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Milk bill format for Animal science

it is time so I'd like to say hello to all of the listeners out there my name is abby bower and i'm an associate editor for hoards dairyman magazine i'd like to thank you for joining us for today's webinar is my pleasure to co-host the webinar with my cousins who comes to us from the University of Illinois we're fortunate to have another top-notch speaker here with us this month his name is bill Weiss he's from The Ohio State University his presentation is titled cutting food costs without cutting milk feed is a big expense on any dairy farm when milk prices are depressed like they have been for the last couple of years opportunities to reduce those costs without sacrificing milk is something that could benefit any farm we really look forward to what dr. Weiss has to say on that topic I want to let you know that this month's webinar is sponsored by QLS quality liquid feeds we are very pleased to have their support for this program and appreciate their help and allowing us to provide this information to you I would like to thank our other team members who work behind the scenes to make sure everything runs smoothly every month that would include Jim bolts at the University of Illinois and our hoards dairyman online media manager patty her tchen for those of you that are listening to the presentation live and we have a good group on board today I want to let you know that you have access to the presentation PDFs if you go to the go to webinar control panel and look down towards the bottom there's a section that says handouts and there you can click on the links and get a copy of the handouts to print out to use for future reference or to take notes on on that's something that is available to our live attendees only mic now if you would be so kind please go ahead and further introduce our speaker and kick-start this month's webinar very good Abbie it's my professional and personal honor to introduce a a great friend and co-worker dr. bill Weiss bill as you indicate works at the Ohio State University and he earned his bachelor's and master's degree at Purdue and his PhD at the Ohio State he was born in Minnesota and so in work part-time she's a short stint in in North Dakota and a joint research extension appointment up there as well bill is no stranger to all of us online here he's very popular here on the hoards dairyman webinar series he has published well in excess 125 journal articles 350 popular press articles and now was the in serves as vice chair of the 2019 dairy NRC committee which we heard about it's going to be come out hopefully this coming year the good news or bad news bill you also were an interim chair in the apartment of animal sciences for a couple years as well so with that bill we'll turn the program over to you and let you discuss the theme today of controlling feed costs welcome dr. bill Weiss thanks Mike and thanks Abby and greetings from a cloudy Wooster Ohio I'm gonna talk about feed cost control today and there's several things because of the amount of stuff I can't go into great detail on a lot of these but will at least cover these topics one of course is the ingredients that go into the diet that has a big effect on on cost homegrown forged the the appropriate use of those how you group cows can affect or does affect feed cost ration formulation specs that won't go into great detail on this but it's that it's it is terribly important and then lastly feed waste and shrink we're gonna start right off with the question or a poll and so I'm going to turn this back over to Mike to take care of this and then we'll get back to business okay we are polling questions here you can see what are the choices and what is in selecting what we consider number one yeah in selecting one you can pick one for the Urrea well in terms of ingredient selection which one is cheapest dollars per ton number two choice what is cheaper in terms of dollars per nutrient supplied number three will it contribute to the diet that produces the most milk or fourth will it contribute to a diet that has the highest income over feed cost that's what i ofc stands for for our international folks so the polls are now open and we're off and running here and wow they're going pretty phat Abby are you going to vote on this one I will I guess dr. Weiss is putting us to work right away in this presentation I am going to go with the last choice the one that combines both the cost of the feed and the milk production so I'm going with IO FC income over feed cost choice what about you Mike well I'm gonna go with number four also because I think that's kind of the bottom line right and everybody's worried about our profitability and margins so Jim let's go ahead and show a show the poll results here Jim is showing to it and and dr. Weiss is there any surprises what do you think of the votes it's it's about what I'd expect and actually these answers here these questions go from the least most correct of what his chief is absolutely wrong to the most correct which is the highest income over feed cost the dollars per nutrient supply definitely contributes to that bottom line but it can't be the only thing you look at in general diets that produce more milk usually are more profitable but at lower milk prices you have to look carefully at the marginal return in other words you you might put something in the diet that gets you more milk but it didn't it wasn't profitable so the bottom one here is the most correct but these the top two are the two right above that do contribute to the income over feed cost and we're going to talk a bit about a lot of these things first thing on an ingredient selection we have to get out of this idea that cows require feed there is not a corn requirement there is not an alfalfa requirement there is an energy there's a protein there's a calcium requirement so we have to start looking at feeds as just packages of nutrients it's it's not quite that simple but we really have to start thinking more of this what what package of nutrients is the best buy and to do this there's different different methods I'm going to talk about one but there's other other ones around that worth work well as as well as the one I talked about first of all when we compare feeds it has to be on a nutrient basis it can't be dollars per town pound or dollars per ton you buy feeds to provide nutrients another thing you have to look at is it you can't just look at a nutrient for it for most feeds most feeds provide more than one nutrient so you you can't price corn grain just done it as an energy source you are getting protein from corn it might not be a lot but you're getting it soybean meal provides protein and energy so you can't just say Zoe protein is worth X dollars per pound you have to price all the nutrients you have to remember local markets even though corn and celery are national commodities prices differ in markets and a lot of these byproducts differ in markets so I'm going to show you some examples but it's for a central Ohio it may or may not be applicable to your your specific area and lastly markets change over time I'm going to show you very recent data but in two months this might be wrong so if you're going to start comparing feed feed values remember local markets and you have to be time specific the one method we use at Ohio State is a program called Sesame we run this or actually Aleks tabi and our department does this every other month it's available at the Buckeye dairy news and he writes an article that basically says cost of nutrients and this is just one software program but there are others that do essentially they may be the mechanics may be different but they do priced feeds on multiple nutrients and so just click on our website go to Buckeye Dairy News and then again Alex writes this article once every two months on nutrient cost and what he does and again this is Central Ohio or it probably could be expanded to all of Ohio in December so this is hot off the presses and this program he uses generates an average nutrient cost this isn't the cost of energy in in corn it's the average cost of energy across multiple feeds and in December in Ohio energy was worth about 0.06 eight cents or six point eight point six eight cents per mega cow metabolizable protein was worth about thirty nine cents a pound effective fiber was worth about eight cents a pound and then this non effective fiber you'll see is a negative minus 0.03 cents per pound 0.03 cent dollars per pound this doesn't mean non-effective NDF has no value it contributes to energy but what it's saying is that the market doesn't like high fiber feeds and that makes sense because chickens and pigs can't use these so the market basically is discounting high by high fiber byproducts which cattle can use so anyway you get these nutrient cost and then you take your feet of interest I'm just using corn silage as an example this could be corn gluten feed or distiller grain or alfalfa this is the nutrient composition of this corn silage and then so in one ton of corn silage dry matter if you assume it's 0.65 mega cows per pound one ton of corn silage dry matter gives you 1,300 mega Cal's MP at five percent of the dry matter gives you hundred pounds and so on so this is the nutrient per pound per - per ton on a dry matter basis and to get the value the economic value this you take the 1,300 mega cows per ton times its it's value point oh six eight dollars per mega cow and so what this is saying is on average corn silage has a ton of corn silage dry matter as eighty eight dollars worth of energy C thirty-nine dollars worth of protein and so on and you just add that up and it's saying a ton of corn silage dry matter is worth a hundred and seventy five dollars in nutrients on an on an as fed basis it's about sixty bucks and you compare that price of the nutrients to what you paid for the for the feed or what you produce the feed for if the value of nutrients is greater than production costs are greater than purchasing cost it's a good buy if it isn't you need to think about feeding that and so you can use this approach you get these energy values or these dollar values you get the nutrient composition and you can make these calculations for any feed and compare nutrient cost to actual cost or purchase cost and then once a month Alex does this and looks at what he calls bargain feeds and these are feeds where the nutrient value exceeds the market price so corn might be $100 a ton but it provides a hundred and fifty dollars worth of nutrients or something like that and in the last month here these are the feeds there are bargains they provide more nutrient dollars than what you're paying and you'll see these top four corn grain corn silage corn gluten feed not meal and distillers are red they are almost always bargains in central Ohio almost always so these are feed you'd want to try and use if you can if they fit your diet if they'd if they don't obviously you you wouldn't include them hominy is cheap right now whole cottonseed is cheap so some of these other ones think of you if they come up as cheap see if you can make them work but again don't put them in a diet even though they're cheap if they don't contribute to the nutrients you need so once a month he generates this and then he also generates a table what he calls overpriced and that's where the value of these nutrients MP net energy and D F is less than market price alfalfa hay that's worth if you just formulate or calculate value on nutrients you're paying most people pay for that pay more than that they know what it's worth but alfalfa has some intrinsic values alfalfa hay has some intrinsic values chewing things like that blood meal is almost always overpriced but you don't feed blood meal for energy and MP you often feed blood meal for lysine that's not calculated so there's good reason to have blood meal and diets and that's because it provides lysine we look here at citrus pulp in Ohio citrus price at pulp is overpriced if I lived in Ohio in Florida likely it would be under priced that just shows you local markets and another example here is molasses is overpriced but again you're not going to feed molasses just for energy and protein you're feeding molasses for sugar maybe mixability so the bottom line on these feeds if they're overpriced you have to have a reason for them in it can't be just for energy and protein so so some overpriced feeds fit quite well because they are providing a nutrient you need in addition to MP and E etc so these tables are useful just to kind of pick ingredients to look at but remember there's other things we're not perfect on on describing feeds we have these what I call less quantifiable factors variability in composition has a price when you buy soybean meal you know what you're getting this it doesn't vary very much sometimes when you buy distillers commodity distillers you're less certain to what it is and if you're less certain of the protein concentration or the fat concentration or whatever you usually have to over formulate these diets and that adds cost so consistent feeds are worth more than inconsistent feeds quality moldy feed and in my opinion has zero value I don't care what they sell it for it has no value but if if it's moldy you know what what's the value of it to you remember these a lot of these pricing systems only price it on fiber energy and protein and there's other reasons to feed and then lastly don't forget the service and support some companies you buy certain ingredients will provide additional service additional support so look at the value of the nutrients but it is more more complicated than that but it's a good place to start ask yourself on cheap feeds or feeds where that are valuable or bargain can I make these work and on overpriced feed just ask yourself why are they in the diet if you have a good reason they may not be overpriced okay we're going to switch now into feed additives feed additives can be quite profitable or they cannot so I've got four questions here and I'll turn it back over to Mike well here we go this will be exciting which feed additive is the best investment based on realistic prices and boy we've got some interesting choices here the first one is costs a nickel five cents if it works it will net about a fifteen cents but it works 75 percent the time charge number two cost 30 cents if it works you end up making 70 cents it works 25 percent of the time number three cost ten cents a dime that's you about four cents and almost works all the time and then one the fourth one is the one that comes with the nicest cap so we'll be off and running here and Abbi what what are you gonna do here young lady this one includes a little bit of math for everyone's brains today I think I'm gonna go with what dr. Weiss was talking about consistently working products when he was talking about ingredients so I'm going to use that same thought process for the additives here and go with the third choice it cost ten cents net four cents but almost always works what do you think I'm thinking about that Illinois cap I see a picture of a very intriguing for me so I was voting I might be biased on that but I can't highlight the cap and I guess a B I would agree with you as well and second of all you know 30 cents is a lot of money so I'm not sure will lead dr. Weiss talk about that so we're gonna close the poll you have plenty of time we got a good vote in here and here are the results dr. Weiss Wow we got a lot of different bullets here what do you think I think that first and the third one are the right answers and this is the kind of question that professors love and students hate because in in the real world I were to say justify your answer the third one here the cost $0.10 and always works to me is a no-brainer you're not going to get rich using it but you gets profitable if you're if you make four cents on it it's it's worth doing and you always get that the the tricky part is is the first in the second one this is has to do with the risk the the first one here that cost five cents Nets you fifteen cents three out of four farms or three out of four pens will be show a profit one out of four those going to lose fifteen or lose five cents a day and that's that's not a lot and that's to me would be if your risk tolerance is such this would be a good deal I wouldn't hesitate to do that now the the second one here is one that is is really dicey and that is it has a huge return if it works but three out of the four farms that try this you're going to spend 30 cents and not make a dime something like this to me I would have to be able to evaluate it on farm can I feed it for a couple weeks look at milk production take it out and really see if it's working because I would not do this without some some proof that it's working for my particular farm so if it always works and it's profitable you should really think about it if it works most of the time and has a pretty good return to me that's worth the risk high returns with low low probability of working you have to be able to evaluate it on the farm and with feed additives a few things you'd ask I'm not going to go into specific additives because we simply don't have the time but first question is what what's it supposed to do a lot of these companies will provide you day to this it's it modifies the room and so on so so and so and then proof does it work and they show you studies preferably refereed journal papers but even either even on farm type things if they're done correctly but does it work and to me this is a critical question and that's how often does it work nothing works a hundred percent of the time and if they have done enough studies where they can tell you yeah we think it works three-fourths of the time or half the time or eighty percent of the time this really helps make a decision if they don't know you know how often it works that that's is a problem and then lastly of course the return on investment I want to also emphasize this is look at the studies and what animals did they use and this may help you answer this question how often it works if if the studies are mostly with fresh cows and it works but when they did it with mid lactation cows at Denton that's telling you concentrate this additive and they're in their early lactation period if it works at ranch fresh cows or whatever but if you can target feed additives they're usually more profitable so ask them what type of animal was it fed to how often was it successful but again this how often it works to me is a critical piece of information and makes decision-making a lot easier okay switching gears here on homegrown forages a few things to always remember it is almost always true one good corn silage is almost always a cheap source of nutrients Midwest west east it's just very consistently a good economic source of energy protein and fiber and I want to emphasize good if it's been chopped way to mature its moldy etc etc it's not a good silage is is a good source of nutrients and then the second thing in alfalfa this is probably more Midwest centric but homegrown alfalfa silage is almost always reasonably priced it may not be a bargain but it's reasonably priced and I want to talk a bit about alfalfa here in the next few slides and again I just want to emphasize this that forages are can be a cheap source of nutrients an economical source of nutrients but it they have to be good low quality forage no matter what the prices will cost you milk it and not be a good buy okay so with alfalfa I want to concentrate on this because it's a little more complicated than corn it's the big if you're growing it yourself the big question in quality versus quantity they are inversely related high yields usually equals lower quality because you get the higher yields bundle and delaying harvest and as ket crops mature they they go down so on another poll question here I want to just clear make a definition for a turn it over to Mike I'm defining average alfalfa as alfalfa with 44% NDF good alfalfa is 40 and grade alfalfa is 36 so Mike I'll let you take it over from here wow this is going to be exciting to see you're gonna scratch your hands you Democrats Republicans get to get thinking here there are there are four choices the first one is three cut higher yield average quality versus four cuts of good quality that's one choice another choice is a three cut high yield average quality versus four cut good and a great quality so there's a quality of French on there and number two varies number three and 10% of the diet and dry matter great alfalfa hay versus good alfalfa that'd be your third choice in the fourth one who is probably the easiest one to understand is betting on the Huskers that they are from Washington that will beat the the Ohio State Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl and to me that's that's the easiest one to understand bill but we'll we'll move on so the polls are now open and we got 21% of the vote in and we've been added for about a minute although on that included guy your time as well so we'll give them about another 25 seconds and see if we can get a few more votes they're slower coming in Andy put you on the spot I think this is a really tough question which one are you gonna go with angry I think it's it's tough I'll be interested to hear it dr. Weiss says I'm going to pick the second option with the four cuts good yield great quality what would you pick Mike well you know it's interesting I'm under listen to what dr. Weiss has to say so I'm gonna go number three saying that you know if it's only gonna be 10% the night I'm gonna really go for the great really great alfalfa and and put it in there versus versus the good hay and I think I struggle Billo with that first thing I'm trying to figure out you know I assume the choice is the first one is what I'm really voting for but not not the verse one but anyway that's that's my bias at this point let's not close us off we don't lose too much time and interesting answers there all over well this isn't is complicated I'm gonna discuss each of these in the next few slides so it won't give the answers right now but again it's basically arguing quality versus quantity and these are hard things to decide but I said I will go into each of these right now we looked at this a few years ago and I've updated the the price but the assumptions were done back in 2012 but I have updated everything and and show you my assumptions I'm assuming if you cut four times you're going to get six tons of dry metal that's based on some plot data out of Worcester but if you cut three times based on date out of Wisconsin yields are expected to be 15 to 20 percent Moore's so my assumption is a three cut system will give you fifteen or twenty percent higher yield I took production costs from our budgets which I think are reasonable for the Midwest and then I had the price the the feed that you grew and I'm doing this based on expected NDF based on what I just showed you earlier protein and Al and we're also looking we also price milk milk production into this we know that higher NDF alfalfa's produce less milk so that's also built in but again these aren't market prices these are prices of nutrients adjusted for milk so these are my assumptions and again I'm assuming if I do three cuts I'm always going to get just average quality alfalfa not not great not terrible just average every cutting 44% with a four cut system I made a few different scenarios here one is that I'm gonna get three of the four cuttings are going to be good 40 percent NDF but one cutting I'm going to have rain or whatever I couldn't get out and it's going to be just average so 3/4 of the the hay or the silage is going to be good 1/4 of it is just going to be average so that's scenario one second scenario is I'm gonna get all four cuttings are going to be good stuff 40% MDF and then the last one here is three of the cuttings are going to be good 40% NDF and one of them is going to be really good so 36 percent India so again always good quality a here is mostly good some average and C is mostly good with some very good and how did this price out well I took a 15% increase in yield and a 20 so that's again based on the data from Wisconsin a three cut system should give you 15 to 20 percent more more yield if we look here I had a which again has got the three cuttings of good alfalfa and one cutting of average the three cut is always more profitable regardless of yield so if what this is saying is if you can just get good or average quality alfalfa good I should say good and average quality alfalfa a three cut system is probably more profitable if you get 15 to 20 percent more yield on the other hand if you're consistently get good quality alfalfa with a four cut system if all you get is a fifteen percent yield it's it's a break-even doesn't really matter if you get a 20 percent yield advantage to the three cut system there's a little bit of an advantage to the quantity or the yield over quality but basically what this is saying is if you always get your alfalfa with 40 percent NDF the three the four cut system three cut is probably about breakeven but when we look here at where you're harvesting always good alfalfa and sometimes great alfalfa with the four cut system then the fourth cut system always is profitable or always more profitable than the three cut system so the bottom line is yield beats okay quality but great quality beats yield so if you if you're good you're consistently good great alfalfa go for the more cuttings less yield if weather and other things dictate average quality alfalfa probably go with yield rather than quality then the the other question I asked there was at these low inclusion rates is is the high quality which presumably is going to cost more than okay quality is it worth it and we need to remember here is in the vast majority of studies showing the effect of alfalfa quality on milk production is where alfalfa is a predominant part of the diet 30 40 50 percent of the diet we are getting now many many diets have this magic 5 pounds of hay in it 10 percent or less does quality matter that much and there's surprisingly very very little data looking at this this question to me it's a very important question because again at low inclusion rates can i buy cheaper alfalfa and still get get milk production and I could only find one study to look at this and they had alfalfa 39 verses 43 fed at about 15 percent of the diet they had no effect in intake or dry matter whereas if this was at 30 or 40 percent of the diet we'd expect a 3 or 4 pounds more milk from this from the 39 percent alfalfa but at the lower inclusion rates the studies found no effect they also looked at two forages to alfalfa's with different in vitro fiber digestion 43 which is a below average 50 which is above they found no effect and again if we fed these at a higher inclusion rate we would expect upwards to 4 pounds more milk from the higher quality alfalfa which would value the higher quality alfalfa at about 20 dollars a ton more than the lower quality but again this is suggesting at low inclusion rates and 10 or 15% tops maybe you can get by with a ver not junk alfalfa but average alfalfa rather than prime stuff so I'd look at at low inclusion rates I'd really look carefully at the differential between grade alfalfa and good alfalfa it might not be worth it at low inclusion I inclusion I don't think there's any question it's worth it the quality is worth it okay now to change gears one more time on grouping grouping you group cows for lots of reasons one reason the group cows is to increase income over feed cost and it can do this if if it's done correctly and your nutrition is done correctly a lot of people group but then they don't take advantage of that grouping it to maximize or to minimize cost the these here are two groups that I think are two grouping systems that almost always will increase income over feed cost and that's separate and I should mention for you any further is I'm assuming if you can group cows the cows will be grouped correctly in good facilities and managed correctly but separating out fresh cows first three weeks or so against all other ones this allows this fresh guy cow diet to be really expensive because it's only fed for three weeks there there's some additives they clearly work and an early lactation cows that are expensive but they clearly work this would allow you to target feeding these fresh cows correctly can have carryover effects which I'll show you briefly they increase Peaks and so on so this separation I think is quite quite useful the other one here is two year old cows versus older cows and and this one diets you might not change feed cost one bit because you could actually feed the exact same diet but there's enough data out there showing that separating out two year olds increases lifetime production so you're not really reducing feed cost you're increasing production but the net is is the same you're going to increase income over feed cost so these are two systems to really think about the this is the study we did a year ago and I don't wanna go into great detail on this but we fed diets the first 21 days 16 and a half percent protein 18 and a half or 17 and 1/2 plus amino acids and again these were fed for just the first three weeks and this this amino acid diet got us more milk fat milk more milk protein during this three-week period which is kind of what we expected but then we put all these cows after 21 days on a common diet and fed those cows for the next 12 or for the next eight weeks up to 12 weeks of lactation but again at this point from week 4 through 12 all cows are fed exactly the same diet and you can notice here that this amino acid treatment which ended maintain high milk fat and higher milk protein significantly more for the next up to 12 weeks so I fed an expensive diet for 3 weeks than a conventional typical diet for the next up to week 12 and I've maintained that difference so again separating out fresh cows may allow you to feed expensive ingredients expensive diets and reap benefits from that well after the diet ceases the other grouping system here that can increase income over feed speed cost is grouping by production but this is one that has to be done correctly and I see a lot of farmers do this but then the nutritionist doesn't take advantage of this grouping by grouping by production you form late for each group which I'll get into in just a minute it allows you to target additives again a lot of additives work on high producing cows tail Enders it doesn't do anything so grouping will allow you to target additives and it may and sometimes this doesn't work but it may allow you to manage your forage inventory better the higher quality forage goes to the early lactation cows lower quality to the late lactation so you can do all this but the key here is the diet you formulate for each group what you do here this is let's say you have a one group TMR it's got an average production eighty pounds doesn't matter but within that one group TMR you're gonna have cows that are very low producing and cows that are very high producing and we know you cannot balance for the average you have to balance for above average and the wider this dispersion the more you have to overfeed the average cow so when we group by production I'm just using example here are three production groups you're gonna get three different means but the mean of those means will be the same as the one group but what really matters here what saves you money is not the three different means it's to let the much less variance within or dispersion within these diets within these cows within these pens so now instead of this really really widespread within each pen you've got much much smaller standard deviations and that's how you take advantage of grouping cows and as an example here we think and this is again beyond the scope of this webinar is you should balanced diets for about four protein metabolizable protein for about one standard deviation above the me so if the mean was seventy five I'm gonna formulate that group for eighty eight pounds because the standard deviation was thirteen when I break it up into three groups with much smaller deviations the low group now is going to be balanced for just four pounds above the mean the mids five pounds above the mean and the high six pounds above the mean based on these standard deviations so when I break them down into three groups the average diet supports eighty pounds the average of these three die supports eighty pounds well with one group I have to formulate a diet that supports eighty eight pounds so you save money by grouping not for the three different means you save money by overfeeding less so if your nutritionist is feeding over feeding when you separate by production that over feeding the same amount he needs to balance them tighter they have to be tighter as you reduce variation within pens you still over feed but you over feed less how many groups well there there are cost of grouping one is labor more pen moves management time feed-in so there's cost but the benefits are lower feed costs maybe body condition score and so on and work out on the brass re work out of Wisconsin looked at this and I'm just gonna talk about typical prices here are typical feed typical milk prices two groups versus three production groups and one two group system saves you about forty bucks and increases income over feed costs 40 bucks compared to one group so it's a huge benefit a three group system saves you another seven dollars and fifty cents so it's its profitable but you've got to think of all the cost more inventory more diets etc so the three groups are more profitable but it's not that much more profitable and I think in general two diets for most farms to production diets for most farms or is adequate plus a fresh cow group you know I want to re-emphasize this you cannot under formulate diets you do not make money by feeding diets less that provide less nutrient than these cows need so you might be of a cheap diet but you will lose milk so these diets have to be adequate and which means you have to over formulate for a pentacles and this or two studies are just emphasizing this you can see my prices I'm using bean mill at 350 corn at 360 milk at $16 and these are two studies here looking at protein and in one study we did we had a 15% died in a 17 and a half you know study out of Wisconsin they had about a 15 point 8 and a 17 point one uh and I'm not saying cows need 17 and a half these are the treatments but increasing protein got me six pounds of milk but they also ate about three pounds more feed and this diet the high protein is clearly more expensive so in our study I increased feed cost 72 cents a day but I increased milk income 96 cents so I make a quarter here so feeding extra protein was more expensive but it paid off and basically the same result in Wisconsin they increased feed cost forty cents they increased milk income sixty-eight cents so again about another quarter so don't overfeed too much but don't under feed either because under feeding can be quite expensive and then I get this question a lot that I do a lot of mineral research and they say or money's really tight can I get rid of vitamins and trace minerals for a while and my answer is no you can feed less you can feed to the requirement but don't take them out and this study here based on current prices it's gonna cost about thirty five dollars a year to feed vitamin E and selenium at NRC dry cow and lactate but this study here published a couple years ago said that feeding adequate selenium and vitamin E gained you $190 so you can take it out and save 35 but you're gonna lose 190 so trace minerals and vitamins are needed they are need for health be reasonable don't take them out and basically by being raised and will feed a 10-hour seal you you a lot of people grossly over feed minerals grossly over feed vitamins these aren't cheap and so just get them down to where they should be in the end the vast majority of research says NRC is adequate and if you want to put a little cushion in here at 20% that's fine but I see diets with two and three times NRC and that's there's no reason for that so don't pull them out just get them down to reasonable levels lastly here is shrink we all know shrinks expensive and here you see a massive amount of shrink in this silage and then you see this pile of concentrate and all this water is running right through it and it's probably making the feed moldy and it's also washing away nutrients so this is an obvious way to reduce shrink and obvious cost to shrink when fees are often very cheap and they should be fed if possible but remember what feeds aren't stable this is wet distillers if if you're buying wet distillers are wet Brewers and after a week or so you see this kind of mold this shouldn't be fed you have to throw this away and you have to price this it still might be a good deal but if you have to throw away 20% of what you're buying factor that into the price and and for these wet feeds especially in hot months you you're gonna have some spoilage so calculate that in very often it's still cheaper simply to throw this away and buy wet feeds I'm just saying make sure you calculate the cost of shrink on these wet feeds this one is for kind of for humor but it's also show you there's a lot of ways we can waste feed and this is the wandering jersey shrink and again this doesn't happen often but just to remind you that there's lots of ways to look look look around the farm see where you're losing feed that never gets to an animal being blown away getting wet not proper fee and not feeding out enough lots of ways to reduce shrink and then this slide I just love these are University goats obviously you you you wouldn't want this on your farm so again just a little humor but it's again emphasizing look around where are you losing feed before the cow ever eats it a lot of these things have very little cost to fix and they have have a good return so remember shrink the feed that is wasted cost you exactly the same as the feed that's eat and and look at ways and here's just an example if you purchase a feed at a hundred bucks or grow it at a hundred bucks a time and you lose 15% of that you're not feeding $100 feed your feeding $118 per ton feed so that's just like spending 15% more if you're really bad or they're very bad situations 50 your hundred-dollar feed now has become $200 feed so watching shrink watching waste it is a good way just to reduce feed cost usually relatively simply shrink proper silage making proper feed I'll make sure you feed enough we used to say a couple inches of silage a day now we think six to twelve inches a day to get maximum reduced feet out losses Hey correct dry matter when you make it use preservatives if necessary and protect commodities under full cover if they they dump a load and half the loads outside exposed to the Sun or exposed to the weather and you're losing a lot of that calculate that into your cost feed bunk management you know feeding several times a day made reduce spoilage in the bunk pushing up feeds on just proper bunk management and then on wet feeds make sure your inventory is appropriate wet feeds can be very very cheap if you don't have a lot of spoilage so if you can go through and manage the inventory wet feeds if you can buy them are usually a good deal way backs this is essentially waste I shouldn't say that it's you know you you feed fifty pounds of dry matter and you're gonna throw out or you're going to still have a pound or two left in the bunk we we shouldn't look at that as waste because if cows have an empty bunk you lose milk so way backs are you the appropriate amount of way back is critical you don't want to hurt milk production by limiting feed but you don't want to throw away this feed and even if you feed way backs to heifers you've still our locale you're still losing value because of time I'm not going to go into all the details in last month's towards Mike went into this in great detail I'd suggest you read it but tracking or monitoring way backs again can save you a couple percent of your feed bill so to wrap up here use cost effective not necessarily cheap feeds feed additives can be very valuable or they can be a waste of money so look at return on investment and how often they work and target them to those those groups that were likely respond forages is is valuable and it's often an inexpensive or a less expensive source of nutrient be aware the quality use the appropriate quality based on inclusion rates talk to your nutritionist and balint if you're grouping cows by production these diets need to be a lot tighter than one group pmrs they're you're still going to overfeed you're just not going to over feed as much shrink you've heard a lot of this a lot of people talk about this just look at ways around the farm where shrink happens and can you do something about it and then lastly way backs i didn't go into great detail don't shortchange nutrients don't feed to empty or don't use or don't have cows suffer from empty bunks but don't waste a ton of feed it's expensive and you know if you even if you feed it to another group of cows you still lose value and with that I'll turn it back over to Abby or Mike thank you very much go right ahead thank you dr. Weiss for that presentation I think nutrition and rations can be pretty confusing and complicated and you certainly hit on a lot of points there thinking about forages and other commodity ingredients additives the effective shrink and how that all plays a role in the price of feed and I think you know the bottom line is being cost effective but not cheap and your spending of the ration to really help enhance that milk production that's so important our dairy producer so thanks for covering a wide variety of topics in the short amount of time I think you did a really tremendous job with that we had a really great audience a live audience today a lot of attendees we appreciate you being a part of our webinar I want to remind you that the webinar will be available online on our archives next week or later this week and so feel free to check back if you want to watch the presentation again also if you want to share it with anyone else it's available to anyone online once it's posted for those of you that are attending you will get a survey in your email that will ask a few questions about the webinar and we'd appreciate if you'd provide your feedback that helps us for future planning our sponsor for today was qlf quality liquid feets and we definitely appreciate it their support of our webinar and if you want to learn more about them please check them out online and then I hope you'll make plans to attend our next webinars which you'll see on the screen here right now kicking off 2019 with a dairy situation in the outlook that will be presented by Mark Stevenson from the University of wisconsin-madison I'm kind of looking to his crystal ball and tell us what he expects for the coming year and hopefully get some good news from him there and that webinar will be sponsored by Chris Hansen and then moving to the next month February 11 2000 19 we'll be talking about heat stress so never too early to think about the hot summer months and how will impact our cattle this presentation will specifically be talking about dry housing the calves and how he's stressed during the dry period can affect future generations of the herd that present the patient will be given by Jeff doll from the University of Florida we had some questions that came in in advance and then for any of you in attendance you are able to type questions in to the webinar control panel down in that questions section so I will turn things over to Mike who will read the questions for dr. Weiss and will wait for his answers to them well we got a bunch of questions here bill so it'll be in the speed round here the first one comes in and as Abby points out you can send questions they had this in some Missouri and I'll read it to you you probably can see if there everybody can see and are there any cost-cutting strategies for the feed in a robotic milking system not only are we effective if affecting milk production but also milk visits in a free flow system comments on that bill well first of all I need to say that like Dirty Harry said in the movie a man has to know his limitations and this is not my my strength but with a robotic system one of you you basically can balance diets for every single cow and the herd almost because you'd have a ban of protein and a ban of energy so you can really fine-tune protein which should cut cost you want to formulate the the PMR the partial mixed diet under the average if you're already a feeding above average in the TMR or the PMR you're wasting money so ten or fifteen pounds less than the average and the group should be in the PMR and then you make up the difference in the in the computer feeder or in the computer in the robot milker but you've got to be careful on cheap ingredients because you these cows have to eat a lot of feed in a short period of time so if it's a bad feed they don't like you're gonna lose money if it's pellet a poor quality pellet because it's cheap you're gonna it's gonna plug up the system you're not gonna get the quality so I wouldn't chore change the the quality of ingredients and the quality of the pellet but I would really look at balancing these diets very very tightly because again you are forming essentially for every specific calendar heard very good here's a fun one for you to think about can we only feed wheat straw as the sole forage source as long as all new trees are being met by for example thames RC software or by some model system I asked this question because you said cows need nutrients not feed any thoughts on if straws your only forage source and you've got that job done you know I should have said I have one day eventually we're gonna just do nutrients but we're not quite there yet cuz we can't quite describe everything but there is a studies from I think Arizona years ago where they fed very high straw it wasn't the only forage but it was the predominant forage at low level so they met the forage NDF requirement 2020 I can't remember exactly but 20 25 percent forage and EF but that would have a very low inclusion rate of straw and these cows did okay so I'm gonna say we're not quite strictly nutrients we have this forage quality still as an issue but with lower quality feeds lower quality forage you drop the inclusion rate maintain appropriate amounts of forage and B F we can do adequately I don't think we'll ever do or we we can't right now do as great as we can with really really good quality forages but yeah I think with with straw or low quality lower quality forages drop inclusion rate maintain forage NDF total and EF starch etc you can get reasonable production the the key though or one key of this stuff is mix ability these straw diets with grain is very dry and sorting is a problem and I think that's why the the Arizona study put some some corn silage and it just helps mix ability so a part the answer is we're not quite at a nutrient basis but yes you can use lower quality forages if you balanced the diets appropriately okay very good here's a fun one a well question is on feed additives actually applies to amino acids and inert fats and that is metanalysis how do we find out how often and these results are positive with the meta-analysis on any of these feed nutrients that may come in - that have meta-analysis out their comments on meta-analysis if if a lot of these meta-analysis if they're done correctly will include tables or figures where it basically has all the all the studies used and they will show significance or not so that's that's one way that there you know by making these numbers up totally it might be 40 Studies on them they show this figure and in 25 out of the 40 they got a significant difference the other so that that's available on the better meta-analysis and they also show even if it wasn't significant was it positive because a lot of times people don't design studies and they're what we call underpowered so they couldn't detect differences so these these tables or figures where it shows you know every single study had a positive response but three-fourths of them were statistically significant that gives you good confidence so look a lot of these studies again if they're done correctly will provide that information if they don't if they just say the average response was two pounds or something I probably talk to the authors talk to the company who sponsored and see if you can get that information because again I think that's as critical as knowing the average return or the average response another interesting question how do you work out standard deviation for a group or groups of cows on the farm is there a software program available that people could actually put their data in and get that number if the farm has individual milk weights you can put that into Excel any of these numbers will give you the standard there's a formula that in in Excel or these spreadsheets that will calculate standard deviations so and the the software the milk software may actually do it as well but Excel will do it but you need individual milk weights if you get something like DHI once a month and and you could import it into an excel sheet that would be another way to get again it's it's I think it's just an STD or something very similar to that that command so all these common spreadsheets will calculate standard deviation the big problem is getting individual cow data again it doesn't have to be every day DHI monthly data would be fine if you have connection the DHI you might ask them if they could do that they could modify their their records so that for a pen it would give you it but right now I'd say Excel or a similar spreadsheet would be the way to go let me build on that cancer and ask you is there a magic number we saw what the one group was the standard deviation was thirteen pounds then you subbed out and down to the smaller ones is is there a number that you say oh that's way too big of a standard deviation you need you should really if your nutritionist really look at multiple pens is their magic cut off we're actually trying to look at this right now on very limited data one group tmr's again I want to emphasize very limited data the average standard deviation is about sixteen percent of the mean so if you're above that I'd say definitely but even at sixteen percent if you if when you cut this down into two groups based largely on production you're going to cut that standard deviation by more than half not a lot more than half but by more than half and so just start thinking of if if you're overfeeding by sixteen pounds a day or overfeeding by eight pounds a day how much difference that would be an especially protein so sixteen percent right now is my best estimate of average one group TMR one group milk production variance and I think if you're at one group you will save money by grouping you will if you if you reduce the overfeeding back to your Sesame examples here a question is if you price in everything and market values is a risk of overpricing farm growing forages we're using sesame and therefore missing an opportunity to optimize or maximize income over feed costs so the question is these these these fall market prices going in on on farm raised oranges yeah the the big problem the one of the biggest problem with sesame and other pricing systems it's not just the sesame is you need market prices and for alfalfa hey we have a market price for even grass hay or hay there's market prices but how do you find a market price for corn silence and and so what we've done in in our system is basically price corn silage at the time of harvest based on the price of corn this you can argue whether this is good or bad the alternative though is you you should have an idea of production cost and so you can calculate the cost of nutrients for corn silage and compare it to production cost it will almost always be be cheap so yeah there I think for for alfalfa we might be under pricing homegrown forages corn silage we really don't know because again there's no market price hey we do a decent job silage not so good let's follow up on that sesame a point could you could sesame also be run by putting in like sugar or lipids as one of the variables besides the for you listed or maybe an amino acids for example yes you can I'm no expert at using this thing there's different runs I know one run has amino acids there's no reason you couldn't put sugars etc you need to know the sugar concentration of all these feeds though you can't you know if you only know the sugar concentration of molasses you can't use it so you have to have the nutrient composition of this basket of feeds and I think we have 30 feeds in our in our basket and then ideally is the other thing it won't do is or it has trouble doing is is it you know sugar is part of energy fiber is part of energy a lot of these nutrients are counted twice so what we it's difficult to separate the energy price from the price of a nutrient like sugar so that sometimes you get some goofy answers so just be aware of that but yes you can price it on musicality on calcium and phosphorus and many things there is a limit because of the computer power but you can't add these things in okay we have four quick answers not quick hitters that we'd say here we go and I think they want the bill Weiss theory on this here we go first one is what about a to dry cow groups one for fat cows one for normal cows what's your idea on that for grouping dry cows it's probably better than nothing I'd rather get rid of the fat cows in lactation you you don't want fat cows in the dry period you know you can't have them lose too much weight because that's almost as bad as having them calves fat so you you might be able to moderate body condition a bit in the dry period with fat cows what it would allow me to do is I'm not going to get too much into specific feed additives but choline ruin protected choline and fat cows works quite well so it would allow you to target a higher priced additives to fat cows and again you could moderate body condition a little bit but not a lot number two free choice minerals do cows know what they need can we do that and use that as a way of giving minerals to our cows I always answer this question by saying humans are smarter than cows we think and we do a terrible job of balancing our minerals no there's there's good data showing cows well if you're if they're deficient in salt for example they will crave salt if they're deficient is something they may crave it and eat it but cows tend to over stew consume free-choice minerals and the average cow a lot of cows eat a below requirement so no they can't I would put it in the the TMR if you're gonna feed free-choice minerals make it make the cow work for it Princeton's salt blocks I have no no issue with those at all it gives cows something to do and they have to work to eat but free choice loose minerals I think or over X are expensive and cows are not smart enough nor our people to balance their own diets I think biased view bypass soybean meal vs. corn gluten the 60% of protein source any bias comments on one or the other their vote both the good feeds high-quality feeds the different amino acids and so we would I can't say one is gonna be better than the other in certain situations one will be better because it's providing different amino acids so if you're going to feed those products you're feeding them for metabolizable protein and amino acids so look at at the balance for example the corn gluten meal you're gonna be low in lysine so if you you need lysine the the treated so we might be better so just look at its there there's no magic no good or bad ingredients really it's diets so which one will fit in your specific diet quality wise they're both good it's just one corn gluten meal is a lot lower and lysine is higher in mp lower and lysine than the soy products last question has to do with shrink and I think it relates us from one of our fire are real supporters than from Europe and that is not using upright styles I so be a bunkers or piles what type of shrink that's how I interpret the question would be acceptable on on that type of storage unit well when I was in school we kept hearing bunkers at 10 and 20 percent shrink this was just standard but the technology we have now on the knowledge we have with these films with the way the bunkers are made the quick covering etc I've seen reports with as little as three to five percent shrink and bunkers which which is as good as any the best upright so I'd think with proper silage making skills or techniques which in covered quick right covering while the tires these films etc strengths a five-percent to me are very achievable now well-built why it's just an excellent job here thanks for all your fast answers we appreciate that and as one of the participants said a great webinar so Abby we'll turn it back to you to wind up very good I'll echo Mike's comments a great job with all those questions and the presentation in general dr. Weiss it's always a pleasure to have you as our presenter I look forward to having you again on the docket for 2019 also let me give one more shout out to qlf quality liquid feeds for partnering with us and being the sponsor of this webinar and we really appreciate their help looking forward here are the future webinar dates listed on the screen and we the dairy situation and outlook for 2019 in January and then in February heat stress effects on drug housing calves we really hope that you will consider joining us for one or all of our webinars for next year same time noon central time on the second Monday of each month and as we approach the end of this year I'd like to take the time to thank all of you for joining us for our 2018 webinars we really hope these presentations have been useful to you and we look forward to another great slate of webinar presenters in 2019 from all of us here at horde spearmen in our team at the University of Illinois like to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone who has been listening to our webinars we will surely look forward to talking with you again in the coming year