The Moos Room™

Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. We are here. OG3, myself, Emily, and Bradley and we have --
Emily: What's up?
Joe: We have two guests today. We're working with Vytelle today. From Vytelle we have Owen Weikert here, who's the business development manager, and Bryce Schumann, who is the seed stock sales director. We're excited to have them on today because we're going to be talking about their company, some of the technologies that they have and how they're married together and how that really works for them, and how it could benefit you as well. Thank you for being here, Owen and Bryce.
Bryce: Thank you.
Owen: Thanks for having us.
Joe: Before we get real into everything, there's two questions we ask.
Emily: Actually, really quick, I am going to cut in and interrupt you again, Joe, because you know that's tradition, but I do want to give a quick shout-out to a good friend of mine and Owens, and a fan of The Moos Room, Brent. He's actually the one who originally connected Owen to us to be on the show and we're so excited that he's with us now. Thank you, Brent. Shout out to you. Yes, listeners, if you have ideas and people you want to connect us to, let us know.
Owen: Brent's the original best friend. I think the world of him and he just is such a great dairyman.
Joe: I've only met him once in passing and I've been on his farm and you can tell right away when you get onto it that it's running very smoothly.
Owen: I think the world of him. I thank Brent as well and thank you guys for having us. This is my first time at least on the podcast, so I can't wait to see how it goes.
Joe: We have two questions that we ask every guest. We're going to start with Owen. We're going to get you both questions here. The first question is, what is your favorite dairy breed?
Owen: I'm a brown cow guy to the core. I'm about five foot three. I'm a Jersey guy.
Emily: Oh. [laughs]
Joe: Yes, correct answer.
Owen: They fit sustainability, which I think we're going to be talking about today. I am just so passionate about Jerseys and their hybrids. I think that talking about Brent still, I think the first time I saw a three-way cross was on his dairy. It wasn't all that long ago. I grew up out east where no one crossbreeds. Still, very, very few people, and just to see him milking these Jersey crosses and Monty crosses, I just think that the Jersey is today and tomorrow and goodbye everything else. I hope so. Anyway, that's how much I love the brown cow.
Emily: Wow.
Joe: That is the correct answer. Absolutely correct answer for Bradley and I. We are Jersey guys as well.
Emily: Could you tell when you first said brown cows? We all leaned in because we were like, wait, which brown cow?
Joe: Same question we're looking for, but we're talking about beef now. What's your favorite beef breed?
Owen: Oh my gosh. I am really a big proponent of Gelbviehs and I think that they are such an adaptable animal. I grew up in Shorthorn Show cattle and just knowing what those things can do as a recipient mother, but also what they can do out in the nothingness of Wyoming and South Dakota. To me, that's just a really versatile and under-touched breed that we need to embrace more as a whole industry. I'm a big Gelbvieh guy.
Joe: All right, well that's a new one. We hadn't had it on the list yet. That's pretty surprising that it hadn't been on there yet, but it's good. We'll update the totals after we get to Bryce here. Bryce, what is your favorite breed of dairy cow?
Bryce: I grew up on a small diversified crop in livestock farm and we had Holsteins, but being a beef guy, I just think the Holstein-Jersey crosses is the right one for the industry. I'm going to hedge.
Joe: You're going to hedge.
Emily: Owen's clapping.
Joe: Well, we don't allow hedging on the dairy side. We decided this quite a while ago, so you have to pick.
Owen: It's so awesome though about that responses is just the sheer reality of the value of heterosis in the dairy space.
Bradley: I agree, I agree.
Emily: Begrudgingly apparently.
Owen: I just think that it's a beautiful thing and we need to just all say it as an industry once. I'm saying it right here. I think it's great.
Bradley: Put Jersey on Holstein so that means Jersey would be the top one so there's another--
Bryce: Well, there go. You have your answers.
Joe: Jersey, it is. Jersey, it is. All right. I'll take it. I'm going to say that predominantly Jersey. That's what you're going for, Bryce?
Bryce: I'll allow it. Yes.
Emily: No, no. This is cheating. Collusion.
Joe: It is not. It is not. Let's get to beef. Bryce, what is your favorite beef breed?
Bryce: Well, I grew up with Herefords. I worked for American Angus for 15 years. I love both breeds. Again, being a beef guy and the value of heterosis, if you're not going to let me choose Black Baldy, I'm going to have to say, Hereford.
Emily: [laughs] No, do Black Baldy. [crosstalk]
Joe: Here's the deal. We'll allow you to choose Hereford, but we have allowed heterosis for only the Black Baldy if you want to choose the Black Baldy.
Bryce: Well, that's the industry ultimate.
Joe: All right. There it is. Black Baldy-
Emily: Black Baldy.
Joe: -not Hereford.
Bryce: Nope.
Joe: Thank you.
Bryce: I think not.
Joe: Let's update these totals here. After all of that on the dairy side: we have Holsteins at six; Jerseys at six; Brown Swiss at four; Dutch Belted at two; Normande at one; and Montb�liarde at one. Then on the beef side: we have Herford, still leading the pack at six; Black Angus at four; Chianina at one; Brahman at one; Stabilizer at one; Scottish Highlander at one; Gelbvieh at one; and now moving up the board, Black Baldies at two. That was great. I'm glad that we gained some ground and Jersey's back tied for the lead as it should be.
Let's get into it. Let's get into it. After having all that fun, we really are here to talk about Vytelle and continue to have fun as we do it. The big thing that we're here to talk about is that there's two technologies that have joined forces with Vytelle and we want to get into, first of all, what they are and then through using those, what are the goals of the company. Let's start with Owen. Give me an overview with of the technology you're most familiar with or go for both if you want to.
Owen: Sure. Vytelle is a precision livestock company and we are looking at identifying, replicating the best genetics that performs well in feed efficiency. We're actually measuring a ton of phenotypic data and that's really Bryce's specialty with some of our platforms, capturing residual feed intake. If we can find those elite animals that do the best performance in the feedlot or the heifer yard or in the tie stall or really any environment we can take measurements in, we can replicate those genetics through IVF. We just went through a rebranding.
There's different terms within our company for these new platforms, but basically, that's what it boils down to is finding the best genetics through phenotypic capture and replicating them in IVF. I think that my background is pretty much strictly in genetics and repro, started with kind of the original OG, I heard that term thrown out at the beginning here and that made me smile, of IVF, great company. Moved on from there and went to work just in genomics on the dairy space.
Really kind of grew a lot of my thought processes about genomics from that experience is saying genomics is a great tool, but IVF actually gets you somewhere. I think that really re-inspired me to get back to the embryo. I'm just so lucky to be at Vytelle and to be sharing this story. I think it's really, really compelling and where the industry needs to go.
Joe: Well, that makes a lot of sense and I'm glad that you bring up the phenotypic capture. I think to me, there's a lot of that that gets missed sometimes when we're talking about finding that feed efficiency and really focusing on that is the metric that we really, really want to see. Bryce, could you expand on that? Tell me how you're finding this data, how you're capturing this data, and what you're looking for?
Bryce: Vytelle, it's a combination of what was formally known as GrowSafe technology and the Vytelle IVF piece. It's a feed intake measurement system that we've been 30 years in development of. It is been deployed in research, commercially in seed stock beef operations, in dairy facilities globally, not only just in the United States. It allows us precision measurement of dry matter intake and gives us the ability to calculate many feed efficiency measures most important of residual feed intake. We've been a champion for RFI since our inception. Personally, my family has gathered this data, in fact, I just got it this afternoon for 13 consecutive calf crops. This will make Bradley happy because it's on my family's Hereford operation and you can make tremendous progress in improving efficiency of gain on the beef side. Some of the efficiencies in growth or in milk production that Owen had alluded to in his opening statement. It really allows you to improve the profit opportunity for your operation.
Joe: I think we need to get into, before we get too much further, this topic of residual feed intake and really getting down to explaining what that means and why we're concerned about that versus just feed efficiency and how we've taken the residual feed intake and what it means to have that measurement that that is also independent of growth.
Bryce: You bet. You alluded to it a little bit, Joe. It's a very interesting trait because RFI takes what we would've expected them to intake on test and looks at what their actual intake was. For example, if you had a minus two RFI, that would mean they ate two pounds less than expected for every day that they were on test. It's independent of body weight or mature size. You can select for RFI and approve efficiency without moving into unprofitable areas in terms of cow size or some of these other traits.
There's other metrics that you can use for the selection of feed efficiency, probably the oldest, and what you talk about in the feeding industry is feed to gain, but if your sole selection is for feed to gain, you end up with later maturing larger animals. If you're raising a terminal breed, maybe that's not a great concern to you, but if you raise a maternal breed and you want to save the daughters or use them in a maternal crossbreeding program, then mature cow size and cow maintenance cost is important to you.
Joe: Well, and that's something we've talked about on here before. Bradley and I talk about cow size and what's the ideal cow. It's always dependent on your system. Bradley's going to say his dairy cows are going to be much different because he's a grazing herd versus a confinement herd. To me, I'm biased and we've talked about this before. I love cows that look like me. I like cows that are short squat, big old ribcage, and that's what I like to see. I would guess that Bradley likes to see cows would look a little more like that. Not necessarily to the extreme that I like, but what do you think Bradley?
Bradley: I'm talking commercial milk production. Sure. I want the shorter, smaller cows that are robust that can last a long time. It doesn't need to be these big, tall, skinny, huge animals that may not last very long. There's a stark difference in the dairy world between I'm talking show ring versus commercial milk production, and those can be very different. I appreciate them both, but we're here to milk cows and we're going to go with the smaller rounder functional cow.
Emily: You appreciate them both, but you appreciate the one a little bit
Bradley: I do. Of course.
Joe: I'm right there too.
Bradley: If we think about RFI and information, how are you getting the RFIs? What are you using to collect that sort of we talk about feed efficiency and feed intake? How is that actually done? In what ways are you doing that?
Bryce: Well, we use what we call our sense technology, which was formally our gross safe intake bunks, intake nodes, we refer to them. Those bunks are connected to a radio frequency transmitter that transmits to a computer. It is weighing the bunk every second of every day. When an animal sticks their head through the stanchion, there's an eID reader molded into the top of the bunk. It captures their ID. We know what the bunk weighed when they started, we know how long the meal event is, how long they stay there for that feeding event.
We know how much feed disappeared, and we know we can do that within an accuracy of three grams. It's a very good technology in terms of the accuracy of measurement. In a beef scenario, after a warmup period of say a week to 10 days, then we take 70 days of intake so that we'd know what a repeatable gain would be over that period. Then we use those factors, the pin average for intake, the pin average for gain. We take those factors plus two behavior factors that we monitor to calculate a residual feed intake.
Now, that's a phenotypic measure for that group that you tested. We also have EPD system that has about 250,000 animals in it, over 14 different beef breeds where you can, if you share a pedigree, if you submit that data, then we'll send you back EPDs for RFI, dry matter intake, and an average daily gain EPD. Let's say you've really put a lot of selection pressure for efficiency.
Well, in every group, half of them are going to have favorable RFIs, half of them are going to have unfavorable RFIs, but maybe as you submit that data into the database, you find that two-thirds or three-fourths of your animals would be considered efficient based on their breeding value. I think that's the appropriate way to look at it. Will the phenotypes take you in the right direction? Most definitely, but the breeding values will really allow you to use this advanced reproductive technology and make swept genetic progress that Owen works with.
Joe: Want to jump in real quick, Bradley, before you go. You said three grams was the error on that. Just so everyone has a frame of reference, that's about a penny. A penny weighs two and a half to three grams, just so you have some reference that's really accurate. Go ahead, Brad.
Bradley: You're taking body weights every time I assume that the animal is coming up for--
Bryce: We have an in-pen weighing system called GrowSafe Beef. You can use regular scale weights. Traditional would be two weights at the beginning of the test, two weights at the end of the test, and then depending on the length of the test, one or two weights in the middle. With the GrowSafe Beef Technology, it sets around the water trough and takes a half body weight, and it's weighing every second, just like the feed intake technology. We can take that data and convert it to a full body weight. We have conversion factors that we--
Once you have 400 weights at your facility, you'll have a custom algorithm just for your facility, but then based on different breed types, we have different adjustment factors in that algorithm. We get where we can predict very accurate, full body weights out of those individual weights. If you do that, you can cut your test link by 21 days. We can go down from 49 days using that technology versus the traditional 70. You might ask why that has value. Well, it's a financial investment to put a system like this in. If you can turn that every 60 days, you can test a lot more animals than if you're turning it every 80 days.
Joe: Absolutely. We've talked about some of the genetic progress that's obviously beneficial to producers and this is actually, this technology specifically could be beneficial to producers. I love hearing that. That's really the big thing that we're trying to focus on most of the time is what is the producer getting out of this, or is this knowledge for knowledge's sake? I'm glad to hear that you guys are really thinking about that piece of it. One of the big questions that we are getting constantly, especially up here, is the dairy beef side of things. Do we have that data yet? Are we getting there?
Bryce: You want to take that or do you want me to go, Owen?
Owen: Go ahead. Bryce, you start and I'll fill in I think.
Bryce: You know we have customers that are capturing this data on, [unintelligible 00:19:32] that are the result of beef on dairy. I looked at some just in the last couple weeks from a large feedlot in the West, Pacific Northwest, which were Charolais and Holstein. It was pretty dang amazing the progress in dressing percentage and red meat yield that you could get out of that cross, but even it's more than just using a certain breed cross. It's pairing the right sire with the dairy animal.
That's different than just needing all-out gain. If it's going to be profitable. You want to improve the efficiency again. When the animal goes to harvest the amount the carcass yields is a relevant economic trait.
Owen: Well, what's nice about these dairy beef crosses is that the dairy industry as a whole underestimated how inherently marbled dairy cattle actually are. When we're mating these dairy beef animals correctly, from efficiency, we can create high value through yield, but I think we can also get a really nicely marbled animal that has a lot of consumer appeal. I think more and more as we look at the female dairy population in the United States is that becomes more homozygous as we get more and more females in the milking herd, which genomics is helping us rapidly get there.
I think that's a good thing. I think that if we're talking about sustainability. If we think about each milk shed as its own natural ecosystem, it's probably not the best thing, but in terms of our food production on a terminal end, I think it allows us to make more succinct decisions and more uniform terminal animals at the end of the day.
Joe: Well, let's expand on that, Owen. You mentioned sustainability and I think we talked about some of the economics for the producer, and obviously, that enhances sustainability for the producer, and that's part of sustainability. Walk me through a little bit more of the economic sustainability of this technology and how pairing the two can help us and then again, expand on the environmental side as well.
Owen: Sure. I think that some of the general thought processes that I've always had. I think so glad to be back in the embryo because now that the embryo can actually play a bigger role in that discussion than ever before. The incentives within government, within large co-ops that are milk or even on the beef side, are looking to say that we're doing everything we can to push the needle back on having a smaller number of animals make the same or more product. I think it all boils down that way.
Combining the ability to single out those elite animals on the terminal end or the maternal end that are the most feed efficient, and combining that with the ability to accelerate those genetics in IVF by using a elite sire over let's say dozens of really homozygous type females. Females that really fit the same mold genetically time after time. I think that we can create a super terminal and super maternal animal in beef and dairy systems. Some of that realism of the swine and poultry industry about quick generation turn, about creating uniform chicken breasts in every single package.
I think that we are able [unintelligible 00:23:17] via the embryo to approach, maybe not with the same accuracy or the same consistency, but I think we can move in that direction. I think in general, that means the consumer's happier at the end of the day. Sustainability-wise. Sustainability was a four-letter word and still is for most people. I think probably a lot of guys on this podcast that hear that from their co-op or at an extension meeting or even from their bull stud, that word scares people.
I really feel at the bottom of my heart-- the bottom of my heart says that it matters to the cattle, it matters to the consumer and it matters to the people involved in our food production system. I think all those things aligning really can boil down to management, of course, luck, but really if you're doing the right thing genetically, you can set the foundation to make a lot more sustainable decisions.
Joe: Well, I think that that helps everyone, and part of the way for me to take the sting out of that word is to remind people that we're also talking about economics, sustainability, and we're trying to keep people in business. That's one of our main goals. I think that helps quite a bit. Now, you mentioned elite sire and I like that term, and I'd like to hear from Bryce as the sales director for seed stock. What is this elite sire? What do they look like?
Bryce: Well, I guess what I'm going to tell you, just looking at a data set with one of my counterparts. They were 395 feeders [unintelligible 00:25:01] that were fed for 250 days and we broke them into quadrants and we compared quadrant 1 to quadrant 4. They both intake the same amount. They both ate the same amount. Quadrant 1 though weighed 116 pounds more at harvest than the least profitable ones, which was 100 pounds more carcass weight. Their dressing percentage was exactly the same, and their quality grade was exactly the same.
The ability they intake feed and convert it to greater output, that's what an elite sire does. There was a study done out of Oklahoma State where they took cattle out of their extension teaching and researcher, and of course, they had student labor, so they did dry matter intakes on non-crossbred commercial Angus cows versus F1 Black Baldies. The F1 Black Baldies ate two pounds less per day. Well, what does that mean in tall grass prairie in northeast Oklahoma? That means a Black Baldy pair takes one less acre for a season than the commercial Angus cow that they had in their herd.
What's the limiting factor in beef production? It's usually the biggest cost is land ownership. It doesn't matter what size cow you like. If you like bigger cows or smaller cows, if I like bigger cows and I want my cows to be over 1,400 pounds, but they eat like they're 1,200-pound cows. Smells like efficiency to me. If I like smaller cows, 1,200-pound cows, but they eat like they're 1,000-pound cows like my dad or grandfather had, that's a win. Just some figures that we put together. Through selection for RFI, you can improve feed intake by 12%.
When you do that, you reduce methane, which is one of the big components of greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, and you reduce manure production by 17%. We may not all be in love with the word sustainability, but globally, the reason a lot of our systems have been installed is around greenhouse gas emission and the ability to find more efficient genetics and lessen the environmental footprint of dairy or beef production,
Owen: I think that's really our company mission and personal mission in a lot of ways. We've got to be able to say that we stand for food first. Technology is great, but how well we can apply it all the way through the supply chain and say, "We made this impact by helping drive these decisions at conception"? Actually before conception, sire tests, all the different things Bryce was just talking about. Driving it before conception, making those decisions, and then ending up with the consumer, having a product that they're really enjoying that had a significant decrease in environmental impact, I think is really a powerful story.
I think it puts our company and to us as professionals in a really unique place. Specifically, if we're looking at IVF providers, it's not a new technology, but to be able to combine it with this thought process and this mentality of using it to better impact the planet and better impact the consumer at the end of the day, pretty proud of that.
Bryce: For some of those that are still on the fence about sustainability, two-thirds of the cost of beef production is in feed. It just makes plain old-fashioned sense to select for improved feed efficiency and you get all these other benefits that will allow over time for companies and beef producers to differentiate their products because they can make a sustainability claim and they can use advanced technology to rapidly multiply the best of the best.
Owen: I completely agree. I think the same on the dairy side. There's probably a lot of your audience, a lot of our audience now is probably out milking cows right now. What does that mean if we could help decommodify the product that you're selling at the end of the day? I think that's a really powerful statement. The vision I think that we all should have or could have in the dairy industry is taking bids for tankers of milk. This tank was produced by cows that were this breed composite, that had this feed intake that produced this amount of components and a lot of that is really-- The start of that is now, I think. I think that that mentality and that kind of paradigm shift of genetics is just for my bull stud or my feed company is the guy who needs to be driving efficiency. I think that we can really empower the producer to keep moving the needle.
Joe: I think that's important to note. I think we'll wrap it there where we're talking about the big message being improving efficiency is good for everyone, the environment, and your own economics. At this point, if you do it correctly, also our image with the general public. Efficiency, good for everybody and that's what we should be focused on. We're going to wrap there. Next week, we'll be having Vytelle back again. Make sure you come back and join us again for that. Thank you, Bryce and Owen, for being on today. We really appreciate it.
Owen: Thank you.
Joe: With that, if you want to learn more, please, please visit vytelle.com. That is V-Y-T-E-L-L-E.com. If you have questions for us, scathing rebuttals, any of that kind of stuff, you can send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Check out our website as well, extension.umn.edu. With that, we'll end the plugs for today. Thank you everybody for listening. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: Bye. Guys, that was good. I felt that that was fun. I was nervous.
Joe: You didn't think you were going to have fun today?
Emily: I didn't know. I had no idea.
[laughter]
Owen: You thought that was just going to be awful and boring.
Emily: I've been wondering what this is going to be like and I really enjoyed myself. Thanks.
Owen: This is what we usually do. If we can get it to move and continue to be like we're just sitting at the bar, having a beer, and laying on the back of a napkin to try to figure out the world's problems, that's what we want it to feel like, which we've all done plenty, right?
Emily: Right.

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