Farming Video | How Nutrient-Dense Corn Cut Feed Costs for One Georgia Dairy

00:00:00 One of the really interesting trials that came about this year, and it was because of a question into extreme ag 00:00:05 for my new friend Luke Harvey. Luke and his father, uh, are dairymen southeast of Atlanta, Georgia. And Luke was having trouble 00:00:12 with high sodium in his soils from the manure applications out of the dairy and things like that. 00:00:16 And he emailed in a question to extreme ag and, uh, the question was pretty detailed, pretty complex. And so I passed it on to Mike Evans 00:00:24 and Clint Freeze, uh, Jared Cook, the agronomist that calibrated agronomy to, uh, to help with something that was a little over my head. 00:00:32 And they started using bio aggie and different products, different carbon sources, things like that. 00:00:37 They changed a few things in his manure application to, to try to affect the soil health, uh, on Luke's farm. And, and now here we are at the end of the season 00:00:47 and, uh, Luke is pretty excited. And, and so am I. Uh, we didn't know that we were kind of working on the same things, 00:00:53 but, uh, the end result has been the same. You know, I've been talking a lot about nutrient density in my beef, um, feeding minerally balanced corn to the beef 00:01:02 or minerally balanced, uh, forage to the beef, and then how it, it makes a higher quality beef. It's more tender, it's more nutritious. 00:01:09 Uh, it definitely tastes better. All of those things are very exciting. A lot of people say, well, 00:01:14 why should I care about nutrient density? Or, how do I get paid if I'm not going direct to the consumer with my beef? 00:01:19 How do I get paid? And I believe Luke has discovered the way that every livestock producer can get paid. 00:01:24 Luke started using bio Aggie to improve his soil health. Luke started running SAP analysis 00:01:29 and things like that to try to improve the crop. And, uh, lo and behold, uh, his, uh, his feed costs have gone down. 00:01:37 Luke and his dad have raised the starch level of their corn, seven to 8%, and the starch is energy 00:01:44 and why, what that equates to, and, uh, why that's very exciting. Every 7% raise in starch saves Luke 00:01:52 and his dad 30 cents per head, per day on feed cost because of how they've improved the quality of the ration. And so, really, I can tell you, uh, Luke 00:02:01 and his dad have improved the nutrient density of their corn crop, the nutrient density of their silage crop. 00:02:08 And now they're feeding that to the, uh, dairy cows. And, you know, a dairy ration is like a race car ration. It's very much dialed in, very much paid attention to. 00:02:16 And I, I think as other livestock producers, we can learn a lot from a dairy ration and what they're looking at because we 00:02:22 can improve upon ours. And, you know, in, uh, um, in my beef cow rations, you know, from my fat cattle, I, uh, I don't know 00:02:31 that I will save the 30 cents per head per day, but I believe the gain will go up. And so if we, if we look at that from another perspective, 00:02:39 you know, how much faster will my cattle gain? Uh, you know, I've started to use AI and things like that to predict, 00:02:44 and it's talking about a half a pound or better per day on an 800 pound steer. Uh, we're gonna have to conduct this research and, 00:02:52 and see what we can figure out. But, uh, again, in using ai, the, uh, the gains That the Harvey family is seeing would, 00:03:01 would translate into beef cattle. It would translate into hogs, it would translate into poultry. 00:03:06 And one of the really interesting things is it would allegedly translate into ethanol production. The yield of the ethanol, uh, per bushel 00:03:13 of corn would go up one or two tenths a gallon of ethanol. Uh, based on the research I've done so far, now, again, 00:03:21 this has yet to be proven out. But this answers the question, how do I get paid by growing a nutrient dense crop? 88 00:03:27.705 --> 00:03:28.885