Evaluating Alternative Feeds in Livestock Diets With Dr. James Coomer

In this episode, Mike Donaldson talks with Dr. James Coomer about the fundamentals of evaluating livestock feeds.

Dr. Coomer discusses how producers can make more informed feeding decisions by focusing on nutrient requirements and economic value. The conversation explores the importance of consistency in feeding programs, understanding feed costs beyond price alone, and selecting feeds that best support animal performance.

Dr. Coomer's Advantage article: 

https://agriking.com/evaluating-alternative-feeds-in-livestock-diets/

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Transcript

Chris Radke (01:35)
Welcome to AK Podcasts where we explore science and nutrition behind livestock care and management with the best and brightest in the biz. I'm your host Chris Radke, part of the Sales Team here at Agri-King And with me today is the Director of Field Service and a Member of the Sales Management Team, Mr. Mike Donaldson Mike, how you doing, Mike?

Mike Donaldson (01:53)
All good, Chris. Every day can be a good day if you decide it's going to be. So today's another one.

Chris Radke (02:00)
That's good. That's a great outlook on life. ⁓ Mike, who's with us and what are we talking about today?

Mike Donaldson (02:07)
Today, Chris, we're joined by AK Nutritionist, Dr. James Coomer ⁓ James has recently written an article for our AK Advantage series, which I encourage you, you viewers and listeners, if you go to our website, you will find all of our nutritionist Advantage articles archived, and they can be pretty good discussions on complicated topics made understandable. James recently wrote an article.

titled Evaluating Alternative Feeds and Livestock Diets. Welcome back, Dr. Coomer. It's good to have you on the podcast again. In case this is someone's first go round with you, could you give us a little background on yourself and what it is you do at Agri-King, please?

James Coomer (02:55)
Thank you, Mike, for the introduction and just to give people a little idea of who I am, what I've been up to ⁓ in my career. This is my 13th, 14th year with Agri-King as a nutritionist here, but 34th year in the dairy nutrition business. And during that time, I've spent time ⁓ working at the University of Missouri in Extension. I spent about seven years in the co-products arena.

working with companies that sold, marketed, and ⁓ educated people about different co-products or byproducts that are used in livestock nutrition. And ⁓ since I've been here at Agri-King, I've had the opportunity to work with dairy farms from coast to coast and border to border really here in the US.

Mike Donaldson (03:49)
Well, it's one of the continuing ⁓ challenges on most dairy farms is constantly having to monitor forage inventory. Right now, the big question would be, do I have enough haylage to get to the first cutting of haylage? Then will I have corn silage to corn silage? And as important as forages are, we're always bringing a lot of other

products in to get the nutrient balance that we need. And that's essentially what James' article was about. I know one of the things, I'm not going to name names here, but one of the country's leading dairy publications has an article every, every episode, every issue has about what is a good and what is not a good buy. And most recently.

Or one of the ones that just drove me crazy was that they said that corn silage is a really good buy and soybean meal wasn't. And from a nutritional standpoint, I come away going like, so what? Maybe now's not the time to lock in six months of soybean meal, but if I need protein, I can't just feed more, more corn silage. So the article just always strikes me as being very poorly structured. So that's.

That's my momentary rant. Let's let James take us through a more reasonable discussion of this topic.

James Coomer (05:24)
Thank you, Mike. that's one of reasons I kind of started my article off with talking about whether a feed is a good buy or not first needs to be determined as whether you need the nutrients that are provided by that feed. Because we only put feedstuffs in the diet if we need the nutrients that are coming from those feedstuffs. And I'll talk a little more later about what those different nutrients are. if you've got a

You get calls all the time from commodity brokers or from you see an article and they say such and such feed stuff is a good buy. Well, compared to what? If you don't need the nutrients that that feed stuff provides, it's a bad buy for you because it's just getting you to spend money on something you don't need to be buying to begin with. So the first thing we need to do in evaluating feed stuff is do we need to purchase nutrients? What nutrients do we need to purchase?

And then from there, we evaluate feedstuffs that supply those nutrients. We don't look at, like you say, corn silage compared to soybean meal. They supply different nutrients to the diet. So we don't need to compare those two feedstuffs to see which one's a good buy and which one isn't.

Mike Donaldson (06:39)
Do you see a lot of issues with people mistaking price per ton with the actual value that is coming onto a farm that just because I guess one of the good ones and canola is a great feed actually does some things that soybean meal cannot, but it's almost always less per ton than soybean meal. doesn't, that doesn't always make it a good buy.

for its actual nutrient content. And it seems at times, ⁓ producers get a little bit confused whether price for tons more important than price per nutrient, maybe.

James Coomer (07:22)
Good point, Mike. ⁓ And yeah, we need to be looking more at price per ⁓ unit of nutrient, whether that's ⁓ protein or fiber or energy. We don't need to look at price per ton. Something can look to be really cheap, but if it's not providing you with any significant nutrients, it may be expensive, relatively speaking. So we need to compare, in your example there, canola meal, if you're care...

looking at the price of canola meal, need to look at price per unit of protein and compare it to other protein feeds that you can get, where you can get that protein from.

Mike Donaldson (08:05)
Well, let's dive into the article a little bit. If we were to break down an animal's nutrient needs into, you can do it a lot of different ways. Let's do it using three basic categories. Let's talk about energy, protein, and fiber. So to start off, let's talk about some of the energy feed stuffs we could be looking at and the pluses and minuses that they may bring.

James Coomer (08:36)
Yeah, it's good. You break down those three major categories I talk about in the article. And that's for the majority of feedstuffs we put in the diet. We're looking at those three major categories, energy, protein, and fiber. Of course, we're going to put feedstuffs in there that are going to supply minerals and vitamins. But those are a much smaller component of the diet compared to the feeds that are supplying those three major categories.

If we start out looking at the energy category, talk about we can subdivide the energy category into three different ⁓ subcategories. You can get energy from sugars, you can get energy from starch, you can get energy from fat as a primary supplier of these nutrients. When you look at sugars, sugars overall are a small part of most livestock diets, but they can be an important part.

of the diet. I mentioned in there on dairy cattle diets, that little shot of sugar can be something good to get the rumen started and really activated quickly and get the microbes growing quickly in there. It can also be beneficial because the breakdown of sugars in the rumen give you different volatile fatty acids and it can be beneficial for butterfat production. Your feeds that are going to supply you with sugars, you could get some human grade sugar that just is off spec. didn't

meat suspects to sell as human sugar on the shells. The more common sources of sugar, ⁓ molasses, both cane molasses and beet molasses, are whey from the cheese manufacturing process. So those are your major sources of sugars that we would use and we would evaluate. And if we're needing sugar in the diet, we want to compare sugar sources against each other. We don't want to compare whey or

or molasses against soybean meal or against canola meal. soybean meal and canola meal are not going to give us any sugar. But that's our major energy supply from sugars. If you look at starch, that's your primary energy source for most livestock diets is starch. The main source of starch in most livestock diets are going to come from grains, your corn, wheat, oats, barley.

I'll say whole grains that are ground up, not fed whole, but the whole ⁓ grain ground up and fed. The other sources you'd have would be ⁓ byproducts of grain processing, some from the human food side. You might have a bakery byproduct, which could be both pre and post consumer waste, bakery waste. And there's more out there of that than you would want to think. ⁓

be surprised how many semi-loads of bakery waste. is food that was intended for human consumption, but ends up going to the cow instead of going to the landfill. You also have candy waste, except bakery waste. There's hominy feed, which is a byproduct of producing ⁓ corn grits, which being a true southerner is a food category in and of itself, but corn grits, the... ⁓

Mike Donaldson (11:56)
He

James Coomer (11:57)
that's produced during the dry milling is also used for making things like corn flakes or corn puffs that are snack foods in the human food side. But I say for those true Southerners, we eat corn grits for breakfast. Put a little butter and salt and it tastes good. When we go to our third category of energy, we look at fats. Those are our really concentrated energy sources. Fats got

2.25 times as much energy per pound as sugars or starch. But we can't just feed fat as our only energy source. Our bodies are not ours and the animals' bodies are not designed to just live on fat as the energy source. The metabolism requires carbohydrates to operate. But we can use those fats. Most of your fats are from processing of other industries.

Oil seed processing like soybean meal or soybean processing, canola processing, sunflower processing, those are all potential oil sources. Or animal processing, ⁓ beef processing produces tallow. ⁓ Pork processing produces choice white grease. That's just the extra fat that's left over after they process those carcasses. We can use those fats as an energy source fed back to livestock.

⁓ If we move into the category of proteins and our protein feeds, again we've got subcategories there. Yeah, Mike?

Mike Donaldson (13:32)
Had a question. So as, as a person who's I've lived my whole life, basically in the Midwest or close to it, where our, our source of energy is usually corn, some form of corn, first, second, and third. And as we talk to the people, for instance, in California, people in the South, Joe Sparrow, ⁓ corn has to be typically hauled in.

James Coomer (13:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Donaldson (14:02)
I know it's not maybe a whole nother type of corn, but in California where they, seem to be in love with steam flaking corn to make it even more available. How, how, I mean, how does where you are sometimes impact what's going to be your, your first choice.

James Coomer (14:25)
⁓ Good question, Mike, is you do look at areas of the United States outside of the Midwest where corn is not ⁓ an abundance. It's not that they don't grow any, but they don't grow enough to meet their forage needs as well as their grain needs. And you talked about particularly on the West Coast or in the Western United States, most of their corn out there is hauled in from the Midwest. ⁓

bread basket here in the Midwest where we produce lots and lots and lots of corn. And they have ⁓ utilized steam flaking as a way to process the corn. And what that does is increase the digestibility of the corn so that they get more energy out of the corn that they do buy. So if they're going to buy it, ship it all the way to the West Coast, they want to get as much out of it as they can. They don't want to waste any of it. ⁓ True, down south, they are

corn grain deficit in the southern United States and a lot of areas. Southeastern United States, I probably when I worked down there and I grew up in the southeast there, we use more, I'll say grain byproducts. You'll see a lot more of the how many feed or ⁓ bakery waste. There's a lot of human food processing in this part of the world that they can ship that down there. ⁓

and utilize it. But you have to compare those. What does it cost to bring corn in and grind it versus some of these byproducts come in already processed. If you buy a bakery product, it's already ground up and ready to feed. So when you compare it to the price of corn, you buy a bushel of corn, you still got to run it through a grinder to grind it and process it and prepare it to feed to the livestock. So that value needs to be calculated in as well.

Mike Donaldson (16:18)
How does, is we move into some of these more unconventional, and this is, this covers protein, I'm sure as well. ⁓ what kind of quality issues do people need to be aware of that they might not be used to? mean, bakery waste, some of these actual co-products that are the result of something else being manufactured. mean, you referenced.

know, bakery waste going to animals instead of landfills. If it might go to a landfill, they probably aren't as careful about quality. So is there anything our listeners want to be sure they're tuned up on in just overall quality issue going into these other products?

James Coomer (17:07)
Good question, Mike. And one thing I did mention early in the article that I failed to mention here is ⁓ alternative feeds are everywhere and they're going to continue to be everywhere because most of those alternative feeds are byproducts of other industries, whether it's the human food industry or the biofuel industry or the pharmaceutical industry, but some other industry that's making something and these alternative feeds are leftover. So

They try to find a use for them. ⁓ There's lots of things that can be potential problems. My concerns for potential problems are less if this is a byproduct coming from the human food industry, because that's probably been screened pretty well before it gets in there. Now, that doesn't mean that like bakery waste, that's probably pretty safe when it's first produced. But if it's stored improperly after it's produced,

You could get mold growth, you could get problems, you could get ⁓ fat rancidity, because some of those products are high fat, and fat, a lot of unsaturated fat makes it more susceptible to oxidation. When you start looking at byproducts from other industries, like the biofuels industry, well, that's a byproduct from an industry that's not looking at their primary product going to humans or going for human consumption. So there's...

things like mycotoxins, it could be an issue. It doesn't really affect their primary product that the industry's trying to produce, but the presence of mycotoxins in the co-product or alternative feed could be a problem for the livestock that we're feeding it to. So it's important to test for those types of things. It's always good to get an analysis, a nutritional analysis of the feeds before you, alternative feeds.

before you want to feed them so that you know what nutrients it is supplying and how much of those nutrients it's supplying and to get a good evaluation of it. Here at Agri-King, we've got a laboratory where we do a wonderful job of analyzing feedstocks of all kinds and we analyze a lot of alternative feeds for people and try to give them a nutritional analysis so that we can appropriately evaluate a feed stuff for whether it's good and mycotoxins being one of those analysis we can do.

test a feed for.

Mike Donaldson (19:29)
Perfect. Well, let's move into that second category. Tell us a little bit about our protein options, please.

James Coomer (19:36)
Yeah, when you look at proteins, and this is probably our most expensive ⁓ nutrient that we buy, the major nutrients, and I'm talking about on a price per pound basis, but we don't feed as many pounds of the protein feeds. We don't need as many pounds of protein as we do need pounds of starch or sugars in the feed. But it is expensive and within proteins, again, I'm about subcategories. We talk about...

particularly as we're feeding to ruminant livestock. This is not as critical for monogastric livestock, but for ruminant livestock, we break it down as to how rumen degradable that protein is or how accessible is that protein for microbial degradation in the rumen versus undegradable protein. Most of our degradable protein is going to come from oilseed meals, soybean meal, canola meal, sunflower meal, flaxseed meal.

Those meals that come from where they're extracting the oil out of a seed, and this is what's left over. Most of those are fairly high protein. I think in the article I'll talk about, they're mostly over 35 % crude protein, and they're gonna be over 50 % brumen degradable protein. Another major source of protein for livestock is gonna be your non-protein nitrogens, urea that we use in ruminant livestock, which is not really a...

alternative feed it's it's a nitrogen source is what it is and it can only be used by the microbes the livestock themselves can't use the urea the microbes in the rumen can use the the nitrogen from urea to make protein when we talk about the other side the protein is not degradable in the rumen or protein feeds that are highly undegradable those are supplying

designed to supply nutrients to the animal so that the protein doesn't break down in the rumen and goes intact to the small intestines. Those feed stuffs are typically higher priced than your high degradability protein feeds. Some of those may be oilseed meals that have been further processed. They've had heat added or steam added or lignosulfonate added to them to bind up some of that protein so that the microbes can't recognize it and break it down.

Other sources of high bypass protein or high rumen-undegrable protein are your animal protein sources, which include blood meal, meat and bone meal, fish meal. ⁓ Those are really high protein feeds in most cases. And they're high bypass protein primarily because of the heat required to dry those things down causes a change in the three-dimensional structure of that protein.

which again makes it where the microbes can't recognize it.

So again, we're probably not going to blood meal to soybean meal on a price per ton basis or on a price per unit of protein basis. Because these high bypass protein sources are almost always going to be more expensive per pound and even per pound of protein because they've required further processing. So we've got to look at which nutrients do we need? Do we need degradable protein or do we need

undergradable protein to add to the diet and compare within those subcategories.

Mike Donaldson (23:09)
Okay. So it's a little bit like, even if water is cheaper by gallon than gasoline, they're not really interchangeable. you're saying.

James Coomer (23:17)
Exactly. That's a good analysis. I hadn't thought of that. And the same would be comparison of gasoline versus diesel. If you've got a diesel truck, doesn't matter how cheap gas is, you've got to put diesel in it.

Mike Donaldson (23:30)
Let's move into that third category and talk a little bit about our alternative sources of fiber. And that could include purchasing a forage, maybe most commonly hay, if it has to come very far. But along with that, what are some of the other places we can pick up from some forage in these ruminant diets?

James Coomer (23:53)
Good question. I'm glad you mentioned there in the article I talk about fiber is a really important and critical part of ruminant diets and most ruminant diets, the primary source of fiber is going to be forages, which in the Midwest are going to be locally produced or maybe produced on the farm where they're being fed. If you're going to have to buy forage and utilize it, ⁓

Probably going to be looking at dry hay because it costs a lot of money to ship water all over the country or however far we need to ship it. But if there is a shortage of forage, whether it's on your farm or within a geographical region, there are some alternative feeds out there that we look at. And I talk about an article, fiber sources, we actually subdivide them, or at least I do, into whether these are

forage fiber substitutes or non-forage fiber substitutes. ⁓ And basically what we ask, whether that fiber source is going to supply some rumination factor. Is it going to encourage the cow to chew or cud more versus not ⁓ encouraging further cud chewing? If we look at those forage replacement type alternative feeds, we're looking at whole cottonseed or cottonseed hulls or some gin trash. ⁓

Some people, when I was going through school, a coat product or alternative feed was straw. But straw has become almost a primary ingredient now in dairy diets. Instead of being an alternative feed, it's become a primary feed. But those are alternative feeds that we're looking not just to get fiber, we're looking to replace some of the forage in the diet. So we need something that's going to encourage the cow to chew or cud and get her to ruminate.

We're not just trying to put fiber in, but we're trying to replace forage fiber. Conversely, that other group called non-forage fiber sources, sometimes we're looking for fiber to replace starch in the diet because the starch levels or starch and sugar combination levels are getting too high and we run the risk of acidosis, particularly in dairy cattle. It can be negative towards milk fat production, butter fat content.

So we look for feedstuffs that can give us similar energy content to our starch sources, but not putting starch into the rumen. It's putting fiber into the rumen. Those are feedstuffs like soy hulls, beet pulp, citrus pulp. These are feedstuffs that are high fiber, but still got very good energy. Maybe they're only 10 % or 15 % lower in energy than the grain that they will be replacing in the feed. But they're not going to necessarily encourage more.

or maintain cud chewing, you wouldn't want to use those necessarily to replace forages in the diet. you're seriously short on forage, you're not looking at those feeds to put in there to try to replace that forage. You're mainly looking at those to replace grain in the diet to keep the starch levels in check.

Mike Donaldson (27:10)
We've talked a couple of times about the economic aspect that we have to pay attention to. Maybe the, I'd said there were three areas we wanted to talk about, but your article does a really good job. Let's, let's treat it as its own area and talk a little bit about the economic, just the, the, the, the rubber meets the road. What is, and isn't going to be a good thing to include. And your article covers that nicely.

James Coomer (27:39)
Yeah, and I spent most of the article, like you said, talking about the nutrition side or the nutrient side, because to me, that's the very first thing. If you are evaluating feed stuff and it's providing a nutrient that you don't need to buy, you've already got it on the farm, then it doesn't matter what the price is. It's not a good buy for you because it's just encouraging you to spend money you don't need to be spending. If you do need some nutrients and you start looking at

what feedstuffs can meet these nutrient needs. Then we start evaluating, which one is the best economical buy? And so we start talking about an economical evaluation. And there are a lot of different ways to evaluate that. Here at Agri-King, I brought with me when I came up a spreadsheet program, it's a fairly simple one, that I can evaluate the economic value of a feedstuff based on its energy and protein content.

And the spreadsheet's actually designed where you can compare lots of different feeds. You mainly just need to do it. It's designed so that you can use it anywhere in the country and you need to have a comparable energy feed and a comparable protein feed. And these I'd say be our local standards, which you talked about it here in the Midwest. That's corn and soybean meal. are soybean mills, most prominent protein feed. Corn is the most prominent energy feed and we got lots of it. So that's going to be our

our standard that we're going to compare everything to, those two feeds. Well, we can plug in corn and soybean meal. We know the energy value, the protein value of corn and soybean meal. We know the local price of those corn and soybean meal. Then in the spreadsheet, we can plug in any other feed we want to as long as we know the dry matter, the protein, and the energy content of that feed. And the spreadsheet will calculate and tell you, based on

what corn and soybean meal is in your area, this alternative feed is worth this much per ton. And then you can look at that price and say, okay, I can buy it for less than that price or they're trying to sell it to me for more than that price. So it's not a good buy. I call it, the program is called an economic replacement value calculator. So it's like, what is the economic value of an alternative feed or feed stuff that's in there?

And the spreadsheet that I've got put in, it's already got, I don't know, 25 or 30 feedstuffs in there that are commonly available, but it's got a place to put in any new feedstuff you'd want. Say up in Wisconsin, one I ran across, farm was close to a frozen pizza manufacturer. Well, they have bad batches of pizza dough every once in while. So the broker called and said, hey, I've got a semi-load of pizza crust.

Do you want them? You say, okay, what's the price on it? And what's the energy? What's the protein on it? And what's the dry matter content? I can plug those numbers in here and say, well, it's worth about this much per ton. Can you buy it cheaper than that? If they say yes, it would say, okay, are they already having to buy corn? First of all, if they've got bins and bins or silos full of high moisture corn, it doesn't really how much those.

matter how much those pieces of crust are, they don't need to be buying them because they can't go out and sell the high moisture corn to anybody unless a neighbor happens to call and says, want it. That's not a marketable commodity they have on the farm. And if they've already got more than enough to meet their feed needs, then why are we even looking at a product that's just going to replace your high moisture corn you've already got? If, however, you're a farm that you're buying dry corn from the mill,

Okay, pizza crust can replace that dry corn. Is the pizza crust a better buy than the corn that you're buying? Maybe, maybe not, but it's an option. You're not buying a nutrient you're not needing. You're already having to purchase that nutrient. So now we're looking at an alternative source of that nutrient.

So we do have, I have that spreadsheet, the spreadsheets available to all of our agri-king consultants and nutritionists. So we have people call in all the time, whether it's our consultants calling in here or customers calling in and asking, can you help us evaluate the feed stuff? And probably if you call and want to talk to one of us nutritionists, first thing we're going to say is, do you have an analysis of it? If not, let's send a sample into the lab.

and get it analyzed so we can give you an accurate evaluation of it.

Mike Donaldson (32:19)
One of the things that I see occasionally happen is it becomes almost an ingredient of the day or the month that I'm feeding this and all of a sudden that becomes a better buy. So I'm going to go away from one, go to the other. Could you comment about that? We're feeding bacteria more than we're feeding cows and the rumen.

doesn't like changing ingredients on a weekly or even a monthly basis. How would you advise me to be using these things beyond the fact that they supply a nutrient that I need and they're an economically, an economic purchase.

James Coomer (33:09)
Good question. I ⁓ guess I'll maybe divide my answer up a little bit. When I'm looking at, I primarily work with dairy cattle. Dairy cattle are much more sensitive in the response that you get from changes in diet. The room in microbial population doesn't like to change a lot. They get adapted to, they can adapt to many different things, but they have to adapt. And it's not just one microbe, but if you change the feed stuff, it's got a different.

nutrient makeup, the whole population of the rumen may need to change and a different microbe needs to grow up to take a place. That may take days. With a dairy farm, that can hurt production for a few days and you can get an immediate response, plus or minus. It can go up or down and you see it every day because the milk trucks come in to pick up the milk every day. So it's much more critical to keep their diet as

Consistent as possible and make as few changes and as minimal changes as possible day to day, week to week, year to year. I have a personal philosophy. I don't want to look at broker causes says I've got one load of something. Okay. If that's not something I'm currently feeding, I'm not going to buy one load of something just to throw it in for a week or a week and a half and not be able to feed it again for the next.

12 months or whatever. That's just going to upset the rumen. Conversely, if I'm looking at beef feedlot cattle, you got a longer term response. You can accept some rumen upset for a day or two and over the 200 day feeding period, it's probably not going to influence their productivity over that 200 days. Now that doesn't mean I want to change everything in there every day for a beef farm either.

keep their rumen constantly upset. But with a feedlot animal, if we upset their rumen for a day or two, we might drop a tenth of a pound of growth for a day or two, but over 200 days, you're never going to see that. So it's easier to make those kind of changes. ⁓ So that's kind of my philosophy on that. I limit my changes on the dairy diets as much as possible.

You can use some of those alternative feeds if you're raising heifers. They're much more like the beef cattle. You're not going to miss a tenth of a pound of gain over a couple of days or three days over the life of that heifer's development. so you can utilize it there better.

Mike Donaldson (35:55)
No, no, that is perfect. That is, that is, that's the, that's the advice I was, ⁓ I was fishing for. That was very well done. Well, Dr. Coomer, thank you for joining us on the AK podcast. Please keep in mind all of our Agri-King Advantage articles are on the Agri-King website from the Agri-King homepage. Select the about us drop down, choose the Advantage to see the complete collection of Agri-King Advantage.

James Coomer (36:04)
Okay.

Mike Donaldson (36:25)
articles at that same site. can view different videos from Agri-King, along with the collection of all our Agri-King podcasts. So Chris, what'd you learn today?

Chris Radke (36:37)
My big takeaways are just kind of the way Dr. Coomer evaluates whether an alternative is worth it, I guess. Does the cow need it? Are the nutrients worth the feed that it's going to be provided? And then ⁓ keep a consistency. You don't want to keep changing it for that cow. Thanks Dr. Coomer. Love hearing your stories. It's good stuff. Always a...

James Coomer (37:01)
You're

welcome, man.

Chris Radke (37:02)
enlightening in my

life. ⁓ I am going to try and put a link at the bottom of this podcast to your Advantage article so if you can find that and then I'll put Dr. Coomer's email address in there also so you can contact him about his food stuff ⁓ super awesome spreadsheet that he's created and help everybody out. ⁓ If you like what you heard and you like what we're talking about please ⁓ leave us a review on whatever podcast format you're listening to.

You can email us at podcasts@agriking.com. Dr. Coomer, Mike, thank you so much. Have a great day.

James Coomer (37:39)
Thank you.

Mike Donaldson (37:41)
Thank you guys, appreciate it.