average daily gain in the dry lot compared to uh to grazing winter grass or corn residue and we we don't see this there's a behavioral component that heifer reared on an environment she's going to live on as a cow she actually developed some better grazing behavior because it was the same forage and they're more efficient uh very complicated winter range corners do dry lot scenario but again corn residue dry lot you know look they about caught up here's here's some in terms you you guys use kilograms right okay so those on corn residue bread almost better equal almost better with a lot less nutrients supplied we have ranchers convinced of our data those cows there they don't they won't get weed until the corn planter runs in the fields and they're milking very little we won't do it with young high-risk females but you know and i don't know what your forage resources are or if you graze in periods of dormancy i assume you have dormancy at some time so in our work we see lower development costs selling open heifers is profitable we determine adaptability earlier by challenging them with a short breeding season lighter breeding weights it does result in lighter mature weights up to five years old but they do have to exhibit compensatory gain be provided nutrients that are going to allow them to grow beyond just maintenance post breeding for sure we're currently looking at some people say well how long can i rough them how long can i run them on stocks and they need supplemented on stocks and on winter grass but not a lot we feed about a pound of a 30 protein q and then when they go to grass in june generally barring a drought we have decent grass that allows them to exhibit a compensatory gain so we got banks of this stuff all over the place remnants of our 16 inches last week but just to wrap up one thing we may not think about when we think about factors affecting fertility in our beef females is what about the uterine environment i know she mentioned fetal programming which is is somewhat new we actually wrote a book um i can show you on the camera here when we're done which was going to be shortly here and uh what what about how we treat those animals we got groups of cows up at the ranch that that's what they eat right there fresh air sunshine snowballs and dormant grass so don adams started some of this work and largely the results were found upon accident so what here's the question do i need to supplement that cow so the red line she was supplemented the yellow line she was not and calving occurs in march and april and breeding in june so what outcome were we trying to manage by supplementing or not well the outcome was what whether she would get pregnant right read back and did she yeah and largely she did why because of what you see happening from april to june she is on a very high trajectory of that's body condition but gain goes along with it so we don't need to supplement well if you stop there i mentioned the systems work if you stopped here at this point in time you probably wouldn't need to supplement what if we look at those heifers so we have a range supplement range no supplement stock supplement stocks no supplement that's the cows right here was the impact on the heifer calves those most challenged females from their mother's standpoint perspective and body condition was the range no supplement look at how much we knocked pregnancy rate i didn't include it but we also if that carcass weight of the steer calves born to cows that aren't supplemented and we also affect marbling and feed efficiency so the consequences of nutrient restriction must be considered not only for the individual animal performance but junior here who's not even born yet and it's all tied to body condition if you're managing i don't think you can enhance genetic potential but i do think you can take away from it and oh my gosh i gotta supplement my cows i gotta suffer with my cows and i'm gonna damage the fetus or progeny postnatally i tell people manage body condition i mean that's a pretty fat cow there and that goes into a whole other area of research we're working on is time of calving and that can be very deceiving come late calving later calving we have a herd that calves in may so they get exposed in august when the forage is starting to go dormant well they look great at the front end of the breeding season but what are they doing during breeding they're losing weight and that whole metabolic signaling process can affect reproduction not not so much in the older cows but seems to in our animals that are younger higher risk so this stimuli i experienced during fetal development impacting postnatal growth and physiology has been termed fetal programming and again a lot of work in humans for um data in humans that you know we know malnourishment over nourishment of uh mothers and it can impact the the children later in life so i know everyone was worried i had too many slides but i talked fast and hopefully i recorded this if not if you go to beef.unl actually there's a couple longer webinars um i know there's one on synchronization there's some on what we just talked about heifer development but more more data more time so if you go to beef.unl.edu and you can search within that website only my name or or whatever topic you want we have the best beef website in the world and if you got a better one shoot it my way because nobody has um and the reason it is is all the people in our system that have beef cattle extension some some appointment minus 60 percent and 40 research we have specialists in genetics nutrition animal breeding um meats what am i missing so most states have one specialist my gosh how do you serve an industry as big as nebraska who's number one in red meat production number one in feedlot we rank in the top five four in cow calf just a very important industry for this state with that there's my email my phone number and then that beef website and then hopefully you got the b3pro.org those two websites would be at the top of my list of recommendations for or uh beef uh questions so i guess that's what i have thank you so much rick that was really interesting presentation and um i think we've had quite a bit of engagement um so i just um before we go into questions i just want to share with everybody a new resource that we have at ahdb um so um basically um we have um on our http website we've just got a new guidance manual called um breeding selecting and managing beef replacement so i think that's a replacement heifer sorry um and i think the listeners of today's webinar might be very interested to see that um it's done by sarah pick who went to visit rick in nebraska and says some parts of her nephew within that guidance document so i'll go on to questions now um right i've got a few questions here rick okay quite a long one this one um so with regards to pre-pubertal growth rate affecting milk yield um the dairy industry recommends pre-paper pre-computer growth rates below 0.9 kilos a day to allow for better mammary development uh for a supplement at 40 kilos body weight to be 450 kilos at one year old that's 1.12 kilos so given that uh given that are we adversely affecting milk yields by bullying at one year old does that make sense questions in the dairy recommends less than two pounds 1.8 and you're wanting them at yearlings 900 pounds see that's the question do they need to be that heavy and i would say no i i would say if you're under two pounds you're probably not gonna but that's point nine kilos whatever you're not gonna but you don't need to i would say your genetics i don't know how big your cows are but they're maybe they're bigger than ours but you have similar breeds right angus and simmental and shorthorn charlie so likely i don't know what your mature cow size is it above 12 1300 pounds 650 kilos um if those heifers don't have to weigh 900 pounds to breed them that's the sad thing um gosh we're breeding heifers at 600 pounds 650 pounds 325 kilos i would say your rate of gains don't have to be what what you're what you're achieving potentially what i'm understanding i would i would be interested in reading sarah did sarah write that uh yes she's partly partly written some of that as well yeah it's a bit of a team effort from some people htv but there's a section in there um yeah it's definitely definitely worth the good worth the read yeah i bet i gave her a lot a lot of papers resources including that economic good economic analysis of cabin as twos or threes and we get so wrapped up in technology and sexy dna and this and that to identify what we showed that the markers of one major company don't count for very almost zero variation in things i'm interested in like fertility time of calving longevity yeah carcass traits that's an easy one those are highly heritable right so why don't we select for the functionality and and um don't overdo it i've got you know and we're talking about flying drones and doing all this stuff and i got a 50 000 acre ranch in the sandhills that don't calve till three years old how much money is that cost in that operation huge i can't i their branching isn't keeping them afloat i know that somebody asked me oh careers in animal science with the vet and efforts nationals on ffa week and they said what's the most rewarding and frustrating thing in your job and i said my most rewarding thing is helping producers in my most frustrating thing is when producers won't adopt things that i know will help them be more profitable um i've just got an add-on from that question from the person who asked it i'm saying that their mature cow weights would be between 650 to 720 kilos yeah so not greatly not hugely they're bigger ours are going to be 1100 so 600 kilos maybe but you know even if you're not comfortable so what percent of mature weight is that there were 900 pounds that was that i understand their 900 pounds of breeding what's 900 divided by 14. what genetics are they oh i'm not sure on the moderate side of continental there used to be some big raw bone continental cattle but today you can tell them apart from the british straight angus they moderated the continental cattle and then accelerated the british cattle too much everybody wants something they don't have i guess but that's that's 65 percent of mature weight you could back that up five ten percent get them get the gain down your cost input down um not worry about milk i doubt you're damaging milk on them they're probably got plenty of milk anyway in general our beef cattle are got too much milk for the environment that we're producing in you probably have a more consistent better environment than we do i don't know um i mean that i'd be interested reading that book yeah definitely um i've got another question um have you any techniques for accelerating the age at puberty aside from adequate health nutrition and comfort i was going to include some more slides do we want to why why why why we know what precocious puberty is how many of you have had a heifer calf come in pregnant on the cow that's a common thing we can't have some of these producers used to have 70 to 90 day breeding seasons can't have it or we start getting the heifer calves pregnant i think we've accelerated it through selecting for greater scrotal circumference and genetics just pure genetics and i i don't know that so i had a rancher uh asked me about they had some fall heifers and didn't want them to beef all heifers and what about breeding these with our springborne heifers so we generally breed you know what 13 to 15 months of age and uh these were going to be 10 months and you know what we we synchronized them and bred them with the other heifers and they bred just as well we did accelerate their gain a little bit but not nothing crazy so yeah i if puberty is is essentially an issue genetic scrotal if you got a problem um which i don't know that we have a problem we don't in the united states maybe with the boss into this cattle but they don't live where the snow flies so not my issue okay so we've just got um one more question um but if anyone else wants to quickly put some more in the box then we'll have a bit more time to discuss them um uh is there any effect on birth weight and or calf birth weight to down weight ratio on carving at 24 to 36 months 24 versus 36 months sorry does it affect birth weight yeah so is there any effect on the birth weight and and the and or the calf birth weight and to the dam weight ratio that one carving well there would be that the birth weight shouldn't be affected no not unless you're using a genetically different bowl so that it would seem to me that i could handle more birth weight if i calved at three i better have more growth in them calves to make up for that that's a whole year of production loss and i can select you know a cabinet's bowl that's going to shoot out of 70 and these cow heifers can handle it we're cabin right now we would have i don't know we probably averaged something less than 80 pound birth weight and have very little dystocia um and then our weaning weights probably would give up some for calving ease but an ai sire you don't have to right um you can have moderate birth weight and still have acceptable weaning yearling slaughter whatever you want whatever your endpoint is one thing that concerns me the way we're decreasing birth weight and i don't know if this is your observation or happening in your country but part of this is happening through conscious or unconscious selection for shorter gestation there's going to be a point where them calves cabin two month two weeks early because that's how calving ease has been selected in that genetic line is going to be a problem with calf survival and i have debated this and we've had this discussion is it carrying on into the feedlot we have not improved calf morbidity or mortality in the feedlot for 20 years is some of this happening are these calves fully functional they look normal we we had one of our three-year-olds which had a calf at two but we had a calf born oh what did jim say three weeks early and those i those weren't supposed to be kavanese bowls with them so okay um got one uh question about breed here and i think different breeds have got um perceived different challenges um but this one um here we've got a the limousine average age at puberty is 15 months um how do we if you want to pull it back to 12 months what do you think for for limousine limousine cattle yeah wolves are big they moved here from minnesota i know they do have some later maturing um well that's interesting question you're talking about kevin are breeding at two years versus one year and now we want to breed them at 12 months versus 15. um you're not gonna do it overnight that as a breed is something they've probably been working on to to back that up i guess my first question would be why because that would put you in a whole different calving season than you're currently in right three months off yeah because if we breed at 15 14 15 months it puts us into calving season similar to what we're in i guess my question is why and um yeah i mean nutrition to a point uh genetic selection doesn't happen overnight scrotal like i said i don't know if people consciously selected for bigger scrotal to decrease age of puberty but it does over time so if truly they're not cycling the other thing is artificial enhancement do you guys have cedars what sink drugs do you have well i'm not sure off the top of my head you can induce puberty with the progesterone device the cedar cumate um crids i don't i don't know what you have available for synchronization things but possibly gnrh because to some extent not not as much as and gnrh only does it through progesterone as well but you got to have a follicle to ovulate that corpus luteum produces endogenous progesterone um one of our helpful listeners has helped me out here we use cidr rs prints tnr uh gnrhpg pmsg yeah okay so basically what we have but you're right but you're afraid of implants sorry um i know they don't use implants in england so any of our synchronization systems potentially could induce puberty to a point but the most effective would be probably the 14 day cedar and heifers so look up that protocol if you're wanting to breed them earlier then you are okay we've got some good questions coming in now um would an injection of prostaglandin at weaning to avoid unwanted pregnancies have detrimental effects on fertility and would it still have a synchronizing effect on their cycle at breeding time at 14 months probably not um so prostaglandin i mean why a boredom cell i don't know your markets but a bread animal bread any time and right now we're selling the heck out of bread females a bread animal bread anytime is worth more than an open one so why make her open you can only abort an animal with prostaglandin up to about a hundred and 110 days look at the label but after that event it takes some if they're far along in pregnancy if they're not if they're only you know 40 45 days pregnant and you know boredom they'll breed right back now when they get out to 80 to 100 and some the uterus has gotten big they're probably need some recovery time but they won't be synchronized yet but i i don't know i don't know why you'd want to abort them but i don't know the whole story um another question uh how many cards should a circular cow produce in her lifetime um how old how old do we want cows to get to you um well we looked at that average age was five and a half years probably not a lot different in your country i think we want them replacement rates really expensive if she's weaning you if she calves in a reasonable time and weaning you a reasonable weaning weight i have a heck of a time calling her for any production variable if she runs me up the fence every time i get close to her or she's open yeah then she may go down the road but older cow don't bother me if she's doing okay in your environment and that replacing there's a huge cost yeah and questions here um does direct carving ease affect heifer pelvic size so you you got both tools good question so calving ease direct is what the impact that bowl has on on that calf maternal calving ease which is really what you're asking okay calving ease direct is also known as paternal cavities male side right maternal cavities is the effect of calving ease from that daughter's sire her ability to have a calf they are antagonistic which makes sense right we keep selecting for lower and lower birth weight guess what we're going to have a heifer that can't lay down and have a 60 pound cap my gosh so we want to we want a reasonable insurance on genetic ability to not have dystocia through calving ease not birth weight but looking at birth weight but they are antagonistic now the good news is in general you have both to select so if you're selecting for calving ease direct pay attention to maternal cavities because they they're not a 100 percent correlated you can have both but without paying attention yeah you're gonna potentially have problems going to the extreme too much cavities direct is going to lower maternal cavities um another question um from the studies undertaken what percentage of assisted carvings were from the lighter bred heifers um less than ten percent probably seven eight percent not not different than uh see by the time they have though they're pretty darn close to the same weight okay so even though we don't develop as heavy remember remember that slide that showed how much more they gained in an environment that allowed him to express that they outgained on the same and people don't believe them calves were in the same pasture well they are and they are every year and this is repeatable so if they're gaining a pound a day more from breeding to fall gosh they caught up so she's no longer they have to experience the compensatory gain i don't advocate having a way light heifer because you probably are going to have dystocia but they're not going to be people are afraid of that though because they've never tried it they think if they if they have them lighter at breeding they're going to give up puberty which we haven't and then you're going to have more dystocia which they're going to make up that weight that lack of gain or whatever um quite another question for you uh what's your average gestation length well it's supposed to be 200 and what 81 and a half or 85 i think we backed that up a full week if not more sure i don't know for half done calving due date isn't until the end of this week i know we had 30 or 40 out of 100 some on the ground yesterday we've bred them and i'd have to look but we breathe we get prostaglandin the week before memorial so whatever that figures out but probably 270 something i don't know it's there are true cavanese bowls what's a true cavendish bowl a bowl that has cavities but normal gestation length okay um that's not reported um just got a few more questions before we finish up um does large pelvic area cow is there a likelihood of this causing carving problems does uh physical carbs that are being bigger in a herd breeding their own replacements not sure i understand um but i think i mean i mean uh four large pelvic area cows is there a likelihood of um the bean carving problems um for carbs are being bigger with larger pelvic area they've got larger pelvic areas well gene deutscher was in my position before and there's a pelvis and in the room next to mine and i have never picked it up um i i don't pelvic measure i got a ranch that used to do the pelvic measuring and now all they do they do a pre-breeding palpation and the vet measures the pelvis with his hand so the only recommendation is that get rid of the extreme outliers and then you're probably fine but i think your point is is selecting is selecting for increase directly increasing uh skeletal structure and yeah it's a skeletal measurement so it's counterintuitive to just select the big ones right because you're probably going to select that in gap size thank you so just one last question and then we're at time then um in terms of uh percentage of the dam what would be what would you say is the ideal weaning weight what oh what's the ideal weaning weight yeah if you're thinking about um in terms of the percentage of the dam the percentage of dam weight or what um yeah so how much what percentage of the dam should should the calf be at weaning with in terms of size would you say 50 of the damn size or 70 of the downside probably doggone it i don't know how to get this to you very done the percent weight of the half weaning weight to calorie weight is a very inefficient measure of efficiency um and barry done is it was a bif proceedings gosh i don't remember what year explained why his students wrote a really nice paper but i mean you got to have some minimum obviously i mean on a 1200 pound cow six weight cap probably isn't unreasonable so i'm you know i i'd set some minimum maybe what's acceptable but i have a hard time calling on it um if if she's if it's anywhere acceptable it could be a function of milk probably is and maybe that isn't a bad thing we got i don't know when you market cows if it's all at weaning or when but maybe we got a calf that has genetic potential for growth but we don't have a cow that eats us out of house and home because she milks too much oh that's good good answer um so i think that's it for the end of the questions um just before anyone logs off uh when you do there'll be a feedback form and we'd really appreciate if you could fill that out how we um make sure that we improve our webinars in the future um i just want to say thank you so much rick for taking the time um it's your afternoon i think our evening to come and speak to us today and present and thank you so much to everybody who's joined in and participated in the webinar tonight so um yeah hopefully we'll see you again and this will all be recorded and available on the hdb website as well along with the questions uh if you want to have a look at the answers and those questions being asked so thank you very much and i hope you all have a good evening you