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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to BCI Cattle Chat. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us and happy to have our crew here in the studio this morning. Morning, Bob.
- [00:11]
B
Good morning.
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A
Morning, Philip.
- [00:12]
C
Hello everybody.
- [00:13]
A
Dustin, good morning. And our special guest today is Dr. Haley Larson. Morning Haley.
- [00:17]
D
Good morning. Thanks for having me.
- [00:18]
A
We're happy to have you with us. And we've got several topics to talk about today. We want to talk about some of your research. We're going to address a little bit of the work you've done with drones Iona4 feeding. And then we're gonna have Dustin fill us in on some tariff topics. But tell us a little bit about you, Haley.
- [00:33]
D
Yeah, well, thanks again for having me. My name is Haley Larson. I am an assistant professor of animal nutrition and health at K State Olathe based in the Kansas City metro region. I'm trained ruminant nutritionist but diversified out to all species right after my PhD working in industry for a small stint as a scientist and came back to academia and have been very happy to help bridge that industry academic gap in the Kansas City metro for K State.
- [00:58]
A
Ok, excellent. And we're glad to have you here. And you've done some really cool research. We actually saw some of your students present some of their preliminary findings earlier. So we want to get updates on those projects and I think really relevant to the industry. As you talked about, you provide some things that should be in the Feedlot Consultants toolbox or an area that they can have other tools. Before we get into our main topics today, one thing to remind you, if you have questions or topics you'd like us to discuss, you can send us an email@bcisu.edu and I had a question for you guys. We've been talking a lot about AI, not artificial insemination, but artificial intelligence lately. So what I wanted to know and Hayley, you're a technology expert, so I think you'll have good insight to this question is what is the best robot or AI movie that you've ever seen? Not you cannot use Terminator, that's too frequently used. But you have to figure the best movie with robots or AI eye.
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C
Well, I've saw one recently. I don't know when it came out, but it was Will Smith and I think it was Ibot or iRobot or something like that.
- [02:07]
A
That's a good movie.
- [02:08]
B
Yeah.
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A
Yeah, that's good. Should come back around.
- [02:10]
B
Yeah. You know, I'm not recent, Philip. No, no. But.
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A
Oh, but I saw it recently. Okay.
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C
I don't get to the theater very Much.
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B
What was. What was that old TV show? This kind of take off on the.
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A
The Lost Face.
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B
There you go.
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A
Danger, Will Robinson.
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B
Danger, Will Robinson.
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E
Yeah.
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A
Yeah, that's a good one.
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B
It's a takeoff of the family Robinson.
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A
You know, 50s, although they redid it.
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B
Yeah. So not that long ago.
- [02:36]
D
That's a good one.
- [02:37]
B
It is a good one, Dustin.
- [02:38]
E
So Sunday, actually, there was another one that just came out, some Netflix or Prime Hit Play, and I fell asleep, and I don't even remember the title.
- [02:47]
B
That's not a very good.
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A
So it may not be the best.
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E
Robot either, but it's a new one.
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A
Okay, it's a new one, but the.
- [02:53]
E
One I was thinking that came to my mind is Wall E. Oh, there.
- [02:56]
A
Yeah. That's a good one. That is a pretty good one, Hayley.
- [02:59]
D
Yeah, I. Playing off of cameras and predicting movements and behavior. I went straight to the movie Eagle Eye and how they can use cameras all around you to better predict what you're doing and what your next move will be. And it's very enlightening from when it came out. It was pretty shocking, I think, or.
- [03:21]
B
And now it's kind of.
- [03:21]
A
There's a lot of those things that are. You're like, it's sci fi far in the future, but now we're getting there. And you've done some stuff in your research that's getting closer and closer to being able to use cameras to figure out what's going on.
- [03:31]
C
Yeah, but we're still not driving flying cars.
- [03:34]
A
Still not driving flying cars. Yeah. You could have picked the Jetsons.
- [03:36]
B
Yeah.
- [03:37]
A
I mean, he had a robot there. What was the robot named?
- [03:40]
B
An Alice or something like that?
- [03:41]
A
I think that's right. Yeah.
- [03:42]
B
So. Yeah, good call. So amazing what's in that file cabinet.
- [03:47]
A
It's amazing that I can't put in new input, because I know stuff like that. Hayley, let's talk a little bit about your research. So you've done some things with drones and looked at drones to evaluate the environment. So as we think about feed yard management, pin management's an important part of that and understanding how the environment impacts heat stress and other areas. Tell us about the project you did.
- [04:10]
D
Yeah, well, so this was an interesting project. We actually partnered with K State Salina. If you're not familiar with K State Salina, they are our appliance aviation research center for the university. They've got drones and all sorts of things that fly all around. And so we partnered with them to see how we could take those skills and leverage them in the Feed yard, particularly surrounding the idea. We know that there's already existing applications that are out there for cattle headcounts and inventory type systems. But we wanted to venture more into the management space and what we could extrapolate from the environment that surrounds the animal to tell us about the animal themselves. So we started off to see what sort of samples could we take in these feedlot pens and how could we better detect pen management, especially as you have different environmental conditions, different manure outputs, moisture content, and then see if we could capture that in a thermal image from a drone.
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A
What'd you find out?
- [05:08]
D
So we found out that thermal imaging and moisture are very highly correlated. So it's a great predictive tool. Very interesting on how they take a lot of these images. I think one of the biggest misnomers with drones is a lot of folks thinks you send your drone up and it takes one image of that pen. Actually, it's a series of hundreds of images of that pen that then have to be recombined back together. So we can get a lot of sensitivity out of these aerial images because of how many images we are taking sequentially over the course of that pen. There's some limitations on how much time that takes, but it is getting better as, as the technology improves too.
- [05:45]
B
I, I think some of that sounds really fascinating because, you know, we know pen conditions such as are there areas of more moisture? I mean, you could do whole lot level and really monitor it pretty frequently at a relatively low cost. So whole lot level as well as pen level, maybe improve our pen maintenance. We talked a little bit off camera about dust, you know, monitoring for amount of dust and again, opportunity to manage and come in. That's really kind of interesting because we've looked at some remote ways of looking at animals. I really like the idea of looking at the environment that the animals are in and, and kind of upping our management of that space.
- [06:24]
A
The cool thing about the drones is you don't have to touch the animals. Yeah, it's, you can go over, fly over. You're very indirect and hopefully you could.
- [06:33]
B
Do it frequently and again with artificial intelligence. Some of, you know, putting that data together, looking at moisture, dust, temperature, whatever of the environment. Kudos to you. I think this could be really interesting work.
- [06:44]
C
So have you done anything with that? We're looking at the thermal images and correlating that to animal performance or health outcomes in the different pens of cattle.
- [06:55]
D
That's really where we'd like to go with it. So we started off looking at two different Types of nutritional diets. So whether or not it's management styles for ablimitum feeding versus limit fed feeding and how that changes manure output. Because we wanted to pilot test whether or not this was even feasible to do so that was the first step. And then we started flying these drones on commercial yards too, Just to start to get those larger lot sizes. See how this extrapolates out from a small pen model to a large pen model. And the things you can start to see, we kind of found on accident, right. We can detect water leaks, especially on large feed yards where you're not checking all those water tanks in the heat of the day. You see that extra water running off that water tank, you can see what the thermal heat print of bedding is and how that looks. You can see cattle behavior on in the heat of the day. One of the coolest things we found, we took a lot of direct temperature measurements in those pens. We know cattle are the masters of their environment, Right. They know everything about that pen. We don't always know everything about that penny. When you go to a large commercial yard in the heat of the day, a lot of times those cattle are lined up around the outer perimeter of that pen or along the bunk line. We usually thought they were just standing up there because they're going to eat, they're just hanging out. But when you actually take direct temperature measurements of that pen, those are the coolest areas.
- [08:10]
B
They find a micro environment.
- [08:12]
D
They found it and they know it. And so it was a simple behavior that we didn't think a whole lot about. Until you start to take those temperature measurements and say, hey, you're telling me a whole lot more about your environment than I knew when I walked in.
- [08:25]
E
Been talking about feed yards. What about if we take the drones and put them into a different space like a pasture? Is there. Have you guys do anything in the pasture space with drones?
- [08:36]
D
Yeah, we were actually grazing some cattle on winter wheat and looking at what we could do for looking at biomass depreciation as those cattle are grazing out there. We had 60 acre pastures that we were grazing those cattle in. And that was a little bit too large. You need a little smaller scale than that to detect those intake differences. But there has been a especially in the headcount space for better understanding where your cattle are at and understanding where they're spending their time and using drones to identify those regions and where cattle are congregated and make sure everybody is accounted for. Especially in the cow calf sector or the stalker sector where you don't See cattle quite as much. The challenges there is on your permit. Right. So we just have a residential, a recreational permit for our drone use. But that means we have to have it within 400 yards of in line of sight. Right. So when you get into some of the pasture settings, you have to make sure that you are in a central location so you can keep eyes on that drone. Unless you have a different type of license where you can go out of line of sight.
- [09:42]
A
Yeah, that's what we had a student, a graduate student that got her drone pilot's license last year. So exactly that she could do some of that kind of stuff. Sounds like a lot of images. And it's not easy to process all those. You've got some good processing horsepower behind you and the ability to go through those. If I wanted to do it, I could probably do some spot checks in different areas. But are there any tools that allow me to process those images yet or do I have to just do it on my own?
- [10:10]
D
So commercially there is some, especially like in the cattle headcount space that you can upload those images into an app on your phone and it will do run the algorithm to count the number of cattle that are in that. A lot of this pilot work is helping to lay the foundation for where we could go eventually for some real time processing ability at the producer level or at the nutritional consultant level to try to better extrapolate some of this data outside of these very specific programs that recombine those images together.
- [10:41]
B
You know, we have talked about artificial intelligence a lot and drones is an interesting technology. We've also talked about grazing management plans. I could see this in the future. I know we're not quite there yet, but really looking at that forage biomass level, you know, to really. And again, what you're trying to figure out is a way to do it over large areas in a time efficient, labor efficient way. And that's probably in your lifetime, maybe much sooner than that. As far as really enhancing our grazing.
- [11:11]
A
Management plan, assuming it's correlated with biomass, we could have much better documentation. And then year to year, which we talked about that with grazing plans year to year, I can start to build a database for my operation. Okay, in mid June, this is a good year, or in mid August, this is what I expect to see. But your first few years may be building expectations. And we talked about how do you take those measurements, what do you do? Time and labor intensive. And with the drone, it actually sounds kind of fun.
- [11:38]
C
No, yeah, it's true too. I mean, they've Got, they use, I forgot what it stands for, but ndvi, where they look at the difference in amount of green and the color or darkness of green and so they can correlate that with biomass and so you can get some estimates of biomass.
- [11:58]
A
Yeah, excellent. Really cool stuff, Hayley. We look forward to see the results of that as they, as they come out. I do want to shift gears and talk a little bit. Last week, Dustin, we defined tariffs because tariffs have been in the news a lot lately and what's the implications? But we didn't specifically dive into what are the implications for veterinarians, animal health providers, cow calf producers, some of our extension agents. What do you see there relative to tariffs?
- [12:24]
E
Yeah, so last time we kind of started talking about tariffs kind of at that 30,000 foot view, we defined it kind of as a government imposed tax on a good. And then we went through and just kind of talked about who imposes tariffs, why are they imposed, things like that. And then thinking about the producers, we talked a little bit about, you know, if we impose a tariff on some country and then they turn around and impose a retaliatory tariff, let's say, on our beef, well then our, the demand for our exports will go down, which then could ultimately lead to a downward pressure in prices. And so that's, I think, how producers can be impacted through, you know, weaker calf prices, et cetera. Then thinking about, just from a veterinarian's perspective, you know, a lot of the products, vaccines for example, aren't necessarily manufactured here in the US So they might come from China, come from India, Brazil. Well, if we're putting tariffs on products coming into the US what does that do? It makes those products more expensive. Right. And so then if, if you're in a, in a situation where margins are pretty small, what do you do? Maybe you cut preventative care. And so vaccines might be a place that you delay a vaccine program or maybe you cut it all together. And so thinking about this animal health investment.
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A
Right.
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E
And so that's, I guess what I was thinking about when we think about animal health, veterinarians, possibly extension.
- [13:46]
A
And one of the real challenges there is a lot of manufacturing is done outside the US and the tariffs are hopefully to motivate some to become internal. But that's not an overnight issue that you can gear up and change some of those manufacturing. And we don't know what the impacts of that will be on the animal health side. But we know those margins are relatively small on animal health products and we're cost sensitive when purchasing Them.
- [14:15]
B
Yeah, that's. It's one of the things that as we look forward down in time because we've had some issues with supply chains because so many of our antibiotics and some of our nutrients, even some of the vitamins and vitamin packs for instance, are produced not in the United States. And we've had occasional supply chain disruptions because of the fact that they're not produced here. So in the long run it might be nice to bring some of that manufacturing back to the United States. In the short run. Yeah, there's going to, there's going to be some disruptions and probably some higher prices. And so there's kind of. Is this going to turn out to be a net good or a net harm? Only time will tell.
- [14:52]
A
But, but I'm going to say when you have looked at this stuff from the Kansas farm management program and we looked at inputs and costs on cow calf ranches here in Kansas and that survey has been going on for a long time, the amount that we spend on animal health drugs is relatively small compared to the overall maintenance cost of a cow. Is that accurate?
- [15:14]
E
Oh yeah. No, the, what we spend on the animal health is very small relative to the total cost. Right. I mean you've got feed, pasture, some of your fixed expenses like depreciation, interest expenses. Those are all some of your larger expenses for sure.
- [15:29]
A
But ballpark, it's, it's 700 to $1,000 to keep a cow a year depending on which area we look at how we look at those numbers. And your animal health costs may be in the 30 to $50 range. So a percent, in a few percent increase in animal health cost is not going to overall change your bottom line or your overall expenses that much.
- [15:49]
E
Correct. But again, if you're in a tight margin, if you're in a margins are really tight and you need to cut some costs. Yeah. Oh well, it's just a preventive initiative care let's, we can do that next year.
- [16:01]
A
Right. And I'm just saying keep it in perspective.
- [16:04]
B
Right.
- [16:04]
A
And try not to push that down just because of an increase.
- [16:07]
E
But I think this is where a veterinarian can step in or extension can step in and show them, help them understand things. Like what? You're just saying that this is a very small. And if you think about the trade offs. Right. Show them that ROI on preventative on vaccines, on dewormers, et cetera, like that.
- [16:24]
C
So you, you mentioned vaccines and kind of focused on the vaccine. What other animal health products are manufactured overseas? Are all our antibiotics and, and all Those mostly manufactured overseas or.
- [16:35]
B
Yeah, a lot of them are. And, and the other one that we've run into is like vitamin A is not produced in the United States. So those are, those are so antibiotics, vitamin A, probably some other, some of the other nutrients, some of the amino acids that are brought into diets. So there's a number of things it might kind of surprise you that we don't have manufacturing in the United States, but.
- [16:57]
A
But there are some that are, and we'd have to go back and look through which I don't know which or.
- [17:01]
E
Which or some of the ingredients are.
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B
Yeah, that's.
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A
That's the other issue I was going to bring out.
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B
It's not necessarily the whole product. It's just part of it. Yeah.
- [17:08]
A
So, excellent, great, great discussion, Dustin. Appreciate you sharing that with us. And we've had a couple of these. If you want to hear the overview of tariffs, you can listen to our, our podcast from last week. Hayley, I wanted to come back because, yes, you've done some things technology wise, but technology, sometimes when we say that word, we imply electronics or precision technology. But another technology, and we were just talking about one, is some of our molecules that we use to help manage cattle in a way that is promoting efficient growth. And you've done some work with ionophores. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [17:42]
D
Yeah, well, in the ionophores space, it's something we've had around for a very, very long time. Molecules like monensin and lesalocin and laidlamycin, they are all readily used within the United States, with minensin being the predominant ionophore that we feed the cattle here in the United States. And they have a multitude of functions and they help control or prevent coccidiosis. And they also have some improvements on feed to gain. Some of them have actual performance claim with. With gain in performance being part of the label. And what we wanted to do was kind of resurrect some of the work way back from the 80s, looking at what happens when we not just feed one ionophore, but rotate between a few of them.
- [18:34]
A
Yeah. And I think that brings us back to. She talked about some of the things that ionophores do. Philip, how. How do they actually work? What are they actually doing?
- [18:44]
C
So ionophores are molecules that inhibit growth of certain bacteria. And so they're technically an antibiotic, but they are not used in human medicine. So they don't fall under the veterinary feed directive. They're not medically important. And so we can still use those for promotion of gain and feed efficiency in livestock.
- [19:10]
A
So what would be the beneficiary of rotating as she described?
- [19:14]
C
Well, so the, the way they work is they inhibit or kill certain types of bacteria in the rumen. And so then that changes the rumen microbial population so that we get a shift in the fermentation profile and the end products of fermentation that are produced that then that in turn makes the, the animal more efficient. And so the thought process from rotating them is that, well, can we shift that microbial population in different ways? And is there a. Okay, psych, kind of a synergistic effect of using two different products or molecules on that efficiency of rumen fermentation?
- [20:00]
A
So that that makes sense as background. What'd you find in your study, Haley?
- [20:04]
D
Well, one thing that I need to mention because we are in the United States, so rotating ionophores in Canada is a practice that commonly happens there. But they have little different regulations that surround their use of ionophores here. Within the United States, all ionophores are labeled for continuous feeding, which the definition by the FDA for continuous feeding is 14 days. So when we look at rotating these, we cannot feed anything under 14 days legally in the United States. So we knew that going into this.
- [20:34]
A
Because you're not in jail, so you're here sitting with us. So that's good news.
- [20:38]
D
But we wanted to also keep this easy for the producer, right. Remembering every two weeks to change something that gets a little complicated. So we said, well, what's an easy metric of the year? So we said, how about a month? So we actually went with 28 days, not a full month. So it's four weeks. But that fits nicely into a trial design. But the idea was to keep this simple so you're not changing things all the time on a yard.
- [21:00]
E
And.
- [21:00]
D
And we also wanted to give that rumen some time to adapt. Just like Philip was saying, we need to make sure that they have that full adaptation to one ionophore before you introduce the next one to shift that population in a different direction. So we tested this in a commercial yard in southwest Kansas in heifers. So these heifers, they were limit fed and for targeted, 3 pounds per day growing ration. And what we found was that as we rotated these twice, so that means we did menensin. Then we looked at a catalyst introduction. So that's lablamycin. Then we went back to monensin and then back to lablamycin again. So it was 112 day grower, which I know is a little long, but that's, you know, an experimental design that we needed to do. We found that those heifers that were on the rotation had an 8.6% improvement in gain over their Minensin only counterparts.
- [21:55]
B
That's kind of encouraging. I mean, it. And again, it'll be interesting to try that in steers and other parts of the, the feeding process, not just the growing area. But that's, that's kind of interesting and it makes sense based on what we thought might happen. But that's why you do the study, to find out what's. What's going on.
- [22:10]
E
Yeah.
- [22:11]
A
And that's sort of what you hypothesized going through. You also took some other measurements that I know you're still in process of looking at. But part of this is feed efficiency and growth. The other part of it is, as we think about things like sustainability, if we have better feed efficiency, hopefully we're having less methane production throughout that period. And I know you're in process of analyzing that. Do you have any feel for that at this point?
- [22:34]
D
Yeah. So it, it's actually pretty interesting. And I think methane gets to be kind of a naughty word in the beef industry these days. But when we're looking at modifying rumen fermentation, we know that mention is incredibly effective at reducing methane. And so when we looked at these two, we have to understand that metric of methane per pound of beef. And we're in the process of analyzing that particular statistic because we had some green feeds that were in these pens rotating through. They were actually in some dairy beef steer pens. So I, I held that data back from y'. All. But we do have some performance in dairy beef steers as well.
- [23:10]
B
Okay.
- [23:10]
D
For the same rotation. And that's where we were taking these greenhouse gas emissions metrics. But with that, what we found was there was an increased methane emissions from the rotational group compared to the Menensin only group. But that's somewhat expected too. Right. Because these are different fermentation patterns. And it really drives home that point that these are different molecules, they work differently on the rumen. And that proponent is really what's driving some of this performance benefit.
- [23:41]
C
So did you see an increase in intake when that rotation compared to the continuous?
- [23:46]
D
So that was always a really interesting question because folks talk about the, the intake effect that happens with Minensin. So specifically to look at the molecule effect, we designed this trial so that these cattle were limit fed.
- [24:02]
C
Oh, okay. So there was no differences in.
- [24:04]
A
Okay.
- [24:05]
D
There is no statistical difference or, or numeric for that point in their intakes across that feeding period.
- [24:12]
A
Very interesting research. I'm glad we were able to have you on and visit about this. And obviously we've got more questions and hopefully as you come out with the publications and some of the other information, we'll be happy to share that with our listeners and glad that you could join us today. Dr. Haley Larson, who's an assistant professor at K State Olathe, does animal health and nutrition. We'll hopefully see you again in the future. Thanks, Haley.
- [24:34]
D
Thanks for having me.
- [24:35]
A
If you have any questions, comments, anything you'd like us to talk about, you can send us an email@bcisu.edu.