( upbeat music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Sunup.

I'm Lindell stout.

We begin today talking about livestock and winter feeding.

Here's our extension beef cattle specialist, Dr. Dave Lalman with some supplement options.

- It's that time of year when cow calf producers are thinking about supplementation strategy for the cow herd.

And so, feed costs in general are more expensive this winter than they were last year.

And protein supplement is particularly expensive this year.

And so with some good quality wheat pasture, it can be used as an alternative protein source for beef cows.

If you think about the nutrient value of wheat pasture forage, it's gonna run somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 22% crude protein on a dry matter basis.

And then which would be similar or comparable to a 20% range cube And then the energy value in a high quality forage like that is around 70, 71, 72% TDN; total digestible nutrients.

And that too is very similar to a 20% Q.

So we discovered in some of the research we did at the range cow research center a few years ago, that once trained, a beef cow turned out on wheat can consume somewhere in the neighborhood of about one to one and a half percent of her body weight in wheat forage, dry matter.

So if you think about that for a minute, so let's say a 1200 pound cow.

Once she's trained to intermittently graze sweet pasture at say three to four hour grazing bouts during each one of those periods, she could consume up to at least 12 pounds of the equivalent of 20% range cubes.

Now that's a pretty valuable feed resource and they can just consume a lot of feed.

So we use the strategy and in a study several years ago of turning the cows out three to four times a week with a three to four hour grazing bouts each time, and our cows performed very well with that strategy.

And so that provided the supplement for the winter for those cows.

The only thing we provided in the dry lot was a water source, so that when they got filled up after about three to four hours of grazing, they wanted to go get a drink and they'd go right back through the gate to the water source, and then we put the mineral supplement, the wheat pasture mineral supply there in the dry lot also.

Another tip to make that system work really well would be to if you can, if it's convenient to put up creep gates for the calves, so they can go out and gradually learn to go out and graze the wheat and those calves gain three to three and a half pounds a day with a high quality wheat forage like this, forge that we're standing in.

The final thing I guess I should say, if you have an interest in using wheat pastures as supplement to beef cows of course, when they're not grazing wheat, they need to have access to lower quality forage.

In our case, we use dry lots with kind of low quality grass hay.

We actually use Prairie hay that was just available to them all the time.

But if you have a pasture of standing a native grass or stock Bermuda grass, obviously you could graze that as well.

But somewhere in the neighborhood of around 12 hours a week of grazing wheat pasture should supply a lactating cow and a fall calving calf.

And so limit grazing like that, whether it's three times a week or four times a week, we'll stretch the wheat pasture resource so that it lasts longer.

And you're able to supplement more animal units through the winter and also make better use of your low quality forage resource.

So for more information on using wheat pasture to provide supplement to the beef cow herd, just go to the cow calf newsletter, which will be a link will be available at beef.okstate.edu and also at sunup.okstate.edu ( country music playing) - So we've had a lot of discussion over really the past 20 years on rural veterinary shortage, rural veterinary under service, and here at OSU, we have the Rural Renewal Institute focusing on just these kind of issues, really across all rural communities.

- Veterinary practices are really no exception to that and as we look at the struggles within veterinary medicine, we see a number of issues that play into why we're struggling in rural veterinary medicine.

We have students here at OSU, we graduate more veterinary students on average then as compared to our national numbers, about 25% of our graduates each year are looking to practice in mixed animal and food animal practice.

But, one thing we have struggles with is we can get them there initially, but we want to retain them there and so veterinary medicine is subject to some of those rural struggles, rural veterinary healthcare, isolation in certain areas, you know, work-life balance, wellbeing, amongst other challenges that often come with being a professional in rural areas.

One of the bigger struggles is finding a spousal employment and so we hope that through some of the programming we have here at OSU we can work to find some solutions to address at least in some part, maybe a small part, in helping getting more rural veterinarians into Oklahoma areas.

In January, we have a program team here at OSU combining expertise from veterinary medicine, extension, agricultural economics, as well as animal science coming together to start our first educational modules for the Integrated Beef Cattle program for veterinarians.

The role of this program, thanks to funding from a USDA NIFA Grant is to increase the sustainability for beef cattle veterinarians and their practices.

The program itself seeks to bring together about 20 veterinarians, as well as 20 current veterinary students to provide educational topics from practice management to nutrition to generalized health, leadership, time management, all those things are really critical to successful practices.

Want to put those veterinarians and these veterinary students right together in classroom in person to also hopefully network them as we seek to address some of the rural veterinary shortage issues we have here in Oklahoma.

(gentle music) - I'm Wes Lee and this is the Mesonet Weather Report.

The two driest months in Oklahoma are usually December and January.

This year, we have taken that to the extreme so far with almost no moisture reaching the state.

Mapped here is the percent of normal precipitation for the last month through mid week.

Nowhere in the state are we even close to normal.

The best is 52% at J, the worst is a toss up across all of the western two-thirds at zero to 1% of normal.

Our soil moisture from the last rain is either gone or depleting quickly.

Here is the fractional water index at our most shallow sensor.

Things still look good in the east, but the west, it comes in at towards the bottom of the index scale.

Zero is as dry as the sensor can read.

If you think things look better deeper down, think again, this map is the fractional water index at 24 inches, our deepest sensor, the soil moisture depletion is evident by all the dark red colors in the west.

Picking one western site, Hobart, you can see how the soil moisture has dropped over a 60 day period with almost no new infiltration rates.

Next week, the dryness is likely to continue in the west with only a slight hope in the east.

Now, here's Gary with more details on the drought situation.

- Thanks Wes and good morning everyone.

Well, unfortunately, Wes detailed how the last 30 days have been extremely dry across much of the state and that means bad news for the drought monitor.

Let's get straight to the new map.

We have more of that bad red color across the state that signifies extreme drought.

So, we have more of that red, extreme drought, down in the far southwest Oklahoma, extending up into west into Oklahoma and then we've expanded that area out in the western Panhandle where it now covers basically the Western half of that Panhandle.

We also have more of that severe and moderate drought all across the state.

We're now at about 83% of the state covered by drought, about 8% of that is that extreme drought.

Well, we've detailed quite a bit how dry it's been.

Let's look forward to January and then the January through March timeframe with the outlooks from the Climate Prediction Center.

As you can see here, the temperature outlook favors increased odds of above normal temperatures across the southwestern two-thirds of the state, but especially the far southwestern corner of the state and the western Panhandle.

For a precipitation in January, unfortunately, we see again that increased odds of below normal precipitation across the western two-thirds of the state, but especially across the western half of the state.

Now, let's go out to the January through March timeframe, we do see increased odds for above normal temperatures across the entire state.

- And really, greater increased odds across all but the far northern reaches of the state.

For precipitation, again, this is the classic La Nina pattern.

Increased odds of below normal precipitation across the western portions of the state, maybe a little bit of an increased odds of above normal precipitation inching down close to the northeastern portion of the state.

Again, that's classic La Nina.

So, unfortunately, we are entering the driest month of the year, so to see increased odds of below normal precipitation for January does not mean good news.

We'll just have to try and get some precipitation in here.

Rain or snow, we'll take anything.

That's it for this time.

We'll see you next time on the Mesonet Weather Report.

(cheerful acoustic music) - Dr. Kim Anderson, our crop marketing specialist, joins us now.

Kim, let's start off with the current situation in the wheat market.

- Well, the current situation is relatively high prices.

You can go back to November the 23rd, just before Thanksgiving, we had $8.46 wheat in northern Oklahoma and $8.33 wheat in southern Oklahoma.

You move into the current situation, about $7.73 in northern Oklahoma and $7.56 in southern Oklahoma.

That's a 73 cent price decline in the price of wheat.

It's 73 cents, and 73 cents is important to producers, but go back to last year.

This time, last year, we had $4 90 wheat, and you look at the average wheat price from 2009 to now, it's about $5.50.

So as you look at the contracts going out to '22, $7 65 in northern Oklahoma, $7.55 in southern Oklahoma compared to $4.90, those are relatively good prices.

- Now, why did we see prices, though, drop off a little bit?

- Well, the market got oversold.

In other words, prices are like a pendulum, and they tend to go, when they're going up, too high, when they're going down, too low.

And so we just had some market adjustment in price.

Plus you had the Australian harvest going on.

It was wet early in that harvest.

We was talking about lower yields, we was talking about poor quality, but they're getting better yields and higher production than anticipated.

And that had a negative impact on our prices.

Argentina's completing their harvest, that wheat's coming on the market, driving the prices down a little bit.

And of course we're in the holiday season.

And so you've got slim volume.

Sales can drive prices down more than they would in a regular marketing period.

- Why do you think we were seeing wheat prices at those historic highs?

- Well, that's a good question.

Because we had record world wheat production.

Now US wheat production, 1.6 billion bushels plus, was well below our average, but in the world we had a new record.

And so why we had those highs is because the demand, the consumption and demand for wheat, was significantly higher than in the past and a relatively high record.

We saw our world ending stocks go from 10.8 billion bushels in '19 to 10.6 in '20 to 10.2 projected this year.

So tighter world stocks plus in United States with that short crop, our ending stocks are projected to be right around 600 million bushels.

Our average is right at a billion bushels.

So really tight stocks in the United States and lower stocks in the world because of demand.

- Now, I know a lot can happen in six months' time, but what are you keeping an eye on?

And what do you kind of expect between now and harvest?

- Well, between now and June when we get into our winter wheat harvest, about 25% of the world's wheat crop will have been harvested, but those, those countries harvesting are India, selected Eastern Asian countries, North Africa.

Very little of that wheat will be put on the export market.

So we got a limited supply of exportable wheat.

The next exportable wheat to come on the market will be our harvest.

So I think our prices will be relatively high as we get into June.

Now, you look at the weather forecast, hot dry conditions and above average temperatures, below average precipitation.

We lose this crop, those prices, we could see $8 or $9.

We've already had $8 wheat, but we could see $9 wheat.

We have a big crop, and we have a big crop in India, and India exports some wheat, we could have our prices below $7, but right now it looks like we'll have $7 plus wheat as we get into the June, July time period.

- Okay, we'll take it.

Thanks a lot, Kim, we'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) - Good morning, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Cow-Calf Corner on SUNUP TV.

And thank you for joining us this morning.

This week, we're going to talk about freeze branding.

And over the months of the past year, we've discussed the importance of individual ID in animals.

As we look at herd performance, we think about selection and culling decisions, it's important that we've got individual IDs in our cows and bulls.

And so we are fortunate this morning to be joined by Jeremy Leister.

Jeremy is the headquarters manager here at the Purebred Beef Cattle Center, and Jeremy's kind of earned a reputation as an artist in this particular application of ID.

So we're going to talk to him today about what we call the OSU Purebred Beef Cattle Center way of doing freeze brands.

Jeremy, to begin... - What materials do we need?

I know as we get into this, we always deal with, well, it's a little more complicated than a firebrand, takes a little more time.

We've got a little more expense tied up in it at the beginning.

What materials do we need here at the onset?

- Well, yeah, Mark.

I mean the best thing that I could say that proper planning would lead to the most effective freeze brands and really finding out where your dry ice will come from.

And typically that's going to be on a full days worth of cattle, you're going to be looking at 40 to 50 pounds of dry ice.

Which can be found at any Homeland, grocery store, or air gas or something.

Oil supply store will have some dry ice.

You'll need, our particular practice, we use methanol that comes from an oil supply store.

We actually go down to Cushing, Oklahoma, and they'll sell us methanol in five gallon buckets.

And that's usually running about 20 to 25 dollars per bucket of methanol, which will last you quite a while.

And another big important part is finding the brands.

And I think that's as important as anything.

You're gonna look for the brass brands.

They typically have about a two foot handle for ease of application and the face of the brand, which is really important, you're going to want between three and three and a half inches that way as your cow herd or your bull matures, and they grow that you're not going to have too small or too big of a brand.

From there just a basic rice root brush, premier clippers with 71 12 blades.

Or if you have a set of flathead clippers with fine blades, you just really want to get that hair close enough.

That way the application is more to the skin, not so much the hair.

Another big part is probably making sure your equipment in terms of squeeze shoot, and your clippers are all running properly, but you are going to probably need some extra hands.

So if you can plan a day where you know that at your particular operation, everybody's going to be there.

You have at least a day to chew up doing this would probably be the most effective.

But from there you'll really need a stop watch and usually somebody running that.

We like to apply our brands for one minute per brand, and usually probably for the cumbersome part of it we just like to do two at a time.

- So can you walk us through that actual procedure?

Once you get set up, you got them in the shoot, walk us through the procedure we use here at OSU.

- Right, so as we, back up and we think that we've gotten our dry ice, we've gotten our methanol and we have our brands.

It's typically best that in the morning, if you can have all that stuff and then you will put it in your styrofoam cooler or a plastic cooler works just fine.

You'll chop up your ice at least into small what I would say, ice cubes.

And then you'll put your brands on top of the ice, and then you pour in the methanol.

And we like to put the methanol where it at least covers the brand a couple inches above that, the face of the brand.

And then you'll let them activate for probably around one and a half to two hours.

You shave a square, we usually like to start at the hip bone and we make, your square can be as level as you can make it because that'll help kind of your canvas of keeping your, your brand level straight.

That way everything looks nice from a presentation standpoint.

After you've cleaned the area off with your rice root brush, you will apply it as you start to apply it somebody will start a stopwatch and you will go for a minute.

And our numbers are a four number system.

So you typically think that you have about two minutes wrapped up in just the application.

I would say, if you really wanted to plan out your time, probably plan for about four to five minutes per head.

- So once we get that part done, what do we start to see on the back end of this?

I know we are going to eventually see hair grow back in white.

- Right.

- We know that these show up better on black and red cattle than they do lighter shades of cattle.

But what's the timeline on that?

- So as much as, so, as fast as 24 hours, you'll actually see it start to blister up a shade under that skin.

And that's, what's kind of making the scab, but really typically around here, you won't see them scabbing over or the scab coming off for about four weeks.

And then consequently to the scab coming off, you're probably going to wait another four weeks and you'll start to see the white hair as the hair's growing.

This is a year round project.

We like to do it always before breeding season.

We try to plan eight weeks out in advance.

And that way, basically by the time you're checking heats, the brands can be coming off and they can be filling back in.

- Basically try to do it when hair is growing?

- Right, yeah, yeah.

- Well, Jeremy, I appreciate you being with us and appreciate you all join - Thanks Mark.

- us on cow calf corner.

- Talking bugs now, back in 2014, I had one of my most memorable interviews with Dr. Wyatt Hoback, an OSU Entomologist studying the American burying beetle.

Now some of his fellow scientists from different departments are joining forces with him to study what could be a very important insect.

- [Narrator] Burying Beetles are attracted to the smell of dead rodents and birds.

- They find the animal, and then if it's the right size for these beetles, they'll actually work together male and female, to bury it in the ground.

After they do that, they're gonna use the resources in the body of this animal, to raise their offspring.

- [Narrator] Once buried, the carcass is protected from predators above the ground.

But the beetle also protects it from decay below ground.

- So these beetles will secrete this bright brown liquid from their mouth, and from their back end.

And that brown liquid actually, helps to digest part of the carcass but also preserve part of the carcass.

- [Camera Man] Correct.

- And this is the brown goo that we're so excited about.

And that material contains both enzymes, and it also contains microbes that are in the guts of these beetles.

But no one had really looked into the molecular mechanisms, that allow this to work.

And a few years back, the Vice-Chancellor of research, funded a collaborative project between myself and Dr. Gustafson.

And then Dr. Hagen came along, and we've been researching how these beetles preserve carcasses and how the microbiome the bacteria inside their guts, helps in that process.

- What we're really excited about, is actually analyzing what's referred to as the microbiome of this organism.

Now, the microbiome is a collection of microbes that live within and on an organism.

- [Narrator] Doctor Darren Hagen is examining the genetic sequence of the beetle.

- We were the group that did all the genomics and computational biology.

And so we were very interested in understanding what genes are turned on or turned off, when the Burying beetle finds its prey, and starts feeding on it.

The idea being that as it starts to... As it recognizes dead carcass and starts to feed, certain genes would be turned on that might not otherwise be on.

We will continue to follow up on that and try to understand any role those genes might play in the preservation of the carcass.

- [Narrator] The hope is that this research will lead to new antibiotic treatments.

And while that would certainly be good news for the medical field, it could also benefit the meat industry.

- There's a lot of potential.

So, as humans seek new ways to combat bacteria, and anti-microbial resistant bacteria is becoming a huge problem.

- In the livestock industry at least, we've moved away from using antibiotics as much as possible.

And so this could potentially serve as a natural source of bacterial suppression.

You know, if you think about slaughter plants, you know, it's key to keep bacteria out or at a really low rate.

And perhaps may be one day we make these totally natural products that we can sort of spritz around the plant and keep the bacteria at bay.

- Research on the American Burying beetle is especially important right now because it's considered a threatened species.

We'll keep you updated on the progress of the research.

(upbeat acoustic music) As we leave you on this very windy day, we wanna say a fond farewell to our colleague and friend, Kurtis Hair.

Who has been with SUNUP for more than five years.

Kurtis, we will miss you, and we wish you the best in your new job.

- Well, the last time we talked to Paul Beck, we were talking about how cattle can handle acute weather that doesn't stay around for very long.

Well, Paul, this weather didn't really turn out that ways.

Although the yellow grub can understandably disgust or discourage someone from eating fish.

There isn't a cause for concern if you ingest contaminated meat.

(upbeat music) Most universities have mascots.

But it's different here at OSU.

It's like Pete is the university and the university is Pete.

And this year marks an important milestone.

It's been 60 years since the legendary Frank Eaton, was immortalized as OSU's mascot.

For five-year-old Saidie Miller, working cattle is her favorite thing to do.

Although some days are easier than others.

- Hey, hey, hey, buddy.

Buddy, buddy, stop.

Can I just lucky... you're so naughty.

- I decided I wanna join in and relax my mind for a bit.

Being a natural athlete and all.

I figure I can take to this yoga thing, like a duck to water.

Shelby's dream is to pursue a career in entomology and continue to expose people to the world of insects.

- Mum told to me behave.

- Even scared agriculture reporters.

You behaves, don't become a crawling on my arm.

(indistinct) (laughs) Rogers County, I'm Curtis Hair (upbeat music)