MSU Extension MI Ag Ideas to Grow With

ood afternoon. Welcome to MI Ag Ideas to Grow With virtual Conference. My name is Paola and I am a dairy extension educator based out of Ingham County. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the session Grain Processing for Beef Cattle. Today we will hear from Jerad. Let's begin now. The floor is yours. As she said, we will be talking about the effects of grain processing on room and health and cattle performance. Or feed cattle performance. First, I want to ask you this question, Get you thinking a little bit as we get started here. Why do we even feed grain to cattle? Throughout this presentation? I'm just going to refer to grain as corn because that is our primary feeds stuff for most finishing diets or cattle diets in general. As you think about that, why do we even feed grain to cattle? Take a minute, think about that. I'm going to list out a few things that you might actually be thinking to yourself, well, other people feed it to their cattle. Must be the right feed, stuff to feed to our cattle, right? It's the best feed choice for growing and fattening cattle. It's the most cost effective feed. Someone's putting $1 value to that feeds stuff and saying, well that's what pays my bills. It supplies a lot of energy, adds value to the grain, in this case corn. The cattle just like to eat it. Maybe you're of the thought that we shouldn't feed grains to cattle, maybe they should be eating something else. Maybe you just don't know. You're logged in today and you're going to learn something new. Got your answer. We feed green or corn to cattle because it adds value to the corn. Now you're actually going to see a few of those answers that I had up on the screen schickle through. But first, let's talk about how feeding corn to cattle adds value to that corn. I have an example here for you. Let's assume that we are feeding a group of cattle, 100% corn diet. Not a common diet by any means, but for intense of this exercise here, this example. Let's assume that we're feeding 100% corn diet. Let's say corn is priced about 04:50 a bushel on a dry matter basis. If we convert that to dollar per pound, that's just over $0.09 per pound. As you can see on the screen looking at the performance that we would expect from a group of cattle, let's assume a modest, I'd say feed deficiency, the amount of feed required to produce a pound of gain. Let's say that seven pounds of dry matter feed to produce one pound of weight gain for said animal or steer. In this case, let's say our gain is about three pounds a day. That means our feed intake on a dry matter basis is going to be 21 pounds of feed per day. Now that comes out to a feed cost of gain of about $0.66 per pound of gain. If you would multiply seven pounds of dry matter to produce that pound, again, times our cost of corn on a dry matter basis, we get that $0.66 per pound of gain. Now if we feed that group of cattle for 200 days in the feed lot, they'll eat about 4,200 pounds of dry matter, corn or corn, on a dry matter basis. Over that course, that 200 days, those cattle have gained 600 pounds. And we'll have tallied a feed cost of $397 using the price of beef or what we could sell that animal for or those pounds for. We look at the live weight return of that animal if we had a live price for that animal. If we were to take them to the sale barn or the auction, we'd sell them for $1.75 a pound. Now that's 10.50 dollar minus our feed costs. We had $397 for feed costs over that 200 day feed period. That leaves us with $653 in this case, the value of corn that we fed to those cattle. We made $653 off of it by feeding 4,200 pounds. That comes down to 15.5 cents per pound of dry matter corn. You can see how that added value to that corn compared to that 9.5 cents per pound that we started out with. In this case, that goes up to a value on a bushel basis once we add moisture back to it. Assuming 85% moisture for your typical corn that you sell at the elevator comes out to be 740 per bushel. Now that's a value that's 1.64 times greater than what we started with. You can see how feeding corn through the cattle added value to that product. Now keep in mind this was just a hypothetical example. If we were to feed corn to these cattle, 100% corn diet. Now that's not usually common or doesn't usually happen. Our diet costs may be a little different or our production costs are a little different. Just keep those things in mind. Now, as I said, there's also some other things that I had on that list of why we're feeding corn to cattle. And one of them has to do with the amount of energy that grain supply. When we're thinking about supplying energy. Supplying energy in our diets for our cattle so that they can grow, we think grains, right? They grow faster compared to our forage based diets that don't have as much grain in this table here I have our feedstuffs. On the left hand side, you can see whole corn. I have corn sige, some dry distillers, grains solubles, soybean meal, brown grass hay, alfalfa hay. Across the top, we have our net energy values for maintenance, the energy that animal acquires just for maintaining itself. Next is net energy that's required for gain crude protein percentage. So the amount of protein feed product then what's the dry matter which is an indication of how much water is still in that product as fed price on $1 per ton basis. Then I've converted that to some dry conversions for dollars per energy value and then dollar per crude protein value. These are on a dry matter basis. If we want to look at what's the cost of energy supplied by each of these different feedstuffs, we can see that corn is the least expensive feedstuff per unit of energy. Corn salvage actually comes in a close second here in this example because typically price so cheap then some others that you can see are somewhat close would be distillers grains has pretty good energy value and is typically priced fairly close to corn as well. Now if we want to look at the value of protein provided by a feeds stuff, we can see that distillers grain does a really good job of providing protein. It actually is fairly decent at providing both of those. But for the tense of this presentation, you can see why corn is the least expensive feeds stuff on her energy basis, and why we choose to feed that in our feedlot diets. Now before we go much further, I want to review the nutrient composition of corn, or the physical composition of corn, just to give you an idea of what we're going to be talking about here. Next on the left, you can see this figure that lays out the physical composition of the corn kernel. On the outside we have the P. Then actually on the right hand side, you can see this graph, this figure here that tells you the nutrient composition of each of those different parts. We have the whole kernel, we have the endosperm, the germ, the pericarp, and the tip cap. Pericarp here you can see has a lot of NDF or a lot of fiber. As we look at the endosperm, there's different types of endosperm, but that is primarily comprised of starch, which is going to provide energy from that grain. I have another question for you. Why do we process grains? This slide, alone with these different figures, should be able to provide a hint to you. Give you a second to think about that. Think you've got the answer. It's because of this per car, this protective covering here is very fibrous. It's tough to break down or digest. As you can see by all the fiber that makes up in it makes it up. What is processing do is it helps break down this per that it exposes the endosperm or the starch inside, making it accessible for digestion or degradation inside the digestive tract of our cattle. If we want to look at how does decorate, what's actually happening in the digestive system of our animals. Here's a photo of different feed particles inside that rumin of that animal that have a bunch of different bacteria that attach to those feed particles. And this is how the feed gets digested. Bacteria or the different microbes in there actually release enzymes they attach to the feed particle. And release their enzymes and break those particles down. The products that get broken down from that feeds stuff produce volatile fatty acids from fermentation, which then provide energy to the animal, to the cattle. If we have processing of our grains, we're actually breaking down that protective coat. That's really tough to break down. And we're giving those microbes immediate access. They can infiltrate into that corn kernel. They can start releasing their enzymes and start breaking down that starch in there to provide bottle fatty acids for the animal to use for energy. Increased surface area is going to increase our ability to break down those feeds. That's what you need to know. We have different types of processing as you're probably familiar with. Staying on the corn theme, we have our whole product which is basically not processed. This could be in a dry or could be in a wet form if you're selling at or buying it from an elevator. Corn is typically around 15% moisture, 85% dry matter. Now if you were harvesting high moisture corn, you would have a lot more water in that product or a lot more moisture where you'd be double that, essentially around 30% moisture. We have two different products then once we start processing those products, we have rolled example of that. Here you can see how obviously this could be referred to as cracked corn in a sense. But it's obviously reduced that pericarp or increase the surface area. So we have more surface area for our bacteria or our microbes to attach to to help with digestion inside the animals digestive tract. Likewise, ground takes that a step further. You can see that's a lot more finely processed now on some of our varieties that have more moisture. For instance, if we harvest high moisture corn, it could be ran through a roller mill or sometimes machines harvesters actually have kernel processors on there that already break the kernel before that product will go to be incyled. That whole process of encyling basically changes the composition of that starch and makes it more digestible for those humin microbes. Likewise, for steam flaking, in this case that corn kernel is exposed to steam, it reconstitutes the starch, restructures the way that starch is stored inside that corn kernel. Then you can see it's flattened, right? It's ran through a roller mill, flattens out, breaks that all apart, and that it processes that product and makes it more digestible for our cattle. Here's a illustration of what some of those machines look like. On the left here you can see we have a roller mill. Corn is going to be dropped into this roller mill. And this roller mill is, consisted of these different rolling pins that this corn has to travel through. You can adjust those pins how close they are to one another, which actually is going to change the particle size of that product that is produced by that machine. Likewise, on the hammer mill, you have these rods that are hammers that are pressing that grain through a screen. You have different screen sizes you can put into these machines and that changes the particle size of the grain that's processed through that. Before we go much further and we start talking about digestion, we have to understand that once we process grain, the site of digestion throughout the animal's digestive tract is going to change as these animals are consuming feed. It enters the mouth, travels down the esophagus and into the first compartment of the stomach, or the largest compartment called them. Here is where microbes are living and are fermenting. The feed that enters in here. Obviously, feed can be regurgitated, chewed and swallowed again. But once it reaches a small enough particle size or appropriate density, it falls down into the ruticulum, which lies on the bottom side of the rumen. From there it'll pass through the omasum and through the abomasum. Now we're all the way through the stomach and we're actually reaching the small intestine. The rumin itself will do some absorption of volatile fatty acids for the animal that can be used for energy. Then the small intestine is another major site of absorption for energy throughout the digestive tract. Then obviously the large intestine, before the remainder gets excreted as min or feces. Now that you're accustomed to that, we're going to talk a little bit about digestibility through these various processing techniques. The first study I'm going to use as an example or talk about, was done by Owens and Sutherland in 2017. It was a review looking at degradation of different processing methods of corn. In this case, you can see the different bars, different colors. Here we have whole corn, no processing of corn. In the red bars we have dry rolled corn. Green bars we have high moisture corn. And in the purple bars we have steam flaked corn across the y axis. Total track, starch, digestion, This animals eating so much starch, how much of it is actually being absorbed or not excreted? On the back side in the manure or in the feces. We can tell how much gets absorbed by the animal based on how much that animal consume. This was a review paper where they reviewed a bunch of different studies. There's a bunch of different factors that are going on. But I think this illustrates the point quite well of what processing can do for starch digestibility for feed lock. As you can see on this figure, our two most processed types of corn, high moisture corn here and steam flight corn had the greatest total track starch digestibilityes for these cattle upwards around 99% Now taking a step down from that, we saw our dry rolled corn around 91% and then even a little bit further was whole shell corn where we're not quite getting as much starch from that corn grade. However, you can see that 87% is still quite a bit. For those who think that whole shell corn is not digestible by cattle, I advise you to take the time to read an article I wrote recently, or maybe it was last year, on whole corn digestibility. And read that for yourself because whole shell corn is indeed digested, which is evidence here that it can still provide energy to that animal. Moving on. As we move through the digestive tract, we start with the rumin, right? We can see that both our highly processed corn varieties, or corn processing methods of high moisture corn and steam flight corn, were the most digested in the rumen. We had about 86, 84% digested in the rumen alone for that starch. Now we saw that the whole shell corn and dry rolled corn didn't quite digest as much starch in that area as the other two methods. Part of that is because that pericarp is still protecting that starch and it's not quite as accessible. We don't have the surface area compared to some of these other processing methods of the high moisture corn or the steam flake corn. Let's move on down through the digestive track a little bit further of the starch that's reaching the small intestine. You can see on the y axis, this is the supply. This is the amount of starch that's reaching the small intestine. There's obviously less starch reaching the small intestine in the high moisture corn and steam flake examples because more of it was digested in the min, right? But we see that in the small intestine of that starch that's reaching the small intestine of these cattle. For high moisture corn, it was more digestible. Same for the steam flake corn compared to our whole corn or dry rolled corn processing methods. Looking at how much is actually how much starch is actually digested in the small intestine relative to total intake. It's a little bit greater for our whole corn and dry roll corn, but that's because more starch is being supplied to the small intestine. My next slide will help make a little bit more sense for you. If we look at the starch that was digested in the, in the small intestine together, we can see that we're almost at 99% here for a high moisture corn and steam flake corn. Whereas our whole corn and our dry rolled corn aren't quite there. Still around about 85% We still have about 15% of that starch left in the intestines or after the small intestines, 15% of that starch is still going to reach the large intestine in those two processing methods. Let's take that a step further of that supply. We had about 15% starch left reaching the large intestine in both the whole corn and dry rolled corn groups. We can see that, that More starch was digested. A larger percentage of that starch was digested in the dry, rolled corn relative to the whole corn. Now I would say that these numbers are a little deflated in the high moisture corn and steam flight corn just because we didn't have much starch to reach the large intestine. Most of it, we saw 99, 98% of it was already digested just between them and small intestine alone. I think that's why those percentages are a little bit low. In this example, if we want to look at how much was actually digested relative to the intake, this is how much starch is actually digested in the large intestine. A larger proportion of it happens of the dry rolled corn is actually digested here in the large intestine relative to the whole corn processing methods or the moisture corn or steam flake methods. Just as a summary, just another visual, you can see how these compare in the, in how they compare in the small intestine and then where is the starch being digested in the large intestine. Overall, the high moisture corn and steam flight corn, a large portion of it, was digested early on in the rumen. And then what's left was basically digested in the small intestine with not much being available to be digested in the large intestine. Well that less of it was digested in the rumin for our whole corn and dry rolled corn in the rumen. Then about similar values for the what's going on in the small intestine. And then obviously they had more starch that could be digested in the large intestine. And we saw, based on the total digestibility of starch for these cattle, that we're actually excreting a larger amount of starch from our whole corn and dry rolled corn in the feces. What does this mean for performance based on where that start actually gets digested. Researches have shown that the energy value from grain that's digested in the rumin is about 80% of that energy efficiency of that energy versus in the small intestine, it's about 97% of the efficiency of energy. Then once we get to a large intestine, even though it's digested, the efficiency of energy that's being provided isn't quite as efficient. I believe it's around 67% based on a review. Then obviously you're not getting any energy if it's excreted. Having more of it be digested and absorbed is better off for producing more energy or making energy more available for the animal onto performance. We talked about starch being digested and absorbed. Obviously, starch is energy in this case. We need energy for these animals to grow. This is another review that was done by Owens and other 97, so it was a little bit older than the last study or last review that I talked about. Probably not quite as many studies being reviewed and they were compiled in this example. But in this example we have the same processing methods. Whole corn, dry rolled corn, high moisture corn, and steam rolled corn As are different treatments, if you will. Looking at average daily gain, or the gain in pounds per day, we saw that high moisture corn in this example or in this review, was decreased just a little bit compared to our other processing methods. I'll come back to why I think that is. Now if you move on to dry matter intake or this is our feed intake on a dry matter basis, mono feed that these cattle are eating per day. We saw that dry rolled corn had the greatest feed intake, actually are further processed. High moisture corn, steam flight corn actually had lower intakes. Part of this could be due to bulk. They have more moisture. If you think about eating, for example, what we might eat in our diet. If you try to eat rice as dry, you could eat a lot more of it. But once you add water to it and you steam it, it gets very bulky, it swells up. It's tough to eat as much of it just based on the sheer volume you have physical characteristics that control feed intake but also chemical control feed intake. We talked about the digestibility of these high processed variations that green is going to be digested to a greater degree, making more volatile fatty acids. As you make more acid in the rumin, it decreases the ph. You have chemical signals going on too that are going to control and regulate feed intake. In this case, we saw that those further process type grain treatments had lower feed intakes. Now that's going to change what our feed efficiency looks like if we had similar average daily gains. If we look at the amount of feed that was required to produce a pound of gain. Our most efficient cattle in this review were actually the steam steam rolled corn fed cattle and the whole shell corn cattle, with the dry rolled corn and high moisture corn being a little less feed efficient. Part of the reason I think that we didn't see as great a performance as we might expect or a little bit greater performance or feed efficiency from the hit corn cattle is because that based on the amount of rouffage they had, they maybe had a little bit less roughage. The steam rolled corn cattle in those diets they had about just over 99.5% roughage, whereas we only had about 7% for the him moisture. Corn, Not having enough fiber to help buffer the rumin will lead to digestive upsets. We'll talk about that a little bit more. But in this case, Owens and others, as they wrote their manuscript said, we probably would expect that some of those cattle had a little bit of acidosis, which we know is going to set those cattle back from a performance standpoint. Those are some of the concerns you also have to be aware of once you process grain two is that you can run into digestive upsets such as acidosis and blow if you're not careful and your diet is not properly designed or balanced to avoid those issues. Another study by Corona and others in 25 2005, excuse me, looked at the performance of grain processing on feedlot cattle as well. In this case, they looked at whole corn, dry rolled corn, ground corn, and steam flake corn. We have three dry varieties that have increasing processing from whole corn, dry rolled corn, and then ground corn, finer particle size as we go there. And then also comparing that to a steam flak corn treatment of cattle, the cattle that were fed steam flak corn or the most processed, in this case the starch is more available than digestible. They had the greatest average daily gain. There's actually a tendency for the cattle fed whole shell corn to have a little bit less average daily gain compared to our other processing treatments. Similar to what we saw in the previous slide or previous study or the review, steam flate corn cat tended to eat a little bit less. It's more finely processed. A green products, that would make sense. If we look at the feed efficiency of these cattle, we saw that the cattle fed steam flate corn were more feed efficient compared to other processing methods as we might expect. They also looked at total track starch digestibility in this study as we would expect. Based on the previous review study that I showed you, the steam flight corn had the greatest starch digestibility, followed by ground corn, which is a finer particle size than dry rolled corn, which is a finer particle size than whole shale. This was actually a 75% corn diet. In this example, they had about 12% hay. Some other supplements, glasses, and added fat. These are at just under 700 pound beef steers with a little bit of boss indicus influence in this study. Another study just to give you another taste of what processing can look like on a performance base. This was a 70% corn diet with 20% modified distillers grains, 5% corn stalks for the forage or roughage in this diet fed to cross bread, beef steers that were just shy of 900 pounds. In this case we have dry rolled corn, ground corn, a ground processing comparison. Then we also have high moisture rolled corn, high moisture ground corn. We have the same processing but on a high moisture comparison as well. Average daily gain in this study across these four treatments was similar. What we saw in from these results is that the high moisture horn variety, less feed intake for those cattle which we've seen it as a trend in different processing. Or again, think of bulk, these are high moisture products. It's back to that rice example. We may have physical fill, limiting intake a little bit there. That's actually going to help us on the feed efficiency side because feed efficiency is the amount of feed consumed to produce that pound of game. Here we saw that the high moisture corn varieties actually were a little bit more feed efficient. Particularly with the high moisture rolled corn versus ground. You can see 5.9 versus 6.2 Then on the dry corn, no difference between those two, but it was less than our high moisture treatments. If we look at the total track starch digestibility of those four different treatments, we can see why that might be that the high moisture corn treatments were more digestible, nearly 99% versus looks like 92, 93% for the dry corn treatments. Because we're providing more energy. We're getting more starch digested and providing more energy. It's resulting in more efficient cattle in this case. This study also took the time to look at ph within the rumin, which helps tell the story a little bit too. On the Y axis we have average ruminal ph, and then on the X axis is our relative to feeding time. This data here was collected, it's the average of days, or 15 through 19, in their experiment, just a small subset of days that they were monitoring the ph. But if you follow the different symbols here, you can see that the high moisture corn treatments actually had lower ruminal phs. As these cattle sit at these lower ph for a greater period of time, we typically experience more digestive upset such as acidosis. Those are things that we have to be aware of in this case, you could have some detriment on those high moisture corn diets if that ph is staying at too low of a level for too long could lead to some problems there. The study also looked at liver abscesses. That can be a potential problem too. As you get digestive upsets, you get some irritation of the digestive tract lining, whether it's in the rumin or potentially in the small intestine or the hind gut, there get some leakiness. You get some infiltration of bacteria that can travel through the bloodstream and colonize in the liver. And that's how liver abscesses are formed. In this case, like the previous slides, show our moisture, Corn, they spend more time at lower pH's potentially could lead to more digestive upsets or more acidosis or irritation of that tissue. That could be why there's a numerical increase here. Otherwise no statistical difference. It's tough to pick up some of those statistical differences. You need a cattle for studies like that. A lot of repeatability, no difference in this particular study. Now I'd like to recap a little bit. We talked about some of these studies and why we were seeing some of the results and some of it made sense and some of it didn't make sense. Why might that be? What are some of the factors that you're not seeing besides the processing? What are some of those interactions that are going on? And one of them happens to be forage or fiber. I really like these pictures or this slide here. These are some pictures from one of my graduate advisers, Dr. Francis Flu Hardy has put this together. It just goes to show the different particle sizes of grain processing and how much fiber you need in your diet to keep those cattle in a good healthy state where you're not dealing with so many digestive upsets whole. Obviously you're not digesting that at a super fast rate because you have that protected pair card. That kernel has to be cracked or at least infiltrated some way by those microbes so it can start digesting that starch. Here he says it's good up to ten to 15% fiber in your diet. Likewise here you can see this is probably a rolled or cracked variety. Again, ten to 15% is quite coarse. Corn kernel is maybe cracked in half here. But as you start to get much finer, once you start to get to these ground variations, you can see you need to add a lot more fiber. Eventually you get Dr. Fluhardy's opinion. And I would echo this opinion as well. Once you start getting into this corn grain that looks like poultry feed or pig feed, it's just too fine. And you overwhelm the rumin microbes where all that starch is, they can attach to it because there's so much surface area and they digest it so quickly. That it overwhelms the rumin and you get a low ph and that's where you get acidosis and digestive upsets. You have sick cattle that no longer feel good, they don't want to eat, and they're not going to grow very well for you. In some cases, if it's severe enough, you can kill cat, stay away from really fine grain. In these cases, you need a lot of fiber. And it just doesn't make a lot of sense to have so much fiber in this case. It's just not as efficient where you could be feeding more grain to the animal to have a higher energy diet to produce greater rates of gain, and have cattle that are more feed efficient. In the end, this is going to save you money as we're getting close to using up all of our time. I'd like to summarize some of those points that I've been making grains. In this particular case, we've been talking about corn is the most cost effective at supplying energy and our cattle diets. Now there are byproduct feeds out there that can be priced competitively. You'll have to make sure when you're looking at this, how can you buy these products and how much energy do they provide? We also talked about why we process grains. It increases the surface area of that grain, making that starch accessible so that the bacteria can attach to it and digest it and release that energy for the animal to be absorbed. Like I said, grain processing increases that digestibility by those microbes depending on the type of processing that you use. We demonstrated how the starch could be digested in different parts of the digestive tract. It may be a little bit more in the room and it may be a little bit more in the small intestine or even in the large intestine. Depending on the type of processing you use is going to affect the efficiency of energy use from each of those different processed grain types. If we're processing, like I said, the most processed types of grain, typically this meant that there was a greater amount of energy being available because that starch was digested to a greater extent throughout the digestive tract. From a performance standpoint, we saw that grain processing can depress feed intake and it can actually increase feed efficiency. Greater grain processing can also decrease rum and ph, which can increase the likelihood of digestive upsets. We talked about that a little bit where it's a balancing act of process can migraine be and how much of that processed grain can I feed? But also consider that your diet has adequate dietary fiber. This can come from forage, but make sure that it's a physical effective NDF, or detergent fiber that can be fed with your green. There are byproduct feeds like distillers, grains that can provide fiber, but it's not physically effective. Having something that has a little bit of particle length is going to help that physical effectiveness help maintain rumin motility. Also increase that rumin ph a little bit so that animal stays healthy with that. That is my presentation today. I'd be happy to take any questions that we have. Thank you very much. We do have one question from Michael. Any data or thoughts on the cost versus benefits of processing corn? In other words, is it worth going through the trouble of cracking that corn rather than just feeding straight whole shell corn without any further processing? Yeah, very good question. There's been some studies and some publications that answer this exact question that you have. I can think back to a study that was done by the University of Nebraska. They looked at feeding. I think they compared dry rolled corn to high moisture corn and steam flake corn. Obviously, depending on the different types of processing that you're interested in, there's going to be some, if you're doing high moisture corn, you're going to need a to store that corn in. A lot of the cost is coming from designing or developing that bunk, pouring that concrete on the steam flaking side. Obviously, having a steam flaker is the largest cost in both cases of the high moisture corn and steam flake corn in their example. Obviously, prices change are going to vary. You'd have to price that yourself. But in their case, they did see that the added improvement in feed efficiency and their cost of gain was improved over dry rolled corn. They actually saw that it was advantageous for them. Now part of that's going to vary on the size of your operation too. Are you feeding 200 cattle? Are you feeding 1,000 cattle? Are you feeding 10,000 cattle? Or even more obviously, if you can spread those fixed costs over more cattle, that's going to make it more affordable to you. That's why some of these large feed lots have these steam flakers because they can cover that cost. Now for the small cattle feeder who is feeding 50 head, maybe 100 head. It's tough to cover those costs in those cases. It doesn't always pencil out. That's why each person needs to take their time and put the pencil to paper and see if it actually makes sense. If you need help doing something like that, I'd be happy to help you. We could take a look at that. If you want to look for any of the articles that Jerad has written, you can just type extension beef on any search engine like Google and it will take you to the beef website and there you click on experts and you look for Jerad in case you forget his name. I'm sure you'll remember his face. And then you can access all the articles that he's written. There's so much knowledge there. Yes. Please use that resource to your advantage. Jerad, I do have a question. Yes. Is there any any like for difference for palatability for the cows? For the cattle, Do they prefer some kind of processing? Are there any studies on that? As far as palatability? I don't know that there's a big difference there. It's all corn. It's not like they like it. Yeah. The chemical composition of corn is really changing or the nutrient composition is really changing. I don't know that that plays as big of a role, but sometimes just texture I think can play a role process. There is some research out there that shows that whole she corn is better designed for young calves calves and she, they chew their feed much more than mature cattle do. They actually are processing it themselves, which is going to make it more digestible. And in that case you don't have to put the money forth actually processing it with a machine. You don't have to put in the power and electrical power, et cetera, for all that. It's another consideration, right? Another factor for the equation of like what kind of grain you should use, right? Yep, exactly. Another question. Any thoughts on an inexpensive machine a small producer should look for if he wants to process his whole corn, for example? Maybe look for an old roller mill from Craig List or Facebook. Yeah, yeah. Another good question. You could certainly do that. I would probably go more of the route of a roller mill. I'd stay more in that rolled state as far as the particle size there versus ground. As I said, you don't want to get, you don't want to be feeding corn. That's too finely ground, if I'm being honest, the majority of the phone calls I get, especially when I started, had to do with acidosis and blow, and a lot of the time it comes down to corn is way too finely processed. Get something that'll damage that kernel or crack that kernel open and make that starch available. It increases the surface area. That's what you need to do if you can find a machine cheap enough to do something like that, that works where you can pencil that in. The costs work for you. Great, that's my recommendation. I'd stay away from making grains too fine, don't over process. That's one of the things that I'll keep preaching on that. And likewise, I wrote an article on the very subject of blow and grain processing. It's one of my most read articles out of everything. It's an issue, unless you know about it, that you're going to run into that issue. That's why we're talking about here tonight. Yes. I just posted in the chat the link to all your written articles. Like I said, a lot of information there. Don't be afraid to look into that little library that has form with all his articles and don't hesitate to contact him directly if you need any help. We don't have any other questions. This would be the end of our session.