- Hello everyone and welcome to Sunup.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

For stocker and feeder calves that are on wheat pasture.

The risk of bloat goes up this time of year because of the constantly changing nutrients that are found in the wheat.

For some timely guidance, here's OSU extension veterinarian and beef cattle specialist Dr. Rosslyn Biggs.

- As we enter our spring months, we're quickly approaching kind of our last last few weeks of grazing on wheat pasture, at least that wheat pasture that's intended to be harvested during these time periods.

For our growing our stalker cattle, we really wanna be aware that these cattle, as the weather changes from warm a few days to cool and raining the next, that these cattle can be susceptible because they change their eating behaviors and eating patterns to bloat when they also are grazing on wheat pasture that is changing its nutritional profile as it's entering this growing season.

So with that, we wanna think about what measures we can take to prevent bloat.

First and foremost, we wanna think about supplementing these cattle, you know, a couple of times a week with some type of supplement that includes an ionophore such as muninsin that can help decrease the incidence of bloat.

We may also want to have, especially if we're finding a higher increase in numbers of bloat in this group of cattle, we may wanna put out things like bloat blocks.

Additional measures that can be taken is to try to manage again, that consumption and keep it consistent so that we're not turning out, you know, ravenous really hungry cattle onto that wheat pasture that will gorge themselves and set up conditions in that rumin so that we see this bloat.

Also having access to, you know, dry grass hay is, is never a bad idea and we wanna make sure they have good access to appropriate mineral and water as well.

As we look at supplements with an ionophore such as moninsin, we wanna talk with our suppliers.

This is not an ingredient that you need a veterinary feed directive for, but we wanna make sure we communicate clearly with our feed manufacturers to incorporate the appropriate amounts and also consider the species that are grazing together.

In particular, horses should not be part of a group of cattle that are fed mamsen because menin can be toxic to horses.

For more information on managing bloat, encourage you to take a look at our Oklahoma State extension resources, and in particular, an archived recording of presentations on bloat that you'll find under the ranchers Thursday lunchtime series webinars.

- Staying on the subject of cattle, but looking at the bigger picture.

Now we have an encore this week of my recent interview with Dr. Dave Lawman that's gotten quite a response and thousands of views online.

We're joined now by our OSU extension beef cattle specialist, Dr. Dave Lalman to kind of reflect back on 2024 and look ahead to the new year.

So as we, as we think about the year that has been, there's a lot that we could talk about.

A couple things come right to the top, how the industry is changing and, and of course we talked a lot about drought on Sunup this year.

- Yeah, those two major impacts to the industry.

And, and you're right, things are, things have changed a lot and things continue to change rapidly.

You know, one thing that comes to mind Lyndall is the, the, the continuous increase in carcass weights in cattle, you know, finished cattle weights and carcass weights.

And of course that that has impacts downstream.

This last November we had a few weeks where steer carcass weights hit 960 pounds and that that is, appears to be increasing steadily by the rate of, oh, somewhere around four and a half to five and a half pounds per year, just year after year after year.

Part of that is, this year in particular is because we have the cheapest corn we've had since 2020.

Recent costs of gain in the feed yard has been around a dollar, $4 five for every pound of gain you put on, but cattle worth a dollar 90.

Okay?

And so you get to the end of that feeding period and there's that big difference.

They're gonna keep, they're gonna keep feeding those cattle and making them bigger.

But of course in, you know, my interest in that is in our cow efficiency program, when you continue to aggressively select cattle for growth, carcass weight, you're gonna make bigger cows.

You know, unless you have a real intentional program to control that in your selection.

But cow weights are increasing, on average it appears by about seven pounds per year.

So if we don't do anything different, and that trend continues in 10 years, cows will be 70 pounds heavier than they are today.

And of course when we have drought, extreme drought, you know, that's important because, you know, you have to a, stock fewer cows on a given land base, and b, you have to depopulate more of those animals, bigger animals.

When we do have these extreme droughts, - As we think about drought, you know, it, we got some nice rain late fall, but as we know that drought can, can rear its ugly head pretty quickly in Oklahoma, especially in a La Nina year.

What, what's on your mind?

What's on the mind of producers as we get through the winter?

- Well, we've had lots of issues related to that.

I mean, first of all, we entered, we entered the year with relatively low hay inventory.

And so hay costs late last year were really expensive.

And then we had decent late spring rains here in Oklahoma to sort of help us recover from that.

And so hay prices have kind of gone down here later in the year, which is kind of odd, but, but they, they have.

And the other, the other impact of the drought this year is the real late wheat pasture.

And so you've got limited number of cattle with record high prices trying to find a home.

And you know, in Oklahoma we, we, that's one of our, our primary enterprises.

And, and so the value of those calves makes that wheat pasture extremely valuable this year.

And again, it's limited.

And so supply and demand, the, the cost to graze cattle on wheat pasture is substantially higher than probably we've ever seen it before.

- Speaking of cost, what about, what about vitamins and other supplementation, you know, when this time of year, but then especially if it's gonna be a little drier than we want it to be.

- Yeah, well let's, let's start off with folks that are grazing cattle on standing forage, maybe lower quality forage, which is very common.

You most, many yearlings are wintered that way and lots of cows are wintered with a bit of a protein supplement and standing forage or low quality hay.

Well, in 2023 soybean meal, that's a good, that's kind of a good barometer of protein prices.

Soybean meal in January was about $488 a ton.

2024 January is about $333 a ton.

Right now it's about $290 a ton.

So, you know, very cost effective protein availability if you will.

Anytime we have drought or anytime a producer is grazing or feeding low quality forage, you know, you just anticipate that the concentration of carotene, which is the precursor to vitamin A, is gonna be low in that forage e even late summer standing forage is low in carotene.

And so after we've gone through a couple of years of drought, it seems like the concerns, the issues reports to veterinarians and, and our nutrition community increase over time related to vitamin A.

What are those reports?

Well, early born calves, real short gestation periods, maybe stillborn calves, substantial amount of diarrhea and baby calves, those kind of things are all potential symptoms of that problem.

Keep your mineral and your feeds fresh.

You know, don't, don't store them somewhere for a year and a half to two years before you feed those and, and then consult with your veterinarian about other opportunities to, you know, make sure that doesn't happen in your operation.

- Well Dave, thank you so much to you and the beef team for all you do for Sunup throughout the year.

- Appreciate - You guys and happy you here to you and your family.

Yeah, thank - You.

- Good morning everyone.

This is state climatologist Gary McManus with your Mesonet weather report.

You thought that groundhog was kidding, didn't you?

Well he really wasn't and winter roared back across the state with snow, ice, freezing rain, all the bad stuff.

We did need the moisture, however, didn't move the drought monitor map very much.

Let's take a look at that first.

Okay.

As you can see, we have still much of the northwestern half to two thirds of the state covered by those abnormally dry conditions.

Not drought, but signaling areas that could go into drought without significant moisture.

You know, as we go forward we do have those areas of moderate drought up in the north, central and south central portions of the state and also just a tiny bit of severe drought up in the north central portion of the state.

Again, these are areas that could intensify if we don't get significant moisture, but you can see from the consecutive days with less than a quarter inch of rainfall map.

Now a course quarter inch rainfall, that also means melted snowfall, melted ice.

So if you look back, we've now gone more than 90 days without at least a quarter inch of rain in a single day, a quarter inch of moisture through much of the northwestern half to th two thirds of state.

So really when you get to the west of I 35, you're dealing with at least three months without significant moisture.

That's also shown on the 90 day rainfall accumulation map from the Mesonet.

Again, you get west of I 35, you're talking maybe at two inches at the most, but mostly less than an inch.

And you get out in the panhandle, you're barely at a quarter of an inch.

So desperate need for moisture on that part of the state.

Not as bad since it's been so cold.

But it would certainly help as we go into the warmer months in the next two to three months.

Also shown the departure from normal rainfall map those deficits across much of the state now up to above three inches, two to three inches in general out in the panhandle it's about an inch to two inches.

We do have some significant deficits up in the north eastern part of the state where they're getting closer five inches below normal over that 90 day period down in southeast Oklahoma.

A pretty good little bit of surplus from three to as much as six inches down in that little tiny corner of the state.

Okay, you reflect that.

On what part of the year are we in?

So about an inch, two inches in the panhandle as much as four inches below normal over in the east, central and northeastern Oklahoma.

How's that relate to being in the driest part of the year?

Well, when you look at the percent of normal, the panhandle in southwestern Oklahoma are still by far the driest, despite the fact that they expect less.

So they're generally less than a quarter 25% of normal over that timeframe.

But again, a large part of the state is less than less than 50% of normal over the last 90 days.

Is that heat gonna come back?

Well, it certainly is that we look at the next week.

We do see those above normal temperatures starting to come back into the forecast.

In fact, we could see seventies on Monday and Tuesday.

So again, you know, once we start to get up in those above normal temperatures, again that's gonna put pressure on the drought monitor.

The good news is we also see increased odds of above normal precipitation.

So that might counteract a little bit of that.

It's all ba basically baking a cake.

So how do the ingredients change that make a drought?

Now if we take a look at the US seasonal drought outlook, this is for February 20th through May 31st.

So basically over the next three months the drought monitor does see drought development likely across the western portions of the, the state and those areas where it's where it already exists at this point that's expected to persist.

Luckily no development across the eastern half of the state and that little tiny area of drought up into east central Oklahoma is expected to improve over the next three months.

So some good news and bad news.

Personally, I would like some seventies just for a couple of days just to get out of this Sub-Zero environment that we've been in.

But we do need the moisture to stave off that drought.

That's it for this time.

We'll see you next time on the Mesonet weather report.

- We're here now with our OSU extension livestock marketing specialist, Dr. Darryl Peel.

And Darryl, we've been dealing with some pretty good winter weather the past couple of weeks as we can see with the cows behind us.

So has that been having any kind of market implications?

- Yeah, there's a variety of impacts that come with this kind of cold weather.

It affects producers tremendously.

Lots of cold weather creates a lot of management challenges for cow calf producers.

We've seen some changes in timing of cattle coming through the auction.

So that's one impact.

These storms, depending on what day of the week they hit and so on, impact the movement of cattle through markets for a lot of cow calf producers.

We're gonna be moving into calving season pretty quickly, so if we continue to have winter weather it, it will have more impacts.

It may be affecting some folks already.

And then finally the cold weather is probably impacting feedlot cattle in in some areas.

You know, we won't see that for a little while yet in terms of how it might impact performance, but it may impact carcass weights in the coming weeks.

- So Daryl, we're almost two months into the new year, so how is the beef demand holding up so far?

- You know, beef demand has been remarkably strong coming into 2025.

We continue to see higher prices.

The retail prices for January were released and the, you know, beef prices were higher yet again higher than a year ago, and on average have moved to the highest average levels in in in a long time, if not ever.

So, you know, box beef prices have also been strong and if you look across the, the wholesale cuts prices for all the primals are higher on a year over year basis.

And for most of the products within those primals it's higher as well.

The only exception has been our, our most expensive beef product is the tenderloin that's actually a little bit lower than a year ago, but almost everything else is higher.

In particular, there's higher, higher prices for some of the lean round products that are being pulled into the ground beef market.

- So kind of moving into the US calf crop report, was that a little bit different than we expected it to be this year?

- Yeah, the, you know, the cattle report we got at the end of January had a surprisingly large calf crop came in about unchanged from a year earlier, even though the beef cow herd or the total cow herd was down a little bit from last year.

And you know, I think maybe it's a reflection of the fact that high prices encourage producers to try a little harder.

Those calves are worth a lot so they, they do things and, and it's not just on the beef side.

Now certainly the beef producers would be doing that, but now because the dairy calves, these beef cross calves coming out of the dairy industry are so valuable from a beef standpoint, the dairy producers also have more incentive to, you know, to save more of those calves and and market more of those calves.

So I think that's probably what's going on here.

- Yeah.

So what are you expecting in terms of herd growth within the next year?

- You know, the prospects for herd growth in 2025 for the beef cow herd are, are pretty limited.

We brought in a very small number of bred heifers this year.

You know, beef cow culling has been going down the last couple of years.

Beef cow slaughter has dropped sharply.

If it drops enough, maybe there's enough bred heifers out there to net out to stable or perhaps slightly bigger herd size for the year.

But it looks really kind of like a long shot at this point.

I think there's at least as good a chance that maybe we continue to slide a little bit more and see a slightly smaller herd again come this time next year.

- Yeah.

Alright, thanks Daryl.

We'll talk to you in a couple weeks.

- Good morning Oklahoma and welcome to Cow-Calf Corner.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the NCBA trade show and Cattleman's Industry Convention in San Antonio is a great program, tremendous set of speakers, a lot of information provided there.

And so our topic this week is some of the key takeaways that I got during that time at the convention.

First thing of interest to me is that our USDA beef yield grade equation is in need of an update.

The beef USDA yield grade equation that we used is based on a population of cattle from about 60 to 65 years ago.

And from that original dataset we learned that things like ribeye size relative to hot carcass weight, external fat thickness and the percentage of kidney, heart, and pelvic fat are the big drivers or predictors of the amount of red meat yield versus fat and bone that comes outta the round loin rib and chuck of a beef carcass.

Well, our population cattle have changed a lot since that time.

And so using modern technology and some empirical evidence that we can collect, we'll probably see an update to that yield grade equation at some point in the near future.

Other things that are really good news stories for our industry, important takeaways are how dramatically we have improved the quality of beef the product.

Over the last 20 years.

We have went from producing a fairly high percentage of select quality grade or a lower quality grade beef carcass to a much higher percentage of choice, upper two thirds of choice and even prime quality grade beef carcasses.

And along with that it has been a big driver in consumer demand for beef.

The product and the market signals are very clear that consumers are willing and demanding of a higher quality beef product.

Since 1998, that increased consumer demand that we see for beef equates to about an $800 of additional value per head of every animal that we see go through the beef production chain.

So we're doing a much better job of shifting from a commodity product that we used to produce to a much higher quality product and there seems to be an unsaturated demand for that from consumers.

Final thing and then a good news story for all of us in this business.

As we look at the current inventory of cows, which is actually down a little bit from last year, current retention rates on heifers proposed to be develop or developed for herd replacements as cows.

It looks like these robust prices for all classes of cattle that we're seeing are gonna stick with us and we may not yet have even reached our market highs as we look into the future.

As always, we appreciate you joining us on Cow-Calf Corner.

- Finally, today we learn what makes Carl Tooma a distinguished alumnus in the OSU Ferguson College of Agriculture video production manager Craig Woods put together our story.

- Carl Tooma credits much of his success to hard work and independence values instilled in him during his upbringing on a cattle ranch in the Oklahoma panhandle.

- I have a different opinion of that experience today than I did growing up on a ranch.

When you grow up on a ranch as a teenager, you, you kind of hate being on a ranch 'cause all your friends are in town doing things that I'm having to work.

But now looking back, growing up on a ranch was very special because when you live in isolation where you're two and a half miles from your nearest neighbor, you really learned to be self reliant.

- After graduation, Carl decided to go to Oklahoma State University but didn't major in agriculture.

- When I got to Oklahoma State, I thought I was gonna be an engineer.

And so I was in engineering for the first year and one of my roommates at the time said, Carl, you grow off on a ranch, you need to get an agriculture.

And so I thought about it and agriculture economics seemed like a natural because it really kind of dealt with more to me the business aspects.

And so that's how I ended up in agriculture.

- After graduation, he married Marilyn from Woodward, Oklahoma.

They moved to Stanford, both attending graduate school in business and administration.

After receiving his MBA, he joined the Arizona, Colorado landed cattle company.

Carl made a meaningful career change when the early seventies recession hit and he needed to find other employment.

- My boss fellow named Ron Burkes, knew somebody that worked in Chicago and private equity and he said, why don't you apply for a job there?

Because my wife had also at that time graduated from Stanford and had a job offer from Quaker Roach, which was based in Chicago.

And so I went to Chicago and interviewed and was fortunate enough to get a job offer to join for Chicago in their private equity group.

- His start in private equity eventually led to the founding of the Toma Bravo with partner Orlando Bravo in 1980.

Toma Bravo is now one of the largest software focused investors in the world.

With the approximately $160 billion in assets under management.

- He has a knack for surrounding himself with great people.

He's a wonderful leader and an incredibly hard worker.

So I don't think that you'll find many people who will outwork Carl Thoma.

- Tapping into their ag roots and entrepreneurial spirit, Carl and Marilyn decided to establish Van Douser Winery in Oregon after the success of Carl's business.

- To me, the nice thing about the wine industry, it's very much like agriculture, but it's got more hospitality associated with it.

And so you enjoy the pleasure of agriculture, but in the wine industry you spend more time directly selling.

So you get to know the people that serve or buy your wine.

- It's no surprise that he and Marilyn have given back to several institutions, especially their alma mater.

The Thoma Foundation has provided gifts to the RTA Center for Entrepreneurship, the McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, the Spear School of Business, and the OSU Museum of Art, just to name a few.

- But we concluded that we should give most of our wealth to to charity because our kids are taken care of enough to accomplish what they want.

And so then we, you know, set out focusing on education and, and art.

And Oklahoma State's, our leading institution that's received the most money and with continue to work with them is.

And so I think it's just giving back.

Oklahoma State's been good to me, I guess society's been good to me, so it's time to give back.

- Carl and Marilyn also support numerous scholarships, including the John W. Goodwin Endowed Agricultural Economic Scholarship Fund named after his OSU advisor, - One of the toughest professor I've kind of ever known.

Very intimidating, but if did a good job, he seemed to like you.

And so he really helped coach me to, you know, develop my career and ag economics and you know, take a number of accounting courses and kind of ran interference with the business school when they would claim that somebody in ag wasn't smart enough to take an accounting course.

- And recently the couple established the Thoma Scholars program at Oklahoma State University.

- Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about the scholarship program.

It will be the most transformational scholarship program we have at our university.

Full cost of attendance for our students, so room and board, books, tuition fees, the whole package, plus an incredible study abroad experience.

- This is a pathway that opens up doors that students wouldn't have had before to attend a university like Oklahoma State University to gain skills, connections, networks so that perhaps some of them can go back home and and invest those skills back in their rural communities.

And even if they go off and do great things in other places, much like Carl has, they have those connections to those rural areas.

- Through it all, Carl has realized agriculture's critical impact on his and everyone's lives.

- To me, agriculture just gives you that grit, determination and how to manage, I hate to say adversity, but that seems to define agriculture as adversity and how you manage that.

'cause it's almost like anybody can make money if prices go up and it always rains and you have no bad weather.

So I think agriculture is an integral part of the success of of America - Celebrating Thoma 2024 Ferguson College of Agriculture, distinguished alumnus.

- That'll do it for our show this week.

A reminder, you can see sunup anytime on our website.

Follow us on social media and stream us anytime at youtube.com/sunup tv.

I'm Lyndall Stout.

Have a great week everyone.

And remember, Oklahoma Agriculture starts at Sunup.