Our presenters tonight in order are Lisa Peterson, beef quality assurance specialist based at the Central Grasslands, REC, and Streeter, Jerry Stucka, livestock stewardship specialist and extension veterinarian based in Fargo, Janna Block, livestock system specialist based at the Heninger REC, John Dewbetter, livestock system specialist based at the North Central, yet might not, Carl Hoppe, livestock system specialist based at the Carrington REC, and Miranda Meehan, environmental stewardship specialist based in Fargo. Also with us tonight, offering technical support is Scott Swanson, our electronic media specialist based here in Fargo. Again, thank you all for joining us, and I'm going to turn this webinar over to Lisa. Good evening. Thank you all for joining us. Our speakers tonight, all of us as specialists are dealing with many of the same winter management issues and challenges that you are and so please feel free to ask questions. I was asked to talk about assessing cow and bull condition and managing bulls in a tough winter situation. So the first thing I'm going to talk about is body condition scoring. This is a really nice three-step system for body condition scoring. First, I'd encourage you to look at the ribs of the cow or the bull that's denoted by number one on your screen. If you can see those last two ribs, that animal is in a body condition score less than five. If those last two ribs are not visible, that animal is in a body condition score five or greater. Next, we would encourage you to look at the spine. That's denoted by number two here on the cow. If that spine is visible, the animal is in a body condition score of three or less. Next, look at the shape between the hooks and the pins. In the dairy industry, we call that area the thorough. If that animal has a strong V shape in that area, that animal is in a body condition score two. If it's a strong V but a little more flat, that would be a body condition score three. A V shape would be a body condition score four, and then as we move into a U shape in that area, it would be a body condition score five, and as we move into a flatter shape, those move into body condition scores six, seven, and eight. In the United States, our beef body condition scores range from a one to a nine. A body condition score one is considered a cow or a bull that is starved, very emaciated, and a body condition score nine is considered an animal that is obese. So let's look at body condition scoring. We would like to see our animals in a body condition score five to seven at calving time. Those are the two body condition scores on the right side of the screen here. So we'd like our mature cows to be in a body condition score five. Again, we are not able to see those last two ribs. The spine is not available, it's not visible, excuse me, and the shape between the hooks and the pins is in a strong U shape. And so you can see that this cow, the top on the right-hand side, is in a body condition score five. The cow below her, we cannot see those last two ribs. The spine is not visible, and the shape between her hooks and pins is very flat. And so she's in a body condition score of six or greater. Now, why do we talk about this? Well, for every body condition score you lose, you lose between 80 and 100 pounds of weight. It takes a great deal of energy and cost to get cows up to increase body condition score at calving or right before breeding. And so we really are concerned about body condition score. There's a lot of impact on calf health and calf productivity along with cow productivity. We tend to forget about bulls when we manage in the winter time, and we certainly forget about looking at our body condition scores of bulls. So these are two bulls. The bull on the left is a body condition score five. Again, just like our cows, we cannot see his last two ribs. We cannot see his spine. And that shape between his hooks and his pins is a strong U shape. So he's a body condition score five. The bull on the right is a yearling bull.  And again, as we look at him, you cannot see his last two ribs. His spine's not available. And this area between his hooks and his pins is very flat. And so he's going to be a body condition score six or greater. So as we move into talking about bulls, we have bulls around to improve our herd, but also to breed our cows, right? And that's how we get that herd improvement. So let's talk about spermatogenesis. That's the fancy term for semen development. In bulls, that takes 61 days or about two months. And so anything that has happened in that period of time will impact semen quality and the ability to pass the breeding soundness exam. I always encourage people to think of semen development as a factory. So anything that has happened along that production in that line over the past two months will result in a lemon in the semen production system. We certainly don't want any lemons when it comes time to breed cows. So what's the effect of body condition score on semen quality in physically normal bulls? Waldner and Barth, they are out of the vet school in Saskatoon at the University of Saskatchewan, looked at body condition scores of bulls breeding soundness time, exam time, and a time period from January to March, which is the green bars, and April to June, which is the yellow bars. We would ideally like to see bulls in a body condition score of four, five, or six at breeding time and at turnout time. And here's the reason why. You can see that the body condition, when we have those bulls in those body condition scores, the percentage of those bulls of satisfactory semen goes up significantly higher. So we range from anywhere being 60% satisfactory to 78% and in January to March timeframe for semen checking to 80%, almost 85% in that April to June timeframe. So what happens when we buy yearling bulls or even two year old bulls at the local production sale? Typically those bulls are a little heavier in condition because we are trying to optimize production. We're trying to optimize weight gain and marbling in those bulls. And so you can see here on this screen that this shows a comparison of bulls that were weighed at sale time and then weighed again when they were tested and they looked at the percentage of bulls that would pass a breeding soundness exam. So in a short period of time after that sale, 74% of those bulls passed a semen test or a breeding soundness exam. At that point in time those bulls were losing about seven pounds a day. When you get out to about 43 to 85 days after that sale, those bulls are losing still about two and a half to three pounds a day, but only half of them passed a breeding soundness exam. So the take home message is that when we buy these bulls, young bulls, a yearling bull or a two year old bull and take them home, we wanna make sure that we are still maintaining their quality of diet so that we don't lose a lot of weight, body condition and fat. So this year we are likely going to see a lot of bulls with scrotal frostbite.  So in this slide, satisfactory semen quality is in the green bar, questionable semen quality is in the yellow bar, and unsatisfactory semen quality is in the gray bar. I want you to look at the boxes with the red squares around them. So they looked at frostbite and they graded frostbite by the number of scabs that were a penny or larger or a penny and smaller. Severe frostbite were those bulls that had one or more scabs on their scrotum that were larger than a penny. Slight was one or more that were smaller. So when we look at severe frostbite in bulls that had breeding soundness exams for example, conducted it from January to March, zero. None of those bulls had what we would consider to be a satisfactory breeding soundness exam. Somewhere around 30% had what we would consider to be a questionable one. As we move down here to May and June, you can see that the percentage of bulls that have satisfactory breeding soundness exams or semen quality increases significantly. So the take home message is to protect the scrotum and testicles from the cold. The easiest way, most logical way to do that is with some good windbreak and good bedding. And so on the picture on the left, you can see that these bulls are bedded with some nice straw and there's some really nice natural windbreak through these trees. This can also be a man-made windbreak whether that happens to be stacks of bales or some of these portable windbreaks. As you can see in Canada, maybe they protect the scrotum and testicles of bulls a little bit different. They've utilized a crumb oil sack. We know that that is maybe not appropriate here in the easiest thing to do. So in summary, bulls should be in a body condition score of four to seven pre-breeding time and at turnout. We want those bulls to maintain condition through the breeding season, but we don't want them to be too fat. Maintain young, recently purchased bulls on a similar plane of nutrition and diet as they were when they were purchased and then slowly step them down. If you have not done so, check out the body condition scores of your herd sires now. Ask someone who's knowledgeable about cattle to check out the body condition score of your herd, both your bulls and cows too. Don't confuse hair, muscle, and or hay belly with condition and get help developing a ration if you need to add some condition. This is really important in bulls because we don't want to get them too fat and we don't want to step them up on too hot of a diet. Most of our county extension offices have software and ration development ability if you need some help. Next, we talked about this, bedding bulls and in fact, bedding cattle is really important. Provide some windbreak. Breeding soundness exams are really important. We need to have our bulls tested within a month of breeding season. That gives us enough time to find bulls if our bulls happen to not test well but it also is an appropriate amount of time for them to have that breeding soundness exam be accurate when you turn them out. Don't save pennies to waste dollars by skipping a breeding soundness exam. Most veterinarians charge $50 to $100 for a breeding soundness exam and while that seems like a lot of money, think about this. If your cows breed just 21 days later because your bull failed a breeding soundness exam, that ends up being somewhere around 50 pounds of waning weight. If calves sell for a dollar and a half a pound, that is $75 per head that you have lost. You could have paid for that breeding soundness exam with just one calf. Remember that that semen test is only good for the day it was taken and that semen development takes 60 days. And so with that, thank you. I wish you the best of luck and as we move into spring. And next, Dr. Jerry Stuck is going to talk about managing calves that have been chilled and cold stressing calves. Thank you, Lisa. Good to be with you this evening. I know that this is really not a topic that all I'm enjoyable to talk about. We're gonna talk about it anyway. We've still got winter left and the storm coming. And I hope none of you have to deal with cold stress calves, but we're gonna focus in for the next few minutes on talking about how we handle and how we deal with it and how we recognize it. Well, these are the three things we're gonna discuss. We're gonna talk about how to recognize a calf and maybe in trouble. And I'm sure that's nothing new for those of you in the audience. You know how to tell when calves aren't doing well or doing right. We're gonna talk about some intervention and then maybe some things about what the outcomes might be. You know, I noticed some things that all of us are gonna talk about and bedding and wind protection come into play here. And yet the snow months they're talking about, it does cause us some issues. It's supposed to be wet snow. And whenever we have those kind of conditions, the problem with moisture is that it decreases the level of insulation on an animal. It's not just a cows, but it's those calves and those calves with not a whole lot of body weight and a lot of surface area. They tend to suffer the most when it gets to be these tough conditions. So you need to be doing what you can, be out there as often as you can during this tough weather.  And so think about what your schedule is and if you can get somebody to check calves for you, during the nighttime or even, even the daytime so you can get some sleep sure helps. Barns do help in situations like that. And just a reminder to keep as clean as possible and fresh bedding at this time of the year. I just wanna talk a little bit about behavior of animals that are under some stress and cold stress. And remember that cold stress can happen in a lot of different outside temperatures. I mean, the critical temperature for calves is probably somewhere around 55 degrees. So all that means that is when the temperature goes below that they have to take in more energy to maintain that body heat. And we'd like 55 degrees now, but calves can handle it if they're able to get up and nurse and the mother takes care of them. But the behavior that you need to be aware of that they'll exhibit when they're in cold stress is maybe standing off by themselves and hunched up. And of course you'll see that when they can't get out of the wind. But they also can be just laying down even next to the mother and you won't notice it. And you need to determine whether that calf has nursed or not. And sometimes I'll admit it's hard to determine that. But look at the udder. Do the teats look dry? And when it's moisture outside they probably won't look dry, they'll look wet. But is their hair on the udder dry or the udder quarters full? A lot of things to look for.   And even beyond that, when you get a calf that's cold and vocalizing, that is a really bad clinical sign. I sometimes use the term 5% chance of survival. So the prognosis in a calf that's vocalizing is really, really poor. We define hypothermia and calves as anything below 98 degree Fahrenheit rectal temperature. You know, newborn calves should be somewhere in that 99, 100, 102. We can actually have severe hypothermia down to 86 degrees. Those calves will definitely need to be intervened. I don't, I'm not telling you need to run around with a rectal thermometer. I'm telling you that you can probably identify those calves that need help just by their behavior. If you have one, that's fine, but it's not something you need to have to identify a calf that needs help. This is just a reminder that better days are ahead. We will get through this March and we will have green grass and some of you will have calves on green grass. So just remember this doesn't, these next two days don't last forever. Just wanna make a couple of comments about this. In order for a calf to maintain its core temperature and maintain its life when it's cold out, he has to increase metabolic activity. And of course that happens when that calf leaves the uterine environment that's nice and warm and safe and all of a sudden he shoved out into the cold environment. And so his metabolic activity has to really jump ahead and get on board. And there's some mention that the metabolic activity will increase five X over the resting phase. And then what calves end up doing is they end up shivering and that helps them to generate heat. And I've got a comment in here below shivering as it talks about calving difficulty. When a calf is having trouble being born or the mothers having trouble delivering that calf, that actually is a detriment to that calves ability to withstand cold temperatures because it messes with the metabolic activity. Even a calf that's born unassisted is gonna have increased cortisol. And just a little bit of cortisol allows that calf to better utilize fat.  But also the sugar stores, the glycogen and protein to create heat. And what happens in cold temperatures in addition to increased metabolic activity when it's cold out, there's vasoconstriction. In other words, the vessels will constrict and you don't have that blood flow to the ears and feet and tail. And that's why when it gets really cold and you see problems result, that's the pieces of the anatomy that get affected the most. Just a little comment on calving ease, just to back up what I just mentioned about calving ease and calves ability to withstand cold and get up and nurse. I wanna mention something about brown fat and we don't often think about that. You think in terms of white fat. Well, calves are born with brown fat and they have the unique ability and it's gone after just a short period of time but they have an unique ability to use that fat to keep warm. And calves that are born to cows in adequate body condition score back to what Lisa was talking about. Those calves will have a little better supply of brown fat that gets them through the tough times and gets them to get up and start nursing. So it's a big deal. Having cows in adequate body condition score, especially in cold temperatures is really important. Just a couple of comments about colostrum. We'll come back to this again in just a bit. If you think about a calf in thermonutrile zone, thermonutrile zone, and I mentioned this earlier about thermonutrile zone for calves probably somewhere in that 50 to 55 degree Fahrenheit range. They need, in order to maintain their heat source they need almost two thirds of a gallon of colostrum. Now, colostrum are different for cow to cow and from breed to breed and dairy breeds and beef breeds, but just kind of an idea of what those calves actually need. And when that temperature falls below that thermonutrile zone, then they actually need a little bit more just to maintain their energy that they need per internal body heat. And remember that our beef cattle do an amazing job of acclimating to the cold. So when I talk about thermonutrile zone, I mean our cattle grow longer hair. They do lots of things to acclimate to the cold. If they didn't, we wouldn't be able to raise cattle out outdoors. I mean, even in temperatures way below zero if the sun is shining and there's no wind and they're laying in bedding, those calves actually do extremely well. Frostbite is one of the side effects of this cold stress that you can have. It can have frostbite right on the skin, but a lot of times what we see happen first is that the tips of the ears will freeze and then they'll necrosis and then they'll fall off. And that's okay. Those calves will be okay if it's just the tips of the ears. The one that becomes really dangerous is when their feet freeze. And you'll notice, you can notice this early on perhaps when you feel the feed in there just frozen solid. And if you don't notice it then those calves will actually get up and move around and be fine, but after a day or so, maybe by 48 hours, those feet become swollen. They actually get what I call squishy because there's edema fluid in the tissues and they're painful. And you can wait a while to see if somehow there's a miracle that occurs and they improve, but most of the time they're not gonna be treatable at that stage and those calves will likely have to be put down. So how do we heat those calves up? Lots of different ways, lots of different methods. You know, heaters, floor heats and blankets and hot boxes and I just want you to think about this though because when a calf is really hypothermic, you know, I mentioned that 86 degree rectal temperatures is extreme hypothermia. It's gonna be hard to conduct enough heat through the hide to raise that internal body temperature. So, and in order to do that really, the calf has to also have the ability to produce heat. And that's why in both of these instances, those calves need colostrum. I know you're in a hurry to get that calf warmed up, but sometime during that period when you're warming, you gotta provide colostrum because that allows calf, that calf to get some energy that it really needs. Warm water tends to be very efficient at warming calves. And some of you may have bathtubs available. Sometimes you need to carry them right in the house and put them in the bathtub, 100 degree Fahrenheit water. And I'll just caution you a little bit. Sometimes it's okay to warm those calves up a little bit with dry heat first so that it's not so much of a shock. So rubbing and putting external heat on is okay. So you can start to raise some of that temperature, but the bathtubs still may be needed in those calves that are extremely hypothermic. And also they need colostrum. Yes, this is my famous picture of a calf in the bathtub. And that one actually did survive, believe it or not. Just a couple of comments again on colostrum itself, fresh is the best, some is better than none. And sometimes you need to put that beef cow that doesn't know that you're trying to help her in the calf. Gotta put them in a head catch. And this is where you need some help. You need somebody to grab the tail of the base and move it to a vertical position so she won't kick so much. And put your head in that flank and milk the nearest heat. And then once they kinda calm down, you can kind of release some pressure. But that fresh colostrum is the best. Energy source, immune source that those calves need. Frozen colostrum is fine. I'd prefer if you harvest it from your own herd. I'm a little eerie of taking frozen colostrum from other herds and from dairy herds. There are colostrum substitutes on the market today. And look at the label, make sure they got a minimum of 100 grams of immunoglobulins that those calves need. I know I always get questions about brandy and whiskey and five hour energy drinks. Brandy and whiskey I'm pretty sure are designed for human consumption. I'm not sure about five hours. I don't know of any studies done on them. So stick with the things you know, colostrum is the best. I'm gonna pass this over at this time to Jana Block, our extension livestock specialist out in Headinger. Jana, you take it away. All right, thanks, Jerry. Okay, so I'm gonna be visiting with you a little bit about how to evaluate your nutrition program. And I know it's been a long haul for many of us and still looking like we're facing a little bit of winter. So it's important to be really critical and evaluate what's going on with your nutrition programs as we try to finish out the rest of this winter and head into spring. So things that we need to consider are obviously quality and quantity of our base diet. Most of the time that's gonna consist of forage. So don't be like the guy in this cartoon here and let the whitetail show you which are the best bales. Get your hay inventory conducted and I'll talk about an example of that shortly. And also make sure you get nutrient analysis conducted so that you know exactly what you're dealing with. Obviously, you have to know what different types of production groups that you have to take care of if you've got some first calf heifers, some old thin cows, mature cows, your bulls, those are all gonna have different requirements and you're gonna need to feed them strategically based on your feed resources. Most of you are calving now or you have been for some time and so that's gonna impact requirements in terms of when your cows get to peak lactation which is approximately 60 days after calving. That's also going to really kind of match up with our pasture turnout dates in terms of when we have to feed that high quality forage when requirements out there are highest. What's the condition of our cow herd? Evaluate body condition score and I'll talk about a couple of other strategies to kind of monitor nutrient status. And then of course, considerations are gonna always come back to the bottom line. What kind of costs are you looking at? What facilities and labor do you have available? And you might need to consider some alternatives rather than just a full feed hay diet. Okay, so this chart gives you just some rule of thumb for estimating hay intake based on energy content or TDN total digestible nutrients. So as you can see here, the low quality forages will have the least amount of intake that's just due to bulk or physical fill due to fiber content. And so our dry cows are going to be able to eat around 1.8% of their body weight of that low quality forage. Lactating cows will increase intake of that. And again, intake will just continue to increase as forage quality increases. And I have just an example of down here on the bottom of comparing intake of a low quality forage at 30.8 pounds to a high quality forage at 37.8 pounds. So again, that's where understanding the quality of your forage is helpful. And this can be used when you're looking at your hay inventory and trying to figure out what the intake should be on various forages based on quality. So Jerry kind of mentioned the lower critical temperature. So in beef cattle, that's just the temperature below which they have to utilize energy to maintain body heat. And so in mature cattle, we're talking about 32 degrees with a dry winter coat or 18 degrees with a heavy dry winter coat. And so as the temperature starts to decline, you can see that feed intake will increase, energy for production is lost, and the maintenance requirement increases. So we can utilize the ambient temperature and wind speed to calculate an effective temperature. And we use this effective temperature to determine how much additional energy those cattle are gonna require just to maintain body heat. So again, a basic rule of thumb is to increase TDN or energy by 1% for every degree below the lower critical temperature. So if we have the dry heavy winter coat that I talked about in the previous slide, our lower critical temperature is 18 degrees. So if we have air temperature of zero and a wind speed of 20, we're looking at an effective temperature of minus 39. So we take our lower critical temperature minus our minus 39, and those cows are gonna require 57% more energy. So just going through some nutrition calculations here, and I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you. I can definitely get you copies of this slide or you can print it from the webinar later, just showing you the relative difference in how much energy is going to be required by that cow just based on that wind speed and temperature. And so if we were able to feed that cow the amount of forages she's gonna need to meet her energy requirements, she'd be eating 3.6% of body weight. That might be possible in some feedlot diets that's still on the high side and probably not possible with our forage-based diets. So we have to find some other ways to reduce maintenance requirements and the amount of feed that those cows are gonna require. So just a couple of ways that you can do that. Many of you are probably already doing some of these things. Need to think about providing some higher quality forages or grain or byproduct feeds, just more energy dense feeds. Again, forage will generate the most amount of heat per unit, but we can't get enough forage into them based on that really high energy requirement. And it's also difficult for cattle to utilize poor quality feeds when it's cold because intake increases, passage rate increases, and nutrient utilization will actually decrease. And so just providing the higher quality feeds is a good idea at that time. Separating off thin and young cows and feeding them separately is a good idea if you have the facilities, just to give them a little more attention and again be strategic about the cattle that you need to maybe provide a little more nutrient dense feeds. Also, Lisa mentioned it, Jerry mentioned it, windbreaks and shelter are really critical. That's gonna really help reduce the effect of the windshield and reduce that effective temperature. If natural shelter isn't available, need to get out there and provide some portable windbreaks, tires, hay bales, whatever you've got. A lot of you already probably feed in late afternoon or early evening if you can stand it. I know a lot of times it's hard for producers to kind of wait to feed, but basically what that does is just kind of generates more heat fermentation later in the middle of the night when those cattle need it the most and typically the temperature's up the lowest. Wanted to just mention hay waste. Most producers are utilizing round bales and that's good for minimizing labor, but we do know that studies have shown that waste can be pretty high when you're rolling out bales 20 to 45%. So you are in the situation where you're having to unroll bales out on feed ground. It's a good idea to try to limit access. A one versus a four day supply, they've shown that hay waste is reduced by 20%. So obviously if we're coming into a blizzard situation and you feel like you need to put a few days of feed out, go ahead and do that. This is just thinking long term over the entire feeding period, providing it one day at a time is probably your best bet. Feeding on fresh ground if possible is gonna be important to increase utilization and intake. And then obviously feeding low quality hay first and trying to encourage them to consume all that before they go to the high quality feeds. It's really difficult to put out high quality feed and then kind of force them to go back and consume that low quality forage. So we're thinking about reducing waste. A couple of things come to mind, obviously using a bale processor. So basically that just functions to reduce particle size, increase passage rate and then increase intake. So it's a good way to increase utilization of low to medium quality forages. Disadvantages, possibly some increased costs due to labor, fuel, investment and equipment. You can also get some leaf loss, particularly on windy days, which we have a lot here in North Dakota. So that's just some consideration. You can look at your increased feed availability and utilization versus the amount of cost that it's gonna take to get you there. Hay feeders are certainly another option. They've been shown to really reduce feeding losses. It doesn't work in every situation, obviously, but the cone feeder with a waste panel at the bottom, it's definitely a consistent feeder that results in the least amount of hay waste. So this just goes back to calculating, conducting a hay inventory and calculating how much you're gonna need to get you through the rest of the winter. Again, just a couple of examples here. So we need to know body weight of our cows. We need to know the percent of body weight as forage that they're consuming. And that's based on forage quality, which you get from your forage analysis. And then we're gonna need to calculate in a waste factor here to get pounds of forage consumed per cow per day. Just an example, 1,400 pounds, eating 2.5% of body weight. I put in a waste factor of 25%. And so they're gonna be eating right, needing right around 44 pounds per cow per day. If we have a 60 day feeding period to get through, hopefully we're gonna have green forage available after that. And so that's the total amount of forage needed per cow. You also need to know your bale weights and your dry matter. Again, that's your nutrient analysis. And so based on our bale weight and the 90% dry matter, that's how much dry matter we have available per bale. So we end up right around 2.2 bales per cow. And you could do a quick estimation of this just based on one bale per cow per month, adding in a little bit of extra. Like I said, for waste. And this doesn't necessarily mean that this is exactly how much each cow needs. It's gonna have to adjust based on temperature, condition, forage quality, and all those other factors that we've kind of talked about. When you do look at supplementing some low quality forages, it's important to know what your goal is and how to most effectively meet that goal. And so for talking about low quality forages that have less than 7% protein, that's the point at which ruminal fermentation could be limited. And so we need to look at providing a high quality protein supplement containing greater than 20%. So we've got alfalfa hay, soybean meal, distiller's grains. The nice thing about cows is they can be fed these every two to three days because of their ability to recycle nitrogen. If you've got a forage with greater than 7% protein, might need to look at supplying an energy supplement. And again, that's gonna be based on the different requirements of your various production groups. And you need to kind of look at whether you choose a fiber versus a starch-based supplement. So some of our fiber supplements are soy holes, wheat mitz, and distiller's grains. And our starches are feed grains, corn, barley, and other things like that. So we know if we feed too much starch on a forage-based diet, it's gonna reduce digestibility and intake of the forage. And that's just based on changes to the microbial population. So there's some things you can do to be strategic and make sure that you're meeting those needs effectively without too much impact on the microbes. Just wanna quickly show you a feed cost calculator. This was developed jointly by the North Dakota Farm Management Education Program and NDSU Extension. This is just a simple Excel spreadsheet. And you can go in and customize all of your feedstuffs and you can put in weight. We thought it was really important to include your trucking costs, how many miles that you have to incorporate when you're evaluating that.  You can go down here to nutrient content and use your values from your feed analysis and plug those in. It'll calculate your dry matter per ton, your energy and protein per ton. And what you end up with is dollar amount per pound of nutrient. And so that's what we want you to use to compare supplements when you're trying to make those supplementation decisions. And just a couple additional considerations before I turn it over to John. Really important to not forget about water. We know that cold use is going to increase metabolic water use. And so this time of year, we don't think about cows' water requirements as much as we do in the heat of summer, but they still require adequate water for making sure that we get good feed digestion and utilization and maintain performance and health, especially with lactating cows. So probably minimum a gallon per 100 pounds of body weight. I know people have had a huge amount of challenges this year, just dealing with ice in the tanks. So a couple of different options here for tanks that maybe aren't next to an electric source, a propane stock tank heater. There's water circulators. Some of those may result in some excess water flow. And so that can be a challenge, but check into different products that are available out there. And then another thing is you just need to, once we get your forward analysis done, your hay inventory done, wanna take a look at how that's performing in your cow herd. Again, evaluate that body condition score and take a look at manure consistency. This pile here where there's not really a lot of solid ring shows that that cow's getting a little bit of excess protein. Here we have adequate protein, but you see some rings. And there's usually a crater type appearance at the top of the pile. And then down here we get into deficient protein. There's definitely very obvious rings and usually this manure pile would be very firm. And so that's just one other option for evaluating the nutrient status of your herd. Again, I've thrown a lot at you tonight. Be sure and contact me if you have questions or put them in the chat box. And I'm gonna go ahead and turn things over to John Dubetter, and he's gonna talk to you about stretching limited hay. Thank you, Jana. Welcome to anybody who might have joined us on the webinar up here in Minot. We've had a couple of days of reprieve from the weeks and weeks of bitter cold wind chills, which stressed a lot of things, equipment, people, livestock, and calves. And unfortunately, I think we're all aware that there's some more stuff coming to North Dakota and some new challenges with some blizzard conditions. It's truly amazing to me just how hardy our cattle are as these pictures kind of illustrate. They can cope with a lot when we do our part to get them out of the wind, have a little backbat on them, and keep their room in full so they generate some heat or fermentation and have some energy to deal with the wind chills and the cold. In the cases when we can't do that for one reason or another, we got some cattle suffering from some lameness or age. It's pretty conceivable to have cows lose three or four pounds a day in a condition score within less than a month of time. We've talked about how their energy needs go up with the cold and the wind chill. And along with that, their appetites go up, their rate of passage goes up, they can eat more feed, and we as stockmen give them more feed because it's absolutely necessary. What that does, though, is it puts us in a position now that some things have happened. What we thought was an adequate feed supply all of a sudden is starting to look a little short. And we've got some instances of people running a little low and concerned that their hay might not get them to where they need to go. How that happens is just looking at what we've had to do. If we've been feeding 35 pounds of hay normally under more normal weather, and we've had weeks upon weeks of extreme weather with minus 40 and 30 wind chills daily, and we've had 50 pounds, we've all of a sudden fed 40% more hay over those two months. That's led us to a situation where we might have to adapt some management to stretch the hay that we still have. We're not anywhere close to grass. For most of us, turnout might be in mid-Made, even late-Made, so we need to have a plan of how we're gonna get there. One of the things that we can do is we could probably go out and try to find some additional hay. The reality of being able to find it and the cost, we might be able to locate it for is probably time to look at some of our alternatives. Most cases feeding some grain or concentrate feed and limiting the hay somewhat might be an option that we really have to consider. I've got two rations in this slide, one for the last month of gestation and one for the first month of lactation as calving is undergoing right now. We know what a cow needs for energy needs and we know we can supply that with medium to better quality hay if we've fed 40 pounds in late gestation or fed 45 pounds in early lactation. If we don't have that much hay, we could restrict the hay to probably 30 pounds, feed five or six pounds of corn and with the bedding and a little extra straw there to help her get content and fill up her room. We could still meet her TDN or energy needs. If we happen to have a limited supply of hay but we're long on silage, we can adjust the ration as well to feed a lower percent hay, maybe a third hay, two thirds or more silage and we can meet her needs that way. Now I recognize some people are a little careful about how much silage, a high energy feed they can feed at calving time. Still concerned about high milk production so a young calf who can't handle it the potential to cause some digestive or scouring calves but we can manage that by limiting that to an appropriate level. Feeding grains a little different than feeding hay so we got to take things a little slower and understand that we got a potential to cause some digestive problems if we don't do it right. For the most part, it's a new feed to cow, it's a fast digesting feed and it should be introduced into the ration fairly slowly. We don't want any cows to overeat too fast, create an acidotic rumen and it might have some consequences of bloat and founder and so forth. Typically we also want to try to feed these start to your grains at a low percent of the ration just so we don't interfere with the digestion of the fiber that might be in the ration and we still get the value out of our forages. Generally that's feeding less than four tenths of a percent of body weight or in the cows. In this state that might be four to six pounds. For wheat and barley, we know cracking them, breaking the seed couts can create or enhance the digestibility of those feeds. And we also, like Janice said, some of our rations may be short of protein and maybe a grain byproduct which typically higher in protein may be more appropriate than feeding just a straight grain. As well as when we feed these byproducts or a higher grain ration, they're high in phosphorus, low in calcium, you might want to consider that or check our mineral to make sure we're not overfeeding phosphorus and underfeeding calcium and pick a mineral with the right blend or proportions of those two. But most importantly, if we're going to feed a limited amount of grain to herd of cows, we have to have a way of getting it out there, getting it distributed so we don't have some cows eating excessive amounts and some cows not getting enough. So we got to give each cow her fair share and distribute the grain over a pretty wide area for that to happen. One of the biggest challenges is how you do that. How you get four or five pounds of grain to your cows in a timely manner and everybody gets a share and it's hard to handle grain if all you've got is a loader tractor. For most people who are feeding a mixed ration with the feed wagon, certainly just weighing in the grain, adding it to the mix of forages and feeding it out works very well. Some people are not equipped with silage or don't feed silage. And so we got some other options with that and we could probably get a cake feeder or cake box, go out there and put it all on the ground or we can add an attachment to a, you know, a bale processor. Some of them have hoppers you can put 20, 30 bushels of corn or grain in top dress the shred hay. Feeding grain has also got some challenges and sometimes it's pretty difficult with a large herd of cattle to feed them in such a way that we can actually minimize the waste. You know, if we've got hard frozen ground, dry sod or compacted snow and ice, cows would do a pretty good job of licking up grain off of those surfaces. However, if we get some slush and mud and deep snow, it won't work very well. In those cases, we almost have to go to feeding these things in some kind of a bunk. Or if we're feeding it on the sod or the ground, certainly it's even better to feed small piles such with a trip hopper on your feeding attachment. So we put little piles over a row rather than a continuous very small shallow line of grain. Certainly grain feeding is a way to stretch our quarry for a little bit. It's also something that we might be kind of required to as hay pile just diminishes and we just have to stretch everything. So we're gonna do what it takes. And I commend you for being the stockman you are and taking care of these cattle under these difficult conditions. And now I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Carl Hoppe and he's gonna talk to us a little about where maybe we can source some of these additional feeds. Thank you, John. I know in our part of the world here, winters really been extended cold and our hay reserves have been used up pretty quickly this year and we're now looking for other options to supplement our cowherds. So alternative feeds are certainly one of those things can be used. Co-product feeds are moderate to high in protein. They're moderate to high in energy content as well. A couple of things that poor quality forages, straws definitely need to have added to it. So co-products work well as a supplement or partial replacement for a forage based ration. Works excitingly well for low quality forages like straws or slew haze or we've already used our good quality feeds and we need to add something to the poor quality feeds. Co-products certainly are something that work out quite well. Surprisingly, North Dakota has many co-products. Mills, crushes, refineries and processing plants across the state. When you get the other states, they don't have the number of opportunities that we have in North Dakota. Now I recognize that most of these crushes and mills and processing plants are located in the eastern part of the state, which means that we have ready access on our side in the western side of the state. They have the same access, but they have freight costs that need to be added to it. Just how much co-products do we produce in North Dakota? There's two examples that I'll share of just how much volume we produce. Our state mill and elevator that's owned by the state of North Dakota, it's the largest single Durham wheat mill located in the world at one location. There's other companies that are bigger, but we actually have the largest in one location. It mills 90,000 bushels of wheat a day, our Durham, into flour semolina. That means it produces a co-product. They mill out the starch, the co-product, the fiber and the proteins are left over, and that's called wheat mids or wheat midlings and they produce 100 ton a day, which is around 33 semi loads. Just to give a feeling at 10 pounds per head per day, they produce enough feed to feed 20,000 head of cattle daily. North Dakota has 900,000 head of cattle or almost a million head of cattle, so you can see that 20% of our cow herds in North Dakota could be fed just what we produce out of this one particular mill. It's a high quality feed of 18% protein and 83% protein. Even more production in co-product feed is found in our ethanol distilleries across North Dakota. We have five plants in North Dakota. They produce 3,000, 3,500 to 4,000 tons daily of distillers grains that's on a dry matter basis. Given the cow inventory that we have, we could feed seven pounds of distillers grains, utilize this feed to every cow every day, or if we just looked at a seven month period, we could feed 12 pounds of distillers grains per day. There's that much product produced in North Dakota. 12 pounds of distillers grains would really take the edge off of how much hay is needed for our cow ration. Not only that, if you look at 30% crude protein, you're giving almost three and a half pounds of crude protein per cow per day, which just is a heck of a lot of protein to provide to a cow. But on a poor quality ration, that might be something a cow certainly needs this time of the year. Again, it's 38% crude protein and 86% TDM, again, high quality feeds. Co-products, there's two big issues that occur with them, and that's gonna be the pricing of it as well as the freight. Freight costs can get to be pretty high. It's very competitive with other local feeds when you look at the price of these co-products, which have to include the price of the freight. Western North Dakota certainly will have a higher cost than our Eastern part of North Dakota. It has to compete with our other feeds like grains, haze, and other available co-products, but there are some limitations in our co-products. There are some long-term starability issues with some. Wheatmeats tend to take moisture out of the air and consequently mold, unless they've been put on an air floor during the summertime. Distillers grains used to have a bridging problems with it, they can still have. Things like distillers, excuse me, wheatmeats is very light and fluffy unless it's pelleted, which increases density twofold and makes it a lot easier to transport. Some feeds like the wet corn gluten feed or the wet distillers grains or beet tailings or beet pulp all are high in moisture. And of course, mold can become an issue too. Calculating the cost per pound of nutrient can easily be done. It's just a matter of taking the feed that you're going to be using and taking the cost per ton and dividing it by the energy content of the feed. So in this example, I used $90 tonne wheatmeats that has an 86 TDN. You do the math and all of a sudden your cost per pound of protein count a TDN or energy content is five cents a pound. If you need these TDN values, go to our NDSU AS 1182, alternative byproduct feeds publication and it has a directory of prices of TDN values in the end, not price of TDN values. We have a bunch of co-products across North Dakota. In most part, they're all low in starch and high in fiber and high in protein. Feeds that are perfect for a cowherd is being fed a low quality forage. In the milling process or fermentation process, most of the starches removed in these products and or the oil, if it's an oil seed, results going to be something that's very high in fiber and usually high in protein too. And this fiber I need to point out is very digestible in ruminant diet. Distillage grains are produced in five different plants in North Dakota. There it's an ethanol at Castleton. Hank is in renewable energy at Hankinson. Dakota Spirit Ag ethanol at Spiritwood. Blue Fun ethanol at Underwood as well as red drill energy at Richardson. It's a very popular feed. You can see some of the values over here of it's very palatable that that's an understatement cows really go after this feed quite well. It mixes well with other feeds, conditions of feed. Maybe there's a limit to 30% of the diet. This is some of the sulfur issues that you want to use. There are ethanol plants in other parts of the in South Dakota and other states that can be trucked into North Dakota too. Right now they've raised the price of distillage grains. So it's still cost competitive but at $160 a ton. It's no longer one of the cheapest feeds out there that we can provide to our cow herd. Wheat middlings is another option. There's five plants in North Dakota that produces wheat mids. Dakota growers in Carrington. Mayanut milling in Mayanut. Arnut milling down at Fairmont. Of course North Dakota milling in Alva that we talked about at Grand Forks and to a lesser extent the plant up in Kandu. Some of these have already been, their sources of supply has been booked out for the year. Although at the mill and elevator and Dakota growers availability is still available and at $80 or $90 a ton turns into a fairly competitive feed. Corn gluten feed is created through the process of a wet corn milling which is the plant located down at Wapton North Dakota at Cargill. Of course, wet corn milling makes high fructose corn syrup and the leftover product is 83% TDN, 20% protein, very palatable. It can be sold as either dried or wet. You need to contact these people because usually availability is rather reduced because they're sold out. It's that popular but it's very palatable. Soy halls is a product that we haven't had in North Dakota unless we've freighted in from Minnesota or South Dakota until the recent several years. Now the ADM plant in Interland is producing soy halls since they're now crushing North Dakota soybeans. So high energy content feed, it's pelleted, it's protein can range from eight to 13%. So be sure to know what your product is if you may not be considered a protein source for your feed, but it certainly is a replacement for our feed. I do have to point out that it's usually high in calcium and low in phosphorus. Most of our other co-products are always high in phosphorus. Maybe triple times amount of phosphorus would be ingrained. And of course, calcium is quite low. And Quinn, like John identified, adding extra calcium to co-product feeds is always indicated. If you're located close enough to a beet pulp plant or a sugar refinery like American Crystal and Hillsboro, Drayton, East Grand Forks or Crookston or even Mendak down at Wapiton, they have a supply of beet pulp and tailings that they usually, at least American Crystal, provides at no cost other than trucking. Versus you need to be on the list to be able to get it. And if you have a trucker that hauls at it, this is a product that works quite well. Think of it as a nice replacement for silage if you're feeding the wet pulp or the wet beet tailings. Be sure to know if the moisture content is quite high. So that's what limits trucking to usually around 100 miles away from the plant before other sources of feed get to be priced more competitive. We do have protein sources or crushes in North Dakota. Canola mill is very popular, if that's all you need. It's usually price competitive. It's produced in Velva as well as Indolin or West Fargo, even up in Hollick, Minnesota. These plants are available. Linceed mill is crushed in Cargill in West Fargo on a sporadic basis, but it is available. Soybean mill is priced very high and it works quite well if you wanna use soybean in your ration that's produced on ADM in Indolin, 46% crude protein. The real bargain on these particular protein sources right now is sunflower mill. So if you're needing protein, sunflower mill could be $120 a ton, even less than that. And it's available out of Cargill in West Fargo and it can be available out of Northern Sun and Indolin. If you need to have a list of co-products, both the phone numbers as well as a recent price, please go to our Carrington Research Extensions on their homepage on the internet and look for livestock and then look for livestock extension and then click on sources and prices for selected co-products in North Dakota. And with that, good luck in trying to source extra feed for your cow herd if you're running yourself short on hay and can't find hay. There is a vast amount of co-products available in North Dakota if you can find out what's available. Our next speaker is gonna be Miranda Meehan. She's our environmental, livestock environmental sewer specialist and Dr. Meehan is here to talk to us about pasture and range turnout issues. Good evening. So I'm gonna change paces a little bit here and talk about what we expect as we look forward to greener grass, especially into some strategies to help you plan for the 2019 grazing season. One thing I want to keep you all to keep in mind is that, yes, we do have a lot of snow and there's a lot of moisture in that snow, but due to the timing of melt and how things melt, a lot of that snow is gonna be runoff and yes, it's gonna be great for refilling some of our stock dams and surface waters. However, that is not gonna be available. There's not gonna be the principal source of responsible for our forage production this year. 80% of forage production in North Dakota comes from precipitation in May and June. So don't be making your grazing management decisions based off of the available precipitation snow that we have right now. So when we talk about preparing for our grazing season and when should we be putting those cattle out there? I know a lot of people use a calendar date. The ideal way to do this is to look at grazing readiness based off of plant development or you can estimate it using growing degree days. We do have a publication that goes through that so I'm not gonna go in detail. The simplest way is to go out there and look at plant development or introduce pasture species such as crested wheat grass, smooth brome grass, meadow brome. That would be the three leaf stage and so you just simply are gonna count the leaves starting from the bottom, one, two, three and then for our native species, it would be the three and a half leaf stage and why do we use this as a rule of thumb? It's important to be looking at this and not grazing our plants too early because grazing too early can stress those plants out and actually result in up to a 60% decrease in your forage production for the grazing season. As a typical rule of thumb, we expect that our crested wheat grass is already early May. Our bromes, smooth brome grass, meadow brome grass being the most common, typically ready to graze in mid-May. If you have post-contract CRP land, that's typically stuff that's coming out of contract is typically somewhere called intermediate wheat grasses and you can expect that to be available in late May and our native pastures typically aren't ready till earliest is early June depending if your cooler warm season dominated and that would be our cool season dominated pastures which are most common across the state. However, I want to keep in mind you and is that there's a lot of variability so we don't want us, you want to be careful but just looking at those states. It varies across the state. Some research that we've been doing with the extension agents across the state shows a two-week variability between counties when different species are available to graze and also we have year to year variability. So just because that's the date you're able to start grazing last year does not mean that that's when our species are going to be available to graze this year. So the last two years I have been working with some of the county agents across the state to monitor grazing readiness for some of our common pasture species, crested wheat grass, smooth brome grass and then our most common native species which would be Western wheat grass. We also have some with that green needle grass but there's some challenges there because it's a little bit more difficult to identify early in the grazing season. In 2017, we found that crested wheat grass was ready to graze at that three-leaf stage around May 4th where our brome was actually earlier at late April, April 24th where our Western wheat grass wasn't available, wasn't at the three-and-a-half-leaf stage until the end of May, almost Memorial Day. One of the reasons you're probably wondering why is crested wheat grass behind smooth brome grass when I said that should be available to graze earlier. I don't know if you guys, if you remember that we warmed up pretty early in 2017 but then we had a little cold snap later as things were starting to grow and that sets some of our grasses back including the crested wheat grass which was further in development at that time. I did get a lot of pictures from county agents where they were out there monitoring grazing readiness and they had pictures of the grass with snow. Looking at 2018, a crested wheat grass was similar. We were at May 11th and then our smooth brome grass was actually two weeks later at May 7th. Typically around where we would normally expect it to be. Our Western grass was about the same at that end of May 20th, it was this year. So one of the things that we've seen here though we actually seen a delay in some of the species because of the drought to 2017 and depending on if those areas, if pastures were graze hard, they've seen a decrease in productivity and a delay in grazing readiness in some areas. So I expect something similar this year with we will have a delay in our grazing readiness because there's a delay with all the snow when our plants are gonna start growing and photosynthesizing and our ground's gonna take longer to warm up. How long that delay is gonna be, I can't say right now. We do plan on working with the agents across the state and monitoring in this year. So hopefully we can keep you up to date on that as we move forward.  You're also running short on hay supplies. So here's some strategies that we can look at to get them out there a little earlier while reducing the stress to those pastures. And I'm talking about these in what I would say the order of preference. So ideally if you can, looking at supplementing on hay or pasture land, pasture again, or it would be those tangerine grass species not native, specifically things like the brooms and your crested and then providing them some additional forage if you still have it available or supplementing with some of the other products that Carl talked about. The next one thing to look at would be grazing some of those domesticated grass pastures then moving in. If you don't have that as an option utilizing some of your winter annuals for spring grazing those should be available early May. So things like triticali, rye or winter wheat if you planted those last fall. Then the next thing if those aren't options for you would be evaluating what you have for native, native pastures, native rangelands. We have a pretty big issue across the state with Kentucky bluegrass invading our native rangelands and becoming dominant in a lot of pastures especially eastern portion of the state. So if look at this picture here this would be a pasture that's been taken over by Kentucky bluegrass. So that would be a good option if you're gonna raise native range if you have a pasture like that starting there actually could help decrease your Kentucky bluegrass grazing it early in the season and give some of your natives a competitive advantage. One thing is that this would be very low in protein so you definitely would need to supplement protein in this situation. And then finally if you have to raise native pastures choosing one that's dominated by cool season grasses and if you're not sure about composition you can use some help with the identification, contact your extension agent or your NRCS I'm sure they'd be happy to come out and help you with that. Few other considerations which we haven't talked about yet is this is with especially with this coming storm we're talking in record level historic storms that you need to be thinking about flooding if we have a riparian pasture that we usually turn out in the spring maybe avoiding that because it's gonna be a mess for one and you're gonna have the decline in health but also that it's gonna tear that pasture up and may reduce its productivity in the long run. Other thing is a lot of you aren't thinking about drought right now except for maybe those of you that were impacted in 2018 but we did see that delay in grazing readiness from those areas impacted by the 2017 drought if they were grazed hard we also see a decrease in productivity. This is a good example of that delay in Oliver County last year or Western Creek grass on in mid-May was at the one and a half leaf stage compared to the three and a half leaf stage early May the year before and there's a pretty significant it's probably hard to see in these photos but there's a pretty significant difference in the productivity and the height of the forge in those two pictures. And we actually seen that as it stayed pretty stunted as it got to the three and a half leaf stage. There was an isolated part of the state that did experience drought in 2018 so if you were in that area you also, some of you also had the experience drought in 2017 and so being cautious and maybe not starting on pastures that you put extra pressure on in those years so they have a little extra time to recover. As always try not overgrazing if you do put a little extra pressure on a pasture make sure that you're allowing enough time for it to recover from that extra pressure. So if you started in a, you're starting in one of your native pastures early in the grazing season this year making sure that you don't come back into that pasture again until next fall. And if you need any help with some thoughts or ideas on how and grazing management strategies contact me contact your extension agent or your NRCS and we'll be glad to help you set up some strategies there. With that I'm gonna turn it over back over to Dr. Charlie with he's gonna have some closing remarks and then you can open it up for question and answer. All right thank you Miranda and thanks to all our presenters out there. We really appreciate the time you've taken and our attendees out there might notice that many of our specialists are doing this from home and so we wanna thank you for the opportunity to come into your homes tonight and from ours to yours. So this is the question and answer time we have a few questions as we go through these. If you have other questions please type them in. And so the first question actually I'm going to call on Dr. Stucka and the question is can you feed a hyperthermic calf colostrum? I've heard that a calf won't utilize the colostrum until its internal body temp is increased and it will just sit in a calf stomach and cause bloke. Is this true? Yeah good question. And I think when we were talking about the need for colostrum no matter what method you're warming the calf. I think I did say sometime during that warming process you need to get colostrum into that calf because you won't have as much success with warming the calf unless that calf has and granted this is warm colostrum so that actually helps a little bit as well. So it's just every bit as important as your warming method whether it's a hot box or a warm water bath. I'm not telling you to put in the colostrum before you start warming the process but at least sometime during that warming process put colostrum into that calf and it'll help that calf build his own energy in addition to what you're already providing to warm that calf. All right thanks Jerry. Next one. I think Miranda I'm going to call on you what growth stage should cows be turned out? And I think the growth stage is with what growth stage should cows be turned out on winter annual pastures such as winter rye? So we want to turn it out at the vegetative stage. I would use the same little thumb as we do for our introduced grasses like the three-leaf sage. With these if you manage it correctly and don't graze it too low you can actually take them off and you'll get regrowth that you'll be able to graze again. So managing the grazing and one of the keys with these is a lot of people aren't watching these pastures they have a lot of other things going on. So getting them out early enough so you can get that regrowth because once it heads out you don't have that potential for regrowth and there's a serious decline in quality too. All right thanks Miranda. The next question I have is well this is a toss up. I think I'll call on Dr. Hoppe first but then other panelists can come in on that. Feeding in late afternoon and early evening I heard it's better for calving. I was told is this true? I'm not sure if it's better for actually calving but if you're looking for calving changing the time frame which cattle calved throughout the day feeding in the evening will tend to delay calving until earlier in the morning. You'll end up having less nighttime calvings if you're feeding late in the afternoon or early evening. Actually the opposite is true in sheep by feeding them within four or five hours you'll end up having more lambs to happen. So if you want to get away from nighttime watches in sheep be sure to feed them in the morning. If you want to get away from nighttime calving be sure to feed the cattle at night or late evening. All right, thank you, Carl. We're at, wow, hour and 15 minutes we've been at this and thank you very much in all those attending. One last call for questions. I'm gonna call on the presenters if there's any final comments that anything has come up while you watched each of you present things that you want to make a point out. Otherwise if there's no questions I'm gonna pause here a little bit and see. Could we share the link for where you can find the feed cost calculator? Sure, Carl, if you, what we're going to do is at the end of this session and you typed in an email. So we should be able to email you. We have some other supporting documents that we're gonna send to all the attendees that were tuned in tonight. So we'll be sending those. So if there are anything else you can put it in the question box if there's something else you want us to send out but we will be sending out that information. Let's see, I'm trying going down my checklist here. I think we've covered most everything. Any other specialists have any final comments or thoughts? Yeah, Dr. Charlie, I guess I just tell the audience still at this point that we are available. Our phones are almost always on and so you can get ahold of us and if you have any more questions we're willing and able to help in any way we can. Thanks, Jerry. Anybody else? So I just want to close with thanks. Oh, just a minute, Dr. Charlie. I was just gonna say, NDSU leads the University of Nebraska Omaha, 48 to 39 with 1220 left in the second half and that's to go to the big NCAA tournament. Thanks, Lisa. And that's great. Okay, so, hang on. Thanks again for zooming with us tonight. On behalf of India Extension, we wish you the best over the next few days. It doesn't look like it's gonna be very nice weather out there. If you have more questions at a later date, please contact your local county-based extension agent. They can field your questions or they can also get in touch with us. They have all our contact information. When this webinar concludes, you should be linked to a brief survey to leave feedback for us. We are very interested in your experience this evening with us and the use of this webinar technology and we want to learn from you. So if at all possible, please take a few minutes and give us your feedback. And so with that, I'm gonna say thank you for your time tonight and good night.


We swear our allegiance, as you know, to the Constitution, not to a party or not to a place or not to an individual. And I think that we not only make ourselves better and more dedicated, more committed, but we also make America better. When someone agrees to join the United States military, they join not just, you know, the commercial, right? It's not just a job or an adventure, but it's a profession, and that's true. It's who we have to be. Folks often ask me, why is it so important that, why do you believe so strongly that what we do needs to be a profession? A professional force will live up to the responsibility to allow civilian control of the military. Our elected leaders don't wake up in the morning worried about whether their military will remain subordinate to them. It's who we are. It's part of our profession. It's part of our professional ethos. When you think about what we do for the nation, with the capabilities they give us, we, to use Samuel Huntington's phrase, we manage violence on behalf of the nation. When you realize that military personnel at all ranks have that kind of responsibility for the nation, it is to manage violence, to harm others on behalf of our national interests. It argues strongly for a professional force of men and women who have a different, who agree to live an uncommon life, not only simply by putting themselves in harm's way, but by putting others in harm's way. That's an enormous responsibility. And who have other values such as humility, honor, duty, courage, all of the values that we espouse. You're not a profession just because you say you are. You have to work at it. And, you know, we had some, over the course of my 41 years, there have been times when we've emphasized it, and when we've emphasized it, we've lived up to it. And there's times when we have neglected it, and we always pay the price when we neglect it. It's actually been an opportunity over the last four years to kind of rekindle what it means to be a profession and then to drive that into our, into our force, into our leader development models, into our education system. And in so doing, I think it's, I personally believe it's one of the reasons we've been able to navigate through the very challenging environment we've had both abroad and at home.


Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for HP Discover 2015. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're here with a very special guest, Cube alum, Antonio Neary, who's Senior Vice President General Manager of the Enterprise Group. Really, the membership as HP tells the story. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you smiling. You get the nice outfit on. You're just on stage at the keynote with Meg Whitman. How do you feel? Well, first of all, thanks for having me back. It's always great to see you guys. And I'm feeling really great. I think it was a great day today. Talking to our customers, both live and around the globe. I'm Billy in HiloPackard Enterprise, our view of the future with our strategy. And feeling really good, really good.  I saw the groups come together, number one in security. The story was really strong. And so I want to ask you a personal question. How did that all come together? What was behind the scenes? Was it a rallying cry? Meg, obviously he wants to get the story simplified, unified, bring the company together, give us some color behind what's going on behind. I think the answer is simple. Customers are demanding it. I mean, that's the simple answer. When you think about the pace of change we're going through today and the challenge that customers are going through, they demand a partner that delivers solutions, solutions focused on business outcomes. So it's all about delivering business outcomes. What is the biggest challenge they have? It's time to value. And for us, we are in a unique position because we have all the assets to give them the solution to deliver those business outcomes so they can move with the speed, the agility, the cost that they need to serve their customers. So I will say it was customer driven, first and foremost. And second, I will say HP, as we engage so many customers, realize that we have a unique opportunity, a unique opportunity to really win in the marketplace. So I think the team came together and delivered a very compelling story today. So you have that customer driven, so I know Dave wants to jump in some questions because we have a limited time and I want to ask this one specific, because cloud and big data, I'll see your big parts of the messaging as well, converges, they're all kind of coming together. And we've talked about this kind of in the queue before, I want to get your answer on this, is where horizontally scalable is what the cloud's all about. And we've had great conversations on that, but then vertically integrated stacks are happening in the cloud as well. So you have horizontally scalable and vertically integrated. How do you manage that in a company that could be looked at as siloed product groups? There's no messaging around products, it was all solutions. So you're making that change, you're busting down the silos, at least on the messaging side. How do you manage the group as you have a horizontally scalable and vertically integrated stacks? I mean, you guys are making great change right now. What's your view on that? So I think, let's talk about cloud. Cloud is all about delivering services, that's it. I mean, to my simple view, is all about delivering services faster with the right economics and the speed that customers are looking for. Then, you know, the world is going to be dominated by workloads, new applications, new way to deliver those services, and the reality, you have to operate in a hybrid environment. Some workloads will live on the public side, in a consume way, and some, many of them will be on-prem. And I think HP has the unique view to provide the infrastructure for both building consume with the right automation and orchestration to move those workloads where it makes no sense. So I think, you know, as you see tomorrow, you're going to see another iteration of our story. So I'm not going to unveil anything. So I'm going to encourage you to pay attention to the keynote tomorrow by Martin Fak. So talk about the vision, how we're going to move in this horizontal vertical.  But also how you integrate that orchestration really matters. So this is why horizontally, vertically, it makes a lot of sense. And just tactically, the portfolio, you got some bright spots in it. I mean, you know, EG growing in constant currency, which is great growing nicely in constant currency. The ISS business exploding, the Gen 9 momentum, 3-par, the gift that keeps on giving, I would say, is Aruba the next 3-par? We believe so. So let me comment a little bit since you brought up our performance. I'm very proud of the results. Obviously we have more work to do. And I think a lot of opportunities in front of us. As you know, I used to run the server business. And I cannot be more proud of what our server engineering and go-to marketing have done. We grew 70% in constant currency. That's phenomenal growth. We think, you know, that people will consume more compute, not less compute. And if you think about behind us, right, you have the entire set of compute platform. We talked about before delivering the right compute for the right workloads of the right economics. We are the only vendor who can address all the right workloads in the market. I think 3-par, you know, we just make an announcement with the new family. You know, more than 40% of our 3-par today is consumed in all-flash array. So you can see customers are taking advantage of the innovation with all-flash, with the performance and the cost they're looking for. So when you move to networking, we were very focused on transforming our networking business. And networking, you know, half of the market is actually campus. And so we realized we have an incredible set of assets in our switching side, but we needed to increase our presence on the wireless side, but more on the software side. And this is why we went on and acquired Aruba Networks, which is actually an expert in transforming end-to-end user experiences. And Aruba actually bring tremendous amount of innovation with our on-prem solution, their cloud Wi-Fi solution, vertical focus, and we have an incredible amount of use cases. And you're going to see tremendous traction within 90 days of the closure, which was just a week and a half ago. And you're injecting some new management talent into the group. Oh, Tom, it's unbelievable. You saw on the stage today, the passion, the focus that he has, the innovation that he brings, the Aruba team is fantastic. I can just tell you. We had a great chat with him here in the queue, but it's going to be released tonight or tomorrow because we didn't want to spill his speed beans. But yeah, the wireless is the new thing and their implementation at Levi Stadium is impressive. I have been there at the opening game and I was blown away with the experience. You know, you get there, you'd allow the 49ers up and you get a unique experience because the way they're up to the infrastructure was optimized was all around the Aruba. Aruba solution, right? They can personalize, basically it's a context-aware access. They're delivering a context-aware. They're delivering replays six seconds after a touchdown from every camera angle to the phone. You can't miss. That is just mind-blowing. Well, you want about a beer without moving, it's just, yeah, I mean, yeah, I know. That, I mean, that's the personalized experience people have demanded today. So tell about the story now. The HP story is really hangs together. I love the messaging, okay? You got hybrid cloud, software-defined infrastructure, great. Protect your digital assets, data-driven enterprise, workplace productivity, solutions have been not the product. What's the common threads across them?  I think it's simple. It's all about the app and the data. At the end of the day, it's all about the application and the data. And so this is when we talk about the customers, they are going to embark on those of four major transformation journeys we work on stage. Transform it to a hybrid infrastructure, operate what they have today as best as they can while they build the bridge for the future.  They're not going to move to the cloud, but they need a more effective way to manage those operations in their IT environments. Then you have protecting your digital enterprise, right? So, and that's very important. Everything is being digitized. So how you protect the interaction with that data is not about security infrastructure, but is securing those interaction with your data, which is your intellectual property. Then obviously, you know, empower a data-driven organization. How I take that data and make something out of it? So whether it is to prevent issues in my own environment or whether to generate new profits of all revenue opportunities for my company.  Everybody here, right? It's connected to whatever they are doing. And the workplace is now digital. There's no boundaries. But at the end of the day, you have to provide an end-to-end experience from the foundation, on the infrastructure, to the security, to the application, in a way that's seamlessly integrated. So those are the four transformation journeys customers have go through. And our focus is to bring those solutions to the customers in a way they can deliver the business outcome they're looking for. But at the end, it's all about the application and the data. So I got to ask you about services. You brought up services, women, cloud services, which is the real value. We see that as well. Let's talk about professional services. You have the TC organization, you know this business, you've seen it, right? A lot of profit. But customers need this right now. So the common thing that Dave and I hear when talking to customers on theCUBE across the world is, I need someone to carry me and build that bridge to the future with me. And I don't want to get out ahead of my skis or snowboard. In this case, for a year, I hear a snowboarder. They don't want to fall down, this risk. Open source has got innovation. So what's your vision on how that's going to evolve for HP because obviously great opportunity. And what's the top three customer conversations that you're in? Yeah. How's HP going to do it? Top three conversations. So I will say, advisory services, core foundational, very strategic for HP. You're going to see a significant amount of investments being placed there. We already have a huge presence, both with our TS consulting, the technology service consulting, our enterprise services, but as well as our software professional services. We're going to bring them closer together and focus on unique business practices around those fourth key transformation areas where how you implement hybrid infrastructure, how you implement the right orchestration for your infrastructure so you can move workloads, depending on where they are most effective for you. How we can protect your digital enterprise with the right security advisory practices. How we can transform your enterprise mobility first type of approach, both from the infrastructure on the way to the application. And how we can make sure they use your data in the most effective way. And Robert Taco Stage focuses on Hadoop and user are heaven platform as a way to enhance the Hadoop implementation. And advisory services are at the core because the reality customers need help. Not everybody knows how to embark on that journey. Some customers have a large staff, they have made their minds, they understand the strategy, but most of the customer need help in defining what that journey needs to be. And that's why our HP consulting team, advisory services team plays a huge role for us. Okay, internal theory. Thanks for coming on, I know you're super busy and I know you've got a lot of things going on. And for you to take your time out to visit us in theCUBE, really appreciate it. I think I speak for Dave and thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Always a pleasure to be here talking to you and I'm looking forward to see you in the next couple of days. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Senior vice vice general manager, enterprise group. A lot of great change, a lot of great stuff happening. This is theCUBE bringing you that signal and sharing it here. Join the conversation, go to hpdiscover.social where we have all the social experience happening right there. CrowdChat and also hashtag HP Discover. We'll be right back after this short break.