70: Forage Quality Decisions That Drive Dairy Profitability

In this episode of Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions, host Scott Zehr sits down with Joe Lawrence of Cornell Pro-Dairy to discuss one of the most critical and often underestimated drivers of dairy profitability: forage quality.

As first cutting approaches, this conversation focuses on the real-world decisions dairy producers are making right now that will impact milk production, feed efficiency, and herd performance for the entire year. From harvest timing and equipment readiness to storage management and crop strategy, Scott and Joe go beyond theory and into practical application.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why first cutting can account for 40–50% of total forage yield
• How harvest timing, not hybrid or variety, drives forage quality
• The hidden cost of shrink and poor storage management on milk production
• Why small grains and cover crops should be strategic tools, not backup plans
• The difference between maximizing tons harvested vs. tons fed

They also challenge assumptions around continuous corn systems, double cropping, and aligning agronomic decisions with labor and logistics on today’s dairy farms.

Whether you're a dairy producer, nutritionist, agronomist, or industry professional, this episode delivers value to help you get more from your forage program.

Because what goes into the bunk today determines what ends up in the tank tomorrow.

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Transcript

0:01

Hello everyone, welcome to Ruminate This with a Growing Solutions. Join us as we explore ruminant nutrition and the impact of mycotoxins. Here we challenge your curiosity and explore new industry insights and research to optimize your herd's health and performance. I am your host again, Scott Zare. And today we're going to be talking forage quality. And if you're listening to this episode, right, where this is the first part of April, man, it's right around the corner putting up that first round of protein for our cattle. And there's a lot of stuff to think about, a lot of stuff going through your mind or your clients' minds. And it's a big time of the season. You know, what we do in these early months of the year, especially around this first cutting that we're getting ready to put in, is setting our cows up really for the whole year. So with me to talk about this today is Joe Lawrence from Cornell ProDairy. Joe, I want to first thank you for jumping in. And why don't you just give the audience a little background on who Joe is and your role there at ProDairy? Thanks, Scott. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. And yeah, so I've been with the ProDairy program at Cornell for about 10 years now as a focusing on forage management. So kind of from the, I should say my background's more on the agronomy side. So I started down this path more from a plant science agronomy standpoint, but really got interested in the forage quality part and not just, you know, planting the crop and killing the bugs and and moving on from there, but harvest management. How do we put up a good quality feed so that the dairymen and the nutritionist have a product coming out of the bunk that's gonna meet their goals for milk production or even other livestock, growing other livestock? So so yeah, it's been a fun role. And prior to that, I spent some time in the county cooperative extension up in Lewis County in northern New York, as well as a few years with a local cooperative doing crop advising type work. So so that was my background before coming to ProDairy. Awesome. And yeah, Lewis County. I mean, that's where you live now, that's where I grew up, and uh now I live in Jefferson County, New York, where you grew up. So yeah, but just proof that good things come from New York, right here, guys. Um so and it's a good part of the state. It is, it's such a unique area, and I'm a little embarrassed that I've been doing this podcast for over a year, and this is the first time I'm having you on. So sorry about that. I was telling my colleagues like sometimes sometimes you forget about the people that are like closest to you in proximity, and we've known each other for a lot of years. You're one of the leading people in your field, so but glad to have you here now. Today's topic talking about putting up quality forage, right? When we're focusing on quality hay forage or alfalfa, whatever. This is our first chance in the spring, right? To just put up some awesome first cut forage that is gonna set our cows up. And you know, if if you folks have been following along, ruminate this for a while. You'll remember Dr. Roth last year. We talked about some some real fundamentals, and you can you can go back and look up that episode. It's called Halage Tips. And there's some really good fundamentals there if that's what you're looking for. But Joe, I want to build a little bit further off those fundamentals today, and I think we revisit them, you know, we make sure I think that's a a big part of this. I used to have a a picture of Vince Lombardi that hung behind me for a lot of these episodes, and I I always loved what Vince said, right? If you don't master the fundamentals, you don't have crap. We'll go with that word. You know what? Let's just start there. We'll start with establishing re-establishing those fundamentals, Joe, and then I'll build into where you really can can get us to the next level. So, with that, when I think of putting up hailage, my mind goes to you know, just the the pre-work that goes into it, right? Equipment, equipment service, knives and the chopper, like all those things. So maybe just give guys a quick rundown of five to six things that they really need to be focused on going into the season. Yeah, that's a great starting point, Scott. And so I'll always start, you know, the with the interaction between safety and being prepared for that first harvest, right? So it's it's a busy time of year with multiple things going on. Often we're trying to get manure out the door onto our fields where we got corn planting, maybe some other crops being planted, and and we have to be ready for that first cut. So having that equipment service, like you said, the knife sharpened is not only you know gonna set you up so that when the crop is at the right stage for a successful harvest, it's gonna avoid breakdowns, avoid putting yourself in more dangerous situations out in the field on those long days during the spring. Uh, another part of that to me is also on your storage area. You know, we sometimes we run into some silos that the structural integrity is starting to look a little rough, whether that's an upright silo or or some T panels on a bunk that have maybe outlived their useful life. But you start looking at that, and not only is it a safety issue, but it really compromises, especially in the case of like a bunk silo, of compromising our ability to really efficiently and effectively pack the feed into those areas. And you know, if we have some T panels that are suspect on one side or something, we end up not really doing a good job packing there. We're probably letting more oxygen in there. And so I think it's really good to start with just kind of assessing your infrastructure, making sure you you have what you need and if any repairs are needed. And then to me, that rolls right into thinking about what I, for lack of a better term, just talk about flexibility in your storage system. You know, I like to say every hay field out there, whether it's orchard grass or pure alfalfa or somewhere in between, has the ability to make high-quality dairy feed, or it can get past us and not be good feed, right? So if we have the flexibility in our storage system to try to separate those feeds out and thinking about that before the season even starts, all right, where am I? If everything goes smoothly, the weather cooperates, and I get this first cutting on time, which bunk is it going in? But if we get a week of rain and all of a sudden it's overmature, you know, now where am I going with it? And hopefully it's not the same spot because we can make use of both of those feeds, but when you know, there's nothing worse than having some really high quality stuff and then having a couple of months of uh poor quality stuff on top of it, right? Because then you're forced to feed through that poor quality stuff before you get to the high quality. So if we can come up with uh more uh you know flexibility in our storage system that can really uh benefit us at FEDO. So, you mean we're we're not supposed to get to that poor quality forage that we're feeding out and then like just it's the nutritionist problem, like that's what we pay these guys for, right? Yeah, but it you know, you're you're right. And I think more and more guys are doing that, but it it's still something that we need to talk about, and because yeah, I mean, there's forage that we're putting up in the spring that would actually be really good for say heifers or or dry cows or you know, guys that are raising their beef on dairy calves, like whatever. But yeah, not so much for those milk cows. I'm admittedly, you know, a crop guy more than a cow guy, so I get a little pushback from the cow folks. But you know, I to me building out your storage infrastructure and your feed system should be on your capital improvement list, kind of wish list, just like the more fans in the barn or a sprinkler system in the barn or some stall upgrades or something like that, right? We always have this list of capital improvements that we think can bring gains to the business, either in efficiency or improve, you know, cow comfort milk production. And I've you know been lobbying for years that we we need to add the forage storage system and feed system to that list. You usually the pushback I get is I'm building a barn right now, I'll worry about the feed center later. But I think we need to reprioritize things a little bit, but that's coming from the crop guy, so you know I don't I don't want to stay on this for for too much longer, but I've talked in the past on this platform. So many times when you see guys start to expand, right? What happens? So you have the 1970s freestall that grandpa built that we built again in the 90s, and then we built again in the mid-2000s. Now we're you know, maybe two twenty, you know, 2022-23. We're putting up another barn, and and what happens? The the milk cows keep going into the best facility, and grandpa's barn that he built in the 70s now houses our dry cows, and the the freestall in the 80s is where our pre-fresh cows are, or something like that, and or you know, heifers, whatever. And I've always said, like, these dry cows are quite honestly like the most important lactation group. I know they're not making milk, but that's the group that's going to determine how how well your cows perform for the next year. If you're not taking care of them, you're sacrificing the next nine months. But it's always it always seems like you know, we have to figure out how we're going to utilize that old structure, and sometimes it shouldn't be. And I I feel like it's the same way what you just described in the forage forage setups, right? It's if we're being realistic, you know, what what we put into these cows is what determines what they put out. And whether it's mismanaged on forage timing and we put up mature, you know, grasses or you know, alfalfa and we have poor forage quality. But if we're putting up rocket fuel and then we're we're dumping in a bunk that is in disrepair, you know, it just doesn't make sense. And I know there's there can be budget constraints and all that, but you know, how are we there's a lot of money that goes out the door on farms just in forage loss. I would love to have somebody equate that to pounds of milk. You know, but it it's real. I mean, you and I probably both went on some what we would call pretty progressive dairies. I'm thinking of one right now that's not all that far from where I grew up. And there's a lot of nice barns, and then their forage pile something left to be desired there. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up. Moving over, Joe, on the the forage quality piece of this. What are we trying to accomplish here? Right. And I I think that's a good place to have you start. Uh and I'll let you take it from there. Like, what are we trying to accomplish with this first cutting? Yeah, so I guess to me, I would start with that, you know, and this isn't new information by any means, but first cutting can represent 40 to 50 plus percent of our hailage yield for the year, right? And it tends to be some of our highest quality feed if we harvest it on time because of the spring growing conditions we have versus our second and third cutting that are growing in the you know hotter part of the summer. So to me, it just represents a huge opportunity to secure that lactating cow feed that we want. And you know, you started out the episode talking about kind of the basics, and I always go back to this great little extension article that Dr. Marvin Hall, a retired forage agronomist from Penn State, wrote, you know, 30 plus years ago. And the article ranks what he talks about the top six things or six things that affect forage quality in the field. And maturity or harvest date is number one on that list. And we we've known that for a long time. And then he goes, I'll just rattle off the list because I think it's informative and I still believe that it's very relevant. Number two is crop species, so that's talking alfalfa versus grass versus winter rye versus corn, right? The species of the crop can have a pretty big effect on quality. Then number three is harvest and storage, so not even a field component, right? But what we've been talking about here. Four is the environment, you know, how that hot, dry part of the summer versus the cooler growing conditions in the spring. I would bump into there also like that rain, you know, that inopportune rain that comes right when you want to start mowing and now you're delayed a week, right? And then number five is the soil fertility. And you know, there's a lot of exciting things going on in the world of soil fertility. But when we look at a lot of our forage quality or the nutritional value of the crop and that data, if we do the basics right, get the pH right, basic nutrition, we need that to support a good, healthy, productive crop. Beyond that, there's not a lot of evidence currently that we can really affect the nutritional value of that crop with you know, with soil fertility. So that was number five on his list 30 plus years ago, and I think that's still fair. And then number six is variety or cultivar. So that's alfalfa variety A versus alfalfa variety B, right? We we had crop species higher on the list, but typically variety A versus variety B, there's not a big difference. I would put an asterisk next to that with like low lignin alfalfa, because that really is that really is a different beast, and that didn't exist when he put this list out. But if you're just talking about conventional alfalfa, you know, you're looking for strong agronomics, but in terms of the actual what we get on a forage test for that nutritional value doesn't change a lot. So so I like to start with that list, and uh you know, I think it really is helpful to to go back to that and say, all right, if these are the things that have the biggest impact as we're planning in the spring and setting up our goals for that high quality first cutting that we're prioritizing our resources based on based on that ranking order. So yeah, that's really good. And that's interesting, you know, from 30 years ago. I mean, just sometimes like the truth is the truth and it holds up over time. That's really good. You know, just thinking about how much time is spent thinking about the different, you know, varieties of crops we plant. And and obviously it's not like it can just be a you know spare of the moment decision, but I would say that that is appropriately placed on that list. That's pretty good. Well, and I think it's important to differentiate the agronomics versus the nutritional value, right? Because there are there may be whether it's an alfalfa variety or a hybrid of corn silage, there may be disease resistance packages bred into those hybrids. There may be other characteristics of those hybrids that are important agronomically. So I still think it's a good practice to really look at what's going to work on your soil types and your region of the country and your growing conditions. Are you in a valley where you don't have good airflow and you have more leaf diseases? You know, type of thing. So still important to look at that stuff, but just differentiating that from the nutritional value of the crop, as we would see on you know on a forage test, I think is important. Well, you know, staying in the agronomy lane, you know, let's talk a little bit about the small grain forages and how we can use them more as a strategic tool instead of an emergency crop. I think that's a great way that you just phrase that, because with some planning, they can really work for us. You know, I when we treat something as like an emergency backup, we we tend the results tend to reflect that, right? Yeah. But if we're treating it as a as a part of our system, then I you know, there's some real opportunities there. Uh a couple points that always come to mind. And again, this is very dependent on where you are in the country, because you know, in in northern New York, we don't we struggle a little bit more with like the double cropping than they might in central Pennsylvania or southern Pennsylvania, right? And but I think there's and still an opportunity, and it's finding that right size for your farm. So if your goal is to use a cover crop as a double crop and take that extra harvest, we really have to think about not just kind of shoehorning that cover crop in after corn silage comes off, but back up a step and ask what relative maturities are we growing? And do we need to scale back a little bit on our relative maturities to put ourselves more in the driver's seat in terms of when silage harvest is going to happen and when we get that cover crop in? Same thing in the spring of the year. You know, it's really about right sizing it for your farm. If you're further south, maybe you feel fairly comfortable with a with having a window in the spring that you can harvest that winter cereal without compromising your corn planting timing or your first cutting or anything else. But especially as we move further north, you know, I think it's important to have realistic expectations. One farmer had told me that on their farm, they cover crop 100% of their corn acres for conservation purposes, but they only plan to harvest about 10 to 15 percent of those acres as a double crop because that's what they feel like they can reasonably manage in the spring of the year. So this was this farm was growing about a thousand acres. So they would cover crop all of that, then go out in the spring, choose 100 to 150 acres that look the best to treat as a double crop, and they could fit that in without compromising corn planting, manure spreading, or the timing of their first cutting, right? If they went over that number, now they're starting to compromise in other areas. And I'm not saying 10 to 15 percent is the right number for every farm, but I think it was a great example of find your number, find what's realistic for your operation. And because it can be a very high quality feed and it could help bolster feed inventories, right? But we kind of got to find what works for us without compromising our other crops or other parts of the system. I'll pause in case you want to cut this, but then that's that that's a really great point. And I think you know, encouraging people to have that honest conversation with themselves. And you know, it I think sometimes, Joe, we get this mindset as people in agriculture. You grew up on a farm, I grew up on a farm. Oh, we're we just need to put in some more hours and it'll all come together, right? And that's sometimes all that needs to happen. But certainly every time you're overextending yourself, you're pushing the edges of what the structure you've built can handle, something is going to start to leak. And I'm glad you brought that up. So, with that on the small grains, I mean that that's a great way to the planning of whether we're going to double crop or not on that serial program. What are some of the advantages? Maybe taking the the crop side out and looking at just the agronomy side. You and I still see enough land that doesn't get cover cropped in the fall, but what are some advantages that people might be missing out on if they're you know they're thinking about doing it for the first time, but maybe they're just not pulling the trigger on it? Yeah, if we just start with cover cropping, I mean, certainly I think we have some good, you know, good data. It's it's not all perfect, right? There can we have to recognize I that it's it's a mixed bag. So the benefits certainly around reducing erosion and retaining nutrients, helping kind of suck up some of those nutrients that might be left in the fall of the year, adding organic material to the soil. You know, we get to the spring, and that cover crop can potentially help dry out the field a little bit faster because it's it's sucking up a lot of water that's then transpiring out through the leaves, and and we can remove some excess moisture in the spring to get ready for planting. So there's certainly some benefits, but we we have to take that with some challenges too, right? You know, we can potentially we could in a dry spring, we may suck too much water out of the ground and and take some of the water that are, you know, if we're planting corn into that field or whatever that that corn crop could have benefited from. We can see some you know increased pressures with some of our cover crops, and we can also, you know, it Can just be a challenge for planting and preparing fields if if it's too wet and it kind of gets out of control on us, there can be a lot of biomass there, which is great for the organic matter aspect, but it can be hard to manage and a little unruly, right? So I think taking the the good with the bad. And I I would tie that then back into the idea of double cropping, because I do think I'll be honest, I'm a little critical of the idea of just doing a hundred percent of our crops as like a corn winter cereal rotation and not having any perennials in the system. I really don't consider corn and a winter cover crop double crop as a crop rotation. It's just two plantings of a of an annual grass every year. And so I think I think we do have to reconcile that a little bit with our in terms of especially with a lot of our milk cooperatives and milk processors looking at carbon footprint and stuff like that. We have to have to reconcile a little bit that perennials really do have a benefit in our dairy systems. And that yeah, I I don't consider corn and a cover continuous corn with a cover crop in between as an actual crop rotation. Well, you know, and it it's I don't want to make this too silly, but I have a three-year-old son, and I I often have to tell him just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. And it's funny how that parallels over. Yeah, we have the technology to plant corn on corn on corn for 10 years, or corn and wheat in the same field for 10 years. It doesn't mean we should. And there are unintended consequences of doing that. You know, even the best we'll call it soil fertility plan to support that soil during a time like that. There's still negative outcomes somewhere in the system. So what what is the thought now of the frequency of rotation between annuals and perennials? Yeah, it's hard to put an exact number on that because it's gonna, you know, the slope of your soil, how uh susceptible it is to erosion and stuff like that is obviously factors in, but but it really hasn't changed from my perspective that once we get out past you know four years of continuous corn, we're really starting to stress that system. I mean, yeah, having a cover crop in there can help some, but especially if it's corn silage, because we're removing so much biomass from the field, we're really not leaving much of anything there in terms of material, right? So when we look at our nutrient management systems on dairies, when we look at the pest management aspects of it, if you're pushing out past that, like you said, we can do it. I mean, farms will will point out to me all the time how many years of a field's been in continuous corn as a point of, yeah, we can do this, but the trouble is we don't always even see the hidden cost of doing that because we still see that we're getting a reasonable yield off of that field. It seems decent, but then if we start calculating in the extra seed cost for, you know, and extra pest management costs that we are using to manage that continuous corn. And and we we can never prove that the yields are are as good as as they would have been if we had a rotation in there, right? We can that's it. We can say the yields uh we can say the yields still seem competitive and it was not a total disaster, but we can actually prove that they they were really optimized where they could have been, right? So yeah, I'm gonna go back to a comment that my colleague Jeff Hostetter made on this podcast earlier. Forget which episode, I could look it up, but it's we were talking in terms of milk production, but his comment was I'm not really sure if people if farmers really know what their ceiling is as far as production. And honestly, I don't think we do. I I think if there's outlier cows that can make 160 pounds of milk a day in our current system, I think there's probably a lot that we haven't unlocked, right? We haven't grown the system enough, and the same's gonna be true for forage. Great. You're you know, you're pulling off big yields or not big, but let's just say, you know, what we would consider to be above average yields on this field that's you know been in corn for 10 years. Where would we be if we'd have managed uh the agronomy side properly? Exactly. You know, and so there's that there's always that what if question that that we can challenge with, and uh I think that's something to keep in mind for folks. I want to go over to thinking about harvesting the stuff, whether it's grass, alfalfa, the small grains, cutting timing trade-offs, yield versus quality versus logistics. What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, so yeah, my tongue-in-cheek answer is is all of all of it, right? All of it, right? Yeah, so the one thing I I think about, and it's it's kind of a simplistic example, it's obviously more complex on uh on a farm with all the moving parts, but you know, I'll go back to something I said earlier. Every single one of those fields has the potential to be lactating quality feed. And what I struggle with on and visiting with some farms is that they they've already kind of predetermined what fields are going to be their, well, say heifer feed, right? They've already predetermined that before the snow's even off the field because it's uh maybe it's further away from the farm, or it's you know, they know it's an older grass stand. And my point always is, well, what if we hit you know May 15th here in northern New York and that grass stand looks beautiful and we got a nice window of weather to go get it? Let's go get it. Because if you ignore it and let it go past, you've predestined it to be low quality, right? Meanwhile, we could get to that week when all your alfalfa is ready and we get a rain event or an equipment breakdown. And now we've all shifted all of that feed into the category of lower quality. So I always encourage the idea of sit down with your map, sit down with your list of fields, and think of every one of them having the potential to be that lactating quality feed. If the weather window presents itself, be ready to go get it. And I would, you know, go back to the small grains conversation too. You know, some of the trade-offs to me there are, and this ties into you know what we talked about in terms of kind of nutritional value of the crop leaving the field versus the the silage management part of it, is we could have these giant, giant windrows of winter rye or winter triticale or something, and they're so hard to manage that we end up with this wet, kind of sloppy hailage. It you know, worst case scenario, it goes butyric on us, right? But even if it doesn't, it's not necessarily going to ferment the way we would want it to. We're leaving it out in those windrows for extra days and we're losing that sugar. So, what if we say, all right, like my goal isn't to maximize the tonnage at coming out of the field? My goal is to maximize the tonnage of quality feed I can put in front of the animal. And those are two very different things because we can we can maximize the tonnage coming out of the field and then have excessive shrink losses and quality losses in the in storage that result in a much lower percentage of that feed actually reaching the animal in a way we want it, right? So so maybe we back off and say we're gonna we're gonna take this winter rye when it gets to the the certain height, regardless of what the date is, because we know at that height it's a manageable windrow for us, and we can dry it quickly and get it in siled quickly. The other part of that can be cutting height too, right? Maybe we we cut higher and leave a little bit of that while we're stock of that winter cereal in the field, and kind of twofold, it it lessens the windrows a little bit. It also one of the things that hurts drying the most is soil moisture, right? And so, and in the spring of the year, what do we we're going out on moist soils mowing this winter cereal? If we raise the mower up a few extra inches and essentially leave that stubble there, so that windrow is now sitting on top of that higher stubble than it being right down like on the soil surface, right? We can we can enhance our drying and our windrill management through that too. So that's one of the, you know, to me, that's one of those compromises you were mentioning between, you know, quality and timing and logistics and all that is sacrificing a little bit of that, you know, what we would traditionally look at as part of the yield, right? And just saying we're if we leave that in the field, we're gonna have a more manageable windrow that we can dry more effectively and actually have more tons of feed reaching the cow. And I would translate that into our first cutting hay too. You know, we really push four-inch cutting height for our grasses, but even with your alfalfa, you know, three to four inches, the same thing, especially with first cutting. It can help with the drying by keeping the windrow off the soil a little bit higher, a little more air getting under there. We can reduce ash content by having that higher stubble height because we're not trying to dig into the ground to pick up that windrow, right? We're using the stubble to help keep it off the the ground. So I I really encourage people to think that way in terms of this cutting height thing, isn't just about the physiology of the plant, right? It's right, it's a logistical consideration, and it can, you know, the trade-off can be I don't have the number, good numbers in front of me to make an example, but you know, we leave 10% of that crop in the field by cutting higher, but we have a better fermentation, a higher quality product, and we actually gain that on the back end by having more more tons of quality feed that reaches the animal. So yeah, I mean, if if nothing else intuitively, I mean, we should know that, right? And uh, yeah, that's that's a big one. Seen a lot of a lot of hailage piles ruined and cows compromised from just missing that one fundamental of you know, say like caught height, right? And uh obviously sometimes it's you know we're not getting ash in just because of that. There's other challenges that can happen, but control what you can control, right? I'd rather have it be that way than adding to the the stuff that we can't control, right? Right. You know, the thing about the quality forage is I was told this a while ago. I forget now who who told me this, but forage quality problems rarely announce themselves early. So when you hear that, Joe, what do you take from that? Yeah, what I take from it is the whole component we've been talking about of the kind of the quality leaving the field versus the quality going to the animal, right? Because you know, I I think even a first cutting and some, you know, sometimes a a nutritionist or a farmer or someone from extension will go out and do what we usually refer to as scissor cut sampling, right? And just snip a clump of the hay field, send it off to the lab, get an analysis on it, and comes back. Oh, this is you know, three days from now, let's cut this. We hit this perfect, the weather's perfect, let's go for it. And so from that perspective, we're thinking we have this really high quality feed, we we hit it right this year. But when I think of your comment, I think well, what happens after that the mower goes through the field that takes that potential we had and reduces it? And oftentimes when that compromise and quality is kind of invisible until we go to feed out that forage, right? And then all of a sudden, whether it's with the nutritional test or if it's beyond that, when we it starts heating, or you know, the the mycotoxins or whatever, all that stuff is kind of comes up later. So yeah, and you know, it's funny, everybody has their their area of I call it zone of genius, if you would, but right, we all see things through a different lens. And having spent all of my career on the cow side of stuff, I'm already thinking of like the quiet, you know, it shows up quietly, right? Or never early, I should say. It's we start feeding that new forage that we did a good enough job, but we didn't do the best we could have, right? And sometimes people have a hard time admitting that, but that's the reality a lot of times. But you get, you know, maybe it doesn't show up in the tank day one. Maybe it shows up in the tank a month later, or it shows up from Repro, or it shows up we've just plateaued uh our milk production. We're no longer able to challenge the cows, right? If you would. And essentially, right, we're our whole goal is with this forage conversation is how do we create on farm protein that is uh so it's super high quality, right? And just thinking back to your heifer feed comment and the the field that we've we've predetermined these fields are going to be heifer feed, whether it's because it's tradition or it's logistics or whatever, right? And we intuitively know that we need so many acres to feed, say the heifers. If I was to go out and have to buy forage, Joe, what am I gonna pay more for? Exactly. Am I gonna pay more for Western Alfalfa to get trucked to New York that's of peak quality so I can get you know challenge my my cows, or can I probably find some pretty decent quality round bales or halage more locally that would actually be a good feed for my heifers? Yeah, I I kind of that's actually one of the uh notes I had for our our next part of the conversation, but it's uh I couldn't you know said that better. It's right. I would always rather be in the market for some lower quality feed for my non-lactating animals than I would be trying to go out there finding something to make milk off of, right? Yeah, well, I'm glad you were thinking that way. And and folks, so I think we're gonna wrap up just about the agronomic side of this conversation, but I want to bring Joe back and I want to talk about economics of this because at the end of the day, like if we're a dairy farmer, we're a cattle feeder in this country, it's hard enough to make money, right? You know, we're not setting our own prices in a lot of cases the case in dairy, especially. And you know, right now we're we're going through a down cycle in the milk price, and it's not fun. There's clients that you and I both work with, I'm sure, that they're feeling the pinch. And you know, the the idea for this episode actually came up. I was on a dare in Vermont, and the question was essentially we're gonna be this many dollars short this year, right? And they're already short on forage because of because of the drought last year, right? So we we know how much forage we need to go buy. We're looking at the milk price projections, and we're gonna be X number of dollars short. And this is a you know, roughly say thousand cow dairy, that's a pretty large number. We can't just make that up overnight, right? I I don't have a a magic wand to print cash, man. That'd be fun. But there I I believe there's things that we can do in the in the barns and in the fields that can at least soften the blow, right? We may not become profitable, but if we can burn less equity through a downturn, sometimes that's a big win. And that's why I'd like to continue this discussion on on the economic side. And you know, I I would just I mean coming back, like if if we do everything right up to this point, right? Soil fertility, managing that resource that is the dirt, uh, that is the soil, and and doing it properly and crop rotations and uh you know, uh just good harvest practices and and siling practices, like we've tried to do everything right up to this point. Then the the real question becomes like, what does that quality actually buy us later? And I I look forward to picking up this discussion with you on the next episode. Any final take homes, Joe? You want to leave people with maybe like a top three things to think about? Yeah, I think just a quick summary of what where we were is that you know, some of those old the knowledge we've known for a long time still holds true. You know, that's the classic thing of we really need to attend to those basics before we start looking at some of these fancy new things, right? One, we need to make sure there's science behind some of these fancy new things, and two, we need to make sure we've made the investments and the basics, you know, whiming your fields is boring, but it you know, routinely comes up as still something that we overlook, and sometimes we overlook it because we have some fancy new gadget, right? And so just going back to you know, sometimes that stuff's boring, but it it can still have the biggest impact. And then yeah, again, just thinking of that and thinking of your fields in terms of every one of them having the potential to be high quality feed, and that you know, the process is only half barely half over when we actually hit the field with the mower, even if we do that at the right, the exact right time. There's still a lot after that. I there's a slide that Dr. Lehman Kung is a retired professor from the University of Delaware and a real silage guru. He's had this slide for years. I think is one of the most straightforward slides you can show in a presentation. And it just has two columns high-quality feed in the field is in the first column, good silo management is in the second column, or bad silo management, and and you have to have the combination of both good field management plus good silage management equals good feed. Any of the other combinations of those two things don't work, right? You can have poor feed coming out of the field and do a great job in the silo. It doesn't make up for that poor feed coming out of the field. You can have great feed coming out of the field and do a poor job in the silo, and that doesn't work either, right? We have to have both. So yeah, that's a great point. Great point. Well, Joe, I want to thank you again for uh jumping on with us today and look forward to talking to you in a couple of weeks for part two, if you would, where we dive into more on the economic side of putting up quality forages and the downstream impact of that. So thank you, and we'll be talking again soon. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. Look for our next episode in two weeks.