2026 Forage Outlook with Jason Alsum

In this episode of AK Podcasts, Mike Donaldson and Jason Alsum, delve into the critical aspects of livestock nutrition and forage management. They discuss the importance of timely harvesting, the balance between quality and quantity in forage production, and the impact of digestibility on livestock health and productivity. The conversation emphasizes the financial implications of forage management decisions, highlighting how proper techniques can lead to significant cost savings and improved profitability for dairy farmers. The episode concludes with actionable insights for producers to enhance their forage management practices.

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Transcript

Chris Radke (01:42)

Hello and welcome to AK Podcasts, where we explore science and nutrition behind livestock care and management with the best and the brightest in the business. I'm your host, Chris Radke, part of the sales department here at Agri-King. And with me today is the Director of Field Services and a member of the Sales Management Team, Mr. Mike Donaldson. Mike, how you doing buddy?

Mike Donaldson (02:00)

Hey, having a very nice day, Chris. How's yours been?

Chris Radke (02:03)

⁓ it's great, it's wonderful. Hey, who's with us and what are we talking about today?

Mike Donaldson (02:08)

Well, we have another ⁓ in our growing list of repeat guests on with us today. ⁓ In some ways, ⁓ this is sort of that time of year when farmers turn into kids that are out in the sandbox with their Tonka trucks and their 1-16 scale tractors, because they're all of a sudden gonna get to get all that iron out of the shed and they're getting ready. A lot of them are really, really excited to get some seeds in the ground. We're gonna plant corn.

Jason Alsum (02:27)

you

Mike Donaldson (02:37)

We're going to plant soybeans and today our guests and I would like to give you another, another something to be thinking about this spring instead of just throwing a bunch of dirt around. So we're joined by Jason Alsom, who is Agri-King's director of Silo-King Operations. For those of you who not seen Jason on a podcast before, going to ask him to introduce himself a little bit and then we'll be off and running. Jason, tell us about yourself.

Jason Alsum (03:07)

Hey guys, good to see ya, good to be with you again today. Love what you guys do on this podcast and I'm honored to be part of it and just spend a little time chit chatting with you guys about something that I love and have been doing for the last 17 years here at Agri-King and it's helping guys make forage. yeah, this will be fun. I'm looking forward to it.

Mike Donaldson (03:29)

Well, Jason, and I alluded to this a little bit ago, the world does a wonderful job of convincing people that your corn has to be in the ground by this date to get that extra 10th of a bushel yield per acre. It's one of the more visible things that farmers actually do is plant something. They can see that crop grow.

knee-high by the 4th of July. There's all the things people do and compare themselves to their neighbors. And I wanted to talk a little bit with you today about the upcoming 2026 forage season, starting with aspects of hay and small grain harvest. And we'll probably be talking heavily about making fermented feed, but a lot of these same things are going to hold true if you're making dry hay.

And I think it's some, in some cases it's better than it used to be, but I think getting people to stop that corn planter when it's time to go cut, cut a forage crop is still one of the toughest things our people are out there trying to convince others to do. What, what do you think about those things?

Jason Alsum (04:49)

Yeah, you're spot on. It is a competition. It's, the neighbor's corn is up. I got to get my corn up. They're in the ground. I got to go. There's definitely something to that. And we have become really good at corn. We really are. We know how to grow corn. We know when to harvest corn. We make a pretty good pile of corn. But I think, especially in the spring,

What suffers is we forget about the haylage, the wheatlage, the rye, whatever else is out in the field. And we tend to not understand as much how critical those delays in harvest are to the digestibility of that haylage, wheatlage, whatever it might be. So ⁓ I'm gonna refer back to some of my recent travels. I was just out in California.

and they're harvesting wheat out there. They're going at it. Some guys a little further south do direct cut. They have direct cut heads on their choppers and they just go in and mow it down. And in that situation, they do have to kind of wait for that plant to mature to a point where it's starting to dry down itself. Whereas the part of California I was in last week, they're swathing the hay, the wheat, and then going and taking it. They have the ability to cut it a little greener.

⁓ and get a little bit more moisture in it. So I think that's important. But what typically ends up happening, there are some really good guys who know how to make quality feed. But what I typically see is wheat fully headed out. They like to get lots of tons. I see a lot of alfalfa taken at 32 to 34 inches because they get a lot of crop off and it's really heavy and they get a lot of tons.

But what I want to go through today is a little bit of the math of how that affects them. We went through at our last podcast when it came to spring, we went through a lot of harvest details about getting ready, getting out in the field, how to pack it, how to make a pile, covering all of that. That all still holds true. We got to do all that management stuff, but we want to dial it in a little bit more today into

the return on investment, if you will, of getting that harvest right. Does that sound good?

Mike Donaldson (07:20)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Where do you think the...

Where does the disconnect start that tons starts to be more important than quality?

Jason Alsum (07:37)

More is better, right? More is better.

Mike Donaldson (07:39)

Well,

and it might be that simple. mean, it doesn't have to be a hard answer, but it's frustrating when, and we are a nutrition company and our definition nutrition starts with the forage and treating it with Silo-King and getting the most out of it. And to see people gladly giving up quality in the name of something that doesn't matter nearly as much is very frustrating to me.

Jason Alsum (08:06)

Well, I think if I put my farmer shoes on, these producers have to make a lot of decisions in a day. And they have to walk the middle in a lot of areas. They got to be careful not to swing too far one way or too far the other way. If they make their corn silage three points too wet, it runs down the driveway and they went the wrong way. And this...

A consultant doesn't like that because they lost all the sugars. ⁓ know, if they go too early on their haylage, they don't have enough. And then another consultant is telling them they don't have enough haylage to make it through the year or wheatlage to make it through the year. So they try to listen to that voice and make it a little better. And the reality is either side of harvest, you can still make milk.

Mike Donaldson (09:03)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason Alsum (09:04)

we

have found at Anger King is we wanna make the most efficient milk. So we wanna help our people understand what two points of digestibility means to that animal and how they will actually eat less if you feed them a higher quality feed. And you have to supplement less if you have a higher quality feed. So we are trying to educate on why quality is better than quantity.

But it's also that visual thing. You have 12 foot walls in a ⁓ 40 by 90 bunker, you want to see it up over the walls. That half a bunker doesn't make you too happy because you start worrying about your inventory. So there's happy mediums.

Mike Donaldson (09:51)

Well, let's start us down that walk. We're going to take what you referenced, putting some value on that digestibility level. And let's give people something to think about.

Jason Alsum (09:59)

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm gonna give you another analogy, Mike, and this can go back to my golf game in California. I would be much better, I would probably score much better if I just took my three iron and hit it straight down the fairway. And then got next to the green and I was able to putt out and get a four or a five on every hole. That would be the smartest thing to do. But you know what I want? I want that 300 yard drive right down the middle, cause it makes me happy.

So I swing like nuts and I end up in the tree and then I hit another tree and then I get to the green at four and I chip on a two putt for a seven. That doesn't make me happy, but what do I do? The next par five, I crank that driver again. So there's some of that involved in this too. When your neighbor is getting, you know, 10, 12 ton to the acre and you're getting eight, I'm talking haylage or a corn silage at

Mike Donaldson (10:34)

You

Yeah.

Jason Alsum (11:02)

You know, they're getting 25 ton to the acre. Well, you maybe plant a BMR, you have great digestibility, but you're getting 18 to 19. That just never feels as good. We want that driver down the middle. So what is that driver? Go ahead.

Mike Donaldson (11:14)

That's beautiful.

No, that works really well. That's good.

Jason Alsum (11:23)

So what does that driver down the middle cost you when it goes one way or the other when you don't hit the middle of the fairway when you're a duffer like me and you don't hit the center of the fairway. So let's get into that a little bit. ⁓ Harvest timing is huge when it comes to grasses and halages which we're about to do right now. Wheats things like that. ⁓ And you really the basic knowledge is once that plant shoots out

seeds or blossoms, it gets top heavy and that plant very quickly builds lignin into the stalk to make that stand. Otherwise, as soon as that blossom or that wheat or that oats or that seed pops out the top, the plant would fall over. So it's almost simultaneously that plant shoots up its fruit, if you will, and it builds stalk to hold it. As soon as it builds stalk,

you lose digestibility. That's just the way it's designed.

Mike Donaldson (12:23)

I never really thought of as being a physics problem, but that's exactly what it is.

Jason Alsum (12:28)

Yeah, that's what it is. So what I'm going to go through next is some work that the illustrious Mike Donaldson sitting here today had a hand in doing, and I'm going to use some of his numbers. So thank you, Mike. Do you want to tee this up a little bit? You did a trial. Tell me the details, and then I'll go through the numbers.

Mike Donaldson (12:34)

Ha

Ha ha ha!

So in 2003, I had, then they are to this day, great, great aggregating clients in Western Pennsylvania. And the one brother was the crops guy and the other brother was the cow guy. And the cow brother had a terrible time convincing the crops brother to do just what we're talking about. Stop the planner.

time to make haylage for a couple, three, four days, and then come back to planting corn. So one year, it's probably still snow on the ground. The cow brother and I cooked up an idea. We went out into one of their alfalfa fields and we set aside with the stakes to roughly 20 foot square areas. And the stakes were there, so I sampled from the same place.

but also so that it was never cut until we were done. So I started in very early April and every week when I was on the farm, I would go out and I'd measure the height of the plant and I would cut it at about harvest height. And then I cut it up with scissors and mixed it. Basically got a forage sample that I then took home and put in my freezer.

because I wanted everything to go through the lab on the same day. I wasn't interested in fermentation. I just wanted this to be about when was the right time to cut. So across eight weeks, I did that every single week. And partway through there is when they made that field, but they left my areas, my two areas stand and never cut them until second cut.

And it was kind of an eye opener for me, just how that plant physically changed. ⁓ by the time we got way past flowering, what Jason's talking about, ⁓ the, the plant was so top heavy, it was on the ground. It was a, I had to be a little careful where I grabbed my samples from. It was a lodge mess. ⁓ but I got, I got samples across eight weeks, thawed them and sent them through the Agri-King lab.

and then made very basic rations, same balance point. They were not tweaked out to the nth degree. They were balanced on energy and basic protein to be able to see what the difference was between those. So that was what we did.

Jason Alsum (15:24)

Excellent and it's great work and what I love about it why we're gonna use it today is it goes all the way through the cow and the ration and the effects on it so I'm just gonna touch on some of that when I look at your maturity dates and the thing that you the cuttings that you did it reminds me of when I would take the peak stick that came from the University and that's a stick that it's called a peak stick I don't know what the acronym is but

It has measurements on it and relative feed values and pre-bud and bud stage and flowering stage and what that does. And your numbers line up pretty well to that. So in Mike's numbers, the 10% bud stage, the plant was about 24 to 26 inches and the relative feed value is about 200. And I think

Mike Donaldson (16:03)

Okay.

Jason Alsum (16:17)

that's about where that peak stick was as well and I would tell guys at that point I want you cutting soon because it's amazing to follow your numbers and the crude protein at that point was 25% so those are a couple of major numbers that digestibility 78 one week later crude protein fell three points relative feed value fell 15 points digestibility fell two points

And about the same thing the next week. We lost three more points of CrU protein. We went down to 177 relative feed value. And this is at 28 to 34 inches. So when I would tell guys a cut at 24 to 26 inches, they usually got it done about 28. And if we ended up with 170, then once it goes through the curing and fermentation process, you usually lose a little bit more. But, and then you're three weeks later.

you got down to 17, this is at 36 to 40 inches, you got down to 17 on protein, a 140 relative feed value, and your digestibility, your IBDMD anyway, went from 78 at 24 to 26 inches to 68, 10 points of digestibility change. So those three weeks of delay went from a phenomenal feed to a subpar feed.

And every week in the middle in between there, you got something a little bit different. And that really holds true to a lot of research that you're going to see out there. So timing is so critical and you have to plan for what you want to feed your animals and how you're going to get it. And like you alluded to in the intro, we heavily recommend park the corn planter, switch the tractor over and go get your hay at the right time. Cause it's worth a lot more to you than

that corn will catch up a week later. When the heat units are there, it'll catch up to everything else. But you can never get this quality back in your hay. Does that make sense?

Mike Donaldson (18:25)

No, it absolutely does. the other not very scientific, not very scientific aspect I'll throw in. It's amazing in how many years how being on the early side of harvest just sinks everything up for that season in a better way. I've seen it work better for rain harvest window. I now I'm really getting off into things I can't prove.

but it seems like the people who go early just open up so much better results on all the following cuttings as well.

Jason Alsum (19:04)

Yep, yep. And in the years I did nutrition work, when we had 180 relative feed value haylage, everything went better on that farm. And let me, so let me segue into that. You did such a great job of following this through into two rations. And we're going to look at the 10 % bud and the 10 % flower three weeks later. So in putting them side by side in a ration, you had 80 cents,

per head per day in corn, 14 cents per head per day in soybean meal, and for a total of 94 cents per head per day with those ingredients to make that ration work. Three weeks later, you had to add eight cents or another pound of corn, basically, and 60 cents, 64 cents in soybean meal to make up for that protein going from 25 to 17. That's a lot of soybean meal.

Mike Donaldson (19:45)

The advanced, yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Jason Alsum (20:02)

That was a $1.66 on that side for a difference of 72 cents per head per day. There is a huge amount of profit in 72 cents per head per day. ⁓ When you look at that, I like breaking it down in thousands because I think our dairies are getting bigger and there's a lot of people that are working with derivatives of a thousand and you can go either way from that. But if you take 72 cents per head per day on a thousand cow dairy,

Mike Donaldson (20:13)

I lost everybody.

Jason Alsum (20:30)

you're talking $262,800. That's a lot of money ⁓ for making that decision to go a little bit earlier. Now, if you go at a week later and get that 180 relative feed value I was talking about, you're gonna be close to this. It's not gonna be as drastic, but if you wait those three weeks, that's the kind of money we're talking about. So it is significant. ⁓ And getting out there and doing it at the right time.

You may not see it in the bunker, you may not see it in the cows, but you're gonna see it in your pocketbook, because you will be supplementing less soybean meal and less corn because of the relative feed value, the energy and the protein you're getting out of that feed. So that's very important to go that way. Now, as I'm talking about the harvest time, let me just touch on a little bit there, and then I have a little bit more coming back.

on some return on investment. But when you're harvesting, I want to make a point of this. was reminded of again in my recent travels cut length. You cannot cut your grasses, your wheats, your haylage an inch off the ground. You can't do that. It doesn't physically work for harvest for a couple of reasons. One, you cut it that short and then you lay a windrow on that.

you have to now lower your head and dig into the dirt to pick that up. And that's where feed hygiene starts to suffer right there. Because I saw choppers growing across the field, they had to lower the head, every bump in the field I saw dirt flying in front of that chopper to pick up the wheatlage that they were working on and they were inoculating everything with dirt. And that, after fermentation, is going to turn claustridia, because there's claustridia in the dirt.

A Clostridial fermentation brings butyric acid and nasty feed. And you're going to have that sprinkled through your pile if you don't adjust your cut height. So when we're harvesting, let's consider our cut height. How are we going to get that chopper head or the merger or whatever equipment to pick feed up and move it? If you go from trying to scalp it right off the ground and get every inch of it to cutting it,

at two and a half to three inches, then your windrow will be up off the ground a little bit more and your tines will be able to pass through that stubble, pick up a clean crop and not inoculate with dirt. again, dirt to get feed hygiene, good, good clean feed. We got to have clean right from when we cut it, merge it. We can't be mixing dirt in it every time we go through the

The guys I really feel sorry for are the guys that have these stupid ground hogs or ground squirrels all over their crop. And I've seen places out west where there's ground hog piles like this and they got, they just power through them and that puts a lot of dirt in that pile. So.

Mike Donaldson (23:41)

Well,

and you know, the other benefit of what you're saying, Jason, that bottom, however many inches of the plant doesn't, if we're talking about alfalfa, if we're talking about grass, it is the least valuable part of the entire plant. So you're actually going to raise the quality of each mouthful along with leaving all that contamination in the field.

Jason Alsum (24:06)

Yes, very good point. there's been a lot of studies on that on corn silage. yeah, you get a higher starch percentage if you, some guys have gone up 12 inches on their corn stalks or higher. And this part is less digestible, more lignin. Yes, it's still feed, it's tons in the pile, but the quality goes down. Your percentage of starch in every pound or every ton of feed goes down because of just the sheer

there's more pounds of stock than there is. So you raise that up, your starch percentage goes up, your digestibility goes up, you have better quality feed in there. And then the big thing on haylage for sure, because ⁓ you get several crops off of it, that second, that next crop will have a better start if we keep that stock a little longer, more nutrients are left in there, it's able to take off.

for the next crop much faster than when we cut it down lower.

Mike Donaldson (25:07)

That makes

perfect sense. And it does, I understand it does go against the, you I need tons. I've got more animals than I've ever had before, but you made an important point. It's amazing how an animal will reach their nutrient fill on less dry matter pounds with better quality forages. When there's something there besides just bones, they don't need.

to eat all those pounds and bones and a bunch of grain. When the forage is higher quality, it actually will stretch and go longer. You can do both.

Jason Alsum (25:49)

Yep, Yeah, so we want to get that quality from the cut to the right cut length to the right chop length. Those are all the mechanical parts of it, but getting it cut at the right time has a huge payback. And then as we transition through the harvest and trying to keep it clean through our harvest, you know, then of course we would, it's best to have

a concrete pad or a concrete bunker rather than putting it in dirt where you're going to have tractors going through dirt and up on piles that inoculates it with dirt again. So keeping our feed pad clean is also going to be very important. And then all of the parts, I'm not going to get into the weeds on making a pile and packing a pile and all of that. We know the importance of all that covering a pile, but I do want to touch on at the end here, another

big payback that I have seen over and over again after the piles done some of the results that happened. So I have a cool story for you. went, ⁓ this was last corn silage season, I went out to a farm and they did two different structures for me. They did about 5,000 ton in a bunker treated and they did about a thousand tons in a drive over pile not treated.

Same chopper, same packing techniques, same plastic covering. Pretty much we tried to keep it as same same as we could. What I was looking for mainly was to determine heating and therefore dry matter loss and what's happening in those two structures with the different treatments. And Silo-King does a lot more to handle heating so I'll get into a little bit of that later in our mode of action. But I went out with a 18 inch compost thermometer

and a three foot digital logger thermometer. And I did both on both structures. ⁓ The data logger, I programmed to take a temperature every six hours. And then the compost thermometer was basically just to check that, make sure we're on. ⁓ The theory here is if you picture that pile or that bunker and look at it like a loaf of bread, if you will.

It's a loaf that you made. And if you made it at an ambient temperature of 74 degrees, in this case, it was 81 degrees, I think, when we put it in. That loaf, the whole thing is going to heat during fermentation. And where does heat go? Up, right? Goes up. We learned that in third grade, I think. Heat rises. ⁓

Mike Donaldson (28:31)

Throws up. Yep. Okay.

Jason Alsum (28:37)

So that heat that whole loaf is making is pushing towards the top of the pile during fermentation. So with my temperature probes in the top of the pile, was reading not only heat, but I was reading fermentation. And in doing so, the treated pile was done fermenting in five days. The heat went up eight degrees, I believe nine somewhere in there and leveled out. And then in preceding or

Mike Donaldson (28:58)

Okay.

Jason Alsum (29:07)

days after that it started taking on the ambient temperature which in October was a little cooler so it actually cooled down so the curve was very sharp. The untreated pile heated up almost 20 degrees 16 degrees and it did it over 16 days before that temperature came down so for 16 days that untreated pile just kept creeping up

Creeping up, creeping up to 101 degrees from, I think that was 83 when it was, I gotta check my notes here, when it was.

nine degrees, nine degrees more heating than the silo king. So yes, it was day 21 before it leveled off and started taking on ambient temperature. And I can tell it was still fermenting because there would be no production of heat if it wasn't still working on fermentation, good or bad. So then you start looking at what did you lose in 21 days versus five days? Dry matter, nutrients.

Mike Donaldson (30:03)

Okay.

Jason Alsum (30:13)

Right, all of that is being burned up during that heating phase. And if we get it done in five days and get it to be stable, we're all after stable feed. Let's do it in five days rather than 21. There's a lot of other factors that go into it, the pack, getting the oxygen out, the, you know, but treating with silo king made a phenomenal difference on this pile.

Mike Donaldson (30:37)

Well, and ⁓ you did it at a real world level, real world amounts. We also do a lot of work in mini silos, buckets, things on a bench in a laboratory that has value, but you eliminated the packing difference, same farm, same equipment, same operators. In the real world,

That's about as close to apples to apples comparison as can be found.

Jason Alsum (31:08)

Yeah, yeah, I think it's good information. The most difficult part to quantify is dry matter loss on a farm scale, because we know there's dry matter loss. The science tells you there's dry matter loss with that much heating over that period of time, there's dry matter loss. The only way to quantify it is on a lab scale, and we've done that. We have studies where we've done it in

300 gallon totes. We've done it in mini silos. We've done it in vacuum sealed bags and we can extrapolate some of those results to the real world farm situation, but there's no way because of density changes and moisture changes in that pile. ⁓ It may shrink more visibly and it may not if it's packed really well, but we know that there's changes going on. So I'm going to talk a little bit about those differences. ⁓

First of all, let's talk about the heating differences. So when it heated for 21 days, it went from 87 to 101. It had nine degrees more heating because our pile went from 88 to 93 and was done. So nine degrees of heating. What does that mean? Right? Is that a big deal? Nobody tracks that. This is where farmers don't believe in inoculant because what? I didn't see anything.

This is what you didn't see. And let me quantify what nine degrees of heating does for you. The university will tell you for every degree of heating, you lose three calories. Okay. So let's take three calories times nine. That gives you 27 calories per pound of dry matter that you lost. Then how many pounds of dry matter do you feed to your cows? That's going to be variable all over the place, right? But let's just look at a 50-50 ration.

eating 55 pounds of dry matter, you're looking at about 27 and a half, 28 pounds of dry matter times 27 calories that you lost. That's 743 calories that you lost every day.

Mike Donaldson (33:20)

Just to

one cow. Wow. Okay.

Jason Alsum (33:23)

just per cow

per cow so everyday you have to make up for those comparing these two piles to get the same milk she needs 310 calories to make a pound of milk

after her maintenance is done. So we can do the math on that too, but you need a certain level of calories to make milk. And if we lost those 743 calories, how do we make them up? The nutritionist comes and he puts a pound of corn in, right? Corn is still usually around 900 to a thousand calories. So it's not quite a pound, but for simple math, I'm just saying we're going to add a pound of corn to make up for what we lost. And again, nobody sees it. Nobody looks at it.

We just balance a ration, add a pound of corn and go on with our lives, right? That pound of corn on a thousand cow dairy, if you take that times the whole year, that pound of corn is $29,720. So again, you don't notice it, don't, guys don't track it, but heating over that period of time is going to cost you some money.

Mike Donaldson (34:35)

Wow, yeah, I don't care how good your production is, making your milk that much more expensive to make really doesn't fit the parameters of good business.

Jason Alsum (34:50)

Right. Right. that's, so I know, I know we're probably getting kind of long here cause I'm rambling on, but I want to take you then. I want to take you then to the cost of the dry matter on that same thousand cow dairy. did this math on, 20,000 tons of feed just to keep things simple. We can easily assume that the silo king pile assume I'm sorry, I shouldn't say assume.

Mike Donaldson (34:59)

No, no, no, no, keep going.

Jason Alsum (35:20)

we can extrapolate the numbers from our lab studies, our vacuum sealed bag studies, and with this level of heating, we, on a conservative side, saved 3 % of dry matter loss on the treated pile. So if you do the math on that 20,000 tons that I am using just for easy numbers, and in this story I'm using corn silage at $75 a ton, if you save

3 % of that, that's another $45,000. So that's over $2 a ton, and the savings on the calories was about $1.50 a ton. So that's like $4 $5 a ton that you're saving by treating with SiloKing. So we can easily demonstrate a 4, 5, 6 to 1 return on investment with those two things. And that's not even taken into account.

digestibility stuff. So in this little story, that's $74,000 we can put back in their pockets on just the heating and the dry matter and then we go back Mike to the even larger part. Remember when I took your numbers on the cutting time? That was almost $260,000. So when you look at the cutting time and then couple it with

Mike Donaldson (36:21)

Wow.

Jason Alsum (36:47)

harvesting, packing, and preserving it well with a good forage treatment product like silo king, you're pushing $325,000 that you're putting back in your pocket. Now the ration numbers were on a year and the pile numbers were on 20,000 tons, which is almost a year's worth of corn silage for 1,000 cow dairy. So those are the numbers.

Mike Donaldson (37:15)

Well, that definitely, definitely worth readjusting your priorities in the springtime and moving it towards more attention to when we're going to make that forward. That's for sure.

Jason Alsum (37:27)

Yes, yes, and I, I'm just trying to get the education out there that these piles we're making these days are one, two, three, five, $10 million piles. And if we can save percentages, it's new tractors, it's paying employees, it's, it's your health insurance, it's a big number. Then we have to pay attention.

Mike Donaldson (37:56)

Well, I think we should have certainly given people some good food for thought. ⁓ Hopefully we can get this out to people at least a little bit before they're too late to harvest. people need to keep in mind with the exception of the small grain example, we're going to go out and cut those hay fields several more times this year. And I know...

weather doesn't go in your favor, equipment breaks down. But if people will focus every cutting on the things they can do something about and try to do it more correctly, I think Jason showed you some significant money, excuse me, that you can put in your pocket. And we try to do these podcasts without too much emphasis on when it is, but we came right out and said we're in 2026, we are ahead.

Jason Alsum (38:40)

Yeah.

Mike Donaldson (38:53)

of when most people will start making first cutting. And right now milk prices are not where they were a year ago. And there's not the forecast for a lot of happy recovery. What is limited amount you can do for what you get paid for your milk by comparison to the things you can do to affect how much it costs to make that milk. And I think Jason just gave us some really good.

really good tips and a really good direction to try and improve that aspect of your business. That was brilliant. Any.

Jason Alsum (39:31)

Yep, get, we get, sorry, we get so many ⁓ clients, producers that want us to help them make money, make more milk. And a lot of times they look at products and they look at costs of products. Really, the first thing you should be doing is spending time on your forage and the management of your forage and two simple things that can help you go get yourself a peak stick and go walk your fields.

and get yourself a compost thermometer and check how much heating you're getting and it'll help you determine your pack because if it's five degrees cooler in the middle of your pile than it is on the sides, they're not packing out to the sides and you can tell that with a simple compost thermometer. So a couple of things that can really help you up your level of management because we should be trying to get better every year. So take those tips and run with them.

Mike Donaldson (40:26)

We should have told people to go get a pencil and a piece of paper at the start of this, Jason. They could have made their own checklist to get better results this year. Any wrap up thoughts you have for people?

Jason Alsum (40:31)

with

Just pay attention to the cost of your forage and don't take it for granted and don't think, don't just do what the generation before you did. Look at how you can get better every day and you want the cleanest, best quality forage to put in that animal and she will pay you back. She'll be healthier and she'll produce better with less inputs if you give her good clean, high quality feed. That's it.

Mike Donaldson (41:06)

I think

that's really hard though. That's hard to improve on that statement. I'm gonna let that be the thing that sticks in people's minds. Chris, what did you learn today?

Chris Radke (41:18)

⁓ I'm just gonna take what Jason just said, simplify it. Cut at the right time, give you better quality, higher quality, and they'll need less and eat less. ⁓ Simple formula. ⁓ Jason, thanks so much for your enthusiasm once again and your sharing your knowledge with us. I really appreciate it. And breaking it down. And Mike, way to go on your previous knowledge sharing it with us. So I love that story. So, yeah.

Jason Alsum (41:27)

There you go.

Mike Donaldson (41:37)

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Jason Alsum (41:39)

Yeah, it's a great study.

Chris Radke (41:43)

If you like what you heard, can find us on just about any social platforms. ⁓ If you'd like us to follow up on anything, you can email us at podcast @agriking.com Jason and Mike, thank you so much for your time.

Mike Donaldson (41:55)

Thank each of you, appreciate it.

Jason Alsum (41:56)

Thank you guys. Appreciate