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New technology! Another tool for the tool box. UMN Extension equine and forage specialist, and cattle owner Krishona Martinson is with us to discuss a study done with B-wrap to investigate hay storage, hay quality, and beef cows.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
[music] [cow mooing]
Joe: Welcome to the Moosroom, everybody. We have another guest, an extension colleague, Emily, and my�s boss, Krishona Martinson is with us. She is the extension educator for horses, for equine. It's good that we have her because I don't know a ton about horses and I don't look forward to answering questions about horses and she handles all of that.
In addition, she is a forage and weed expert. She's with us today. We're going to talk about some research that came out. Pretty big stuff, especially with a lot of farmers out there not having facilities and having that be expensive. It's a good topic to get into. Thank you for being here today, Krishona. We really appreciate it.
Krishona: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Joe: Two questions, I always ask these two questions.
Emily: Question time.
Joe: They're super important. We know you have beef cows at home, so we're going to start with dairy. What is your favorite dairy breed? It has to be a purebred. There is a right answer.
Krishona: The only reason I might disappoint Brad. I actually grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, so Holsteins is my answer.
Joe: Oh, that is so unfortunate. That hurts a little bit.
Bradley: This is tied now. Now it's tied again.
Joe: Actually, it's not.
Bradley: It�s not? Oh, the Holsteins are ahead.
Joe: The Holsteins are ahead. That puts us at Holsteins with four, Jerseys with three, Dutch Belted with two, Normandy with one, Brown Swiss with one, and Montb�liarde with one. Very disappointing but that�s okay. We'll take it.
Emily: It's a good choice.
Joe: At least you didn't say Dutch Belted, that�s all I ask.
Emily: Rude.
Joe: [chuckles] All right, same question but we're talking beef.
Krishona: Well, that's easy, Herefords.
Bradley: Yes. Woo-hoo.
Emily: Wow.
Krishona: If somebody tells me that that�s a grandpa's choice anymore, I'm going to have a meltdown.
[laughter]
Bradley: Well, that's what my grandpa had as well.
Emily: Shona, do you have any Herefords at your place?
Krishona: That's all we have is Herefords.
Emily: Okay. Love it.
Joe: Well, that's a good choice. I can't go wrong with Hereford. My choice is Angus, but Hereford is definitely a close second. If I had to choose a cow to work with, I would take Hereford. That puts us at Herefords with four leading the pack.
Emily: Wow.
Bradley: Wow, yes.
Joe: Black Angus with three, Chianina with one, Brahman with one, Stabilizer with one, and our exception to the purebred rule, the Black Baldy with one.
Emily: Sorry, I forgot we made that exception.
Joe: I randomly made that exception for John David.
Emily: Some people get special treatment on things like that.
Joe: Shout out to John David there.
Emily: Yes, John David. Whoo.
Joe: Let's get into the topic for today. We're talking about different ways to wrap bales. The newer technology that's out there that I think has changed the game and I think the research has backed up my thoughts. Krishona, give us an overview of the-- sorry, just hang tight.
Emily: A rundown.
Joe: Give us the rundown on how this whole study was set up.
Krishona: Like you said, there's new technologies coming out all the time. I think everybody knows that twine had its day and most people now use net wrap, but there's a new product that has come out in the last handful of years called B-Wrap. I think of it as like a Tyvek for a round bale. As these claims are coming out, of course, all of us in extension get a lot of questions. We started getting questions from people on, is it really as good as the barn, does it live up to its expectations.
A lot of it was focused around the cost. If you look at the average cost for twine, a bale is about $1 to bind that round bale. Your average four-foot by five-foot round bale in twine is like $1.17 for net wrap. B-Wrap jumps you up just a little over $8 a bale. When people see that price tag, their eyes get pretty big just like--
Emily: Whoa.
Joe: Whoa.
Krishona: You get a lot of questions about the product. That's really what stemmed this research was just questions from farmers.
Joe: Wow.
Emily: I am still in shock about $8 a bale.
Joe: I know.
Emily: I think we've never had complete silence like that before.
Joe: No. I knew it was expensive. $8 a bale shock me. Now, I've read the research, I've read the abstract, and the rest of the paper I think is probably still worth it. I think you can pencil it out and I'm sure that's a discussion we can continue to have, but really that was the point. We're comparing twine to net wrap to B-Wrap. You didn't include storing in a barn in the study, did you?
Krishona: No. We actually did a follow-up study, but we haven't got to those results quite yet. Essentially, what we did is we split up a field, an alfalfa field into different sections, baled the bales with net wrap, B-Wrap, and twine. Then for a year, we stored them outside on pallets. Every three months, we weighed the bales and we sampled the bales to get a good distribution over the year thinking the year is about the longest hay would be stored at a typical barn, and then just looked at the results after that year ended.
Joe: It's drastic the difference, that's the big piece. When you look at twine versus net wrap versus the B-Wrap, you can see why it's more expensive because there's a difference when you're just looking at the hay, and we'll get into the second part of the study later. When you're just looking at the hay, there's a dramatic difference in what's going on there. For me, I'm the vet, I'm biased. I want to see mold, I want to see spoilage, and things like that because it affects health and dry matter intake. How big of a difference was it on that front?
Krishona: It was a pretty significant difference. Surprisingly, within the first 90 days of storage, the bales were very similar. Even the twine bales looked great, the analysis was similar to when they were harvested. After 90 days in storage is when things really started to take a turn. After 90 days in storage, the B-wrap bales were able to maintain their nutrient profile, so crude protein was maintained, the fiber values, and then, of course, relative feed value was calculated off those values, that was maintained.
Where the bales that were wrapped in twine and net rap really started to decline. At the end of the year of outdoor storage, there was a significant enough difference where the B-wrap bales on average had a $10 greater value per bale than the other two wrap types. It really did pay for itself, so it overcame that initial upcharge in the B-wrap. At the end of the year, it was a more valuable product simply because B-wrap is able to better shed moisture and water, which we all know is something we want to avoid when we're storing hay outdoors.
Emily: Podcast is done.
Joe: Podcast is over.
Krishona: Spoiler alert, yes, done.
Joe: No more episodes. Well, again, we've talked about this on our show a lot where it's applied research is the thing that really gets most of us going. The stuff that happens preliminary or the sometimes in the lab is very important and it needs to happen, but when it's a real-world situation and I can see the effect immediately, that's the research I want to see and that's the research that I hope most of our department and everyone at the University of Minnesota in extension is trying to do.
This is a perfect example, especially with an economic analysis that says, should you do this or not? It's pretty straightforward and I love it. The other half of this study, also equally interesting. You guys didn't just look at value and analysis and testing, you fed this hay, you actually fed it.
Krishona: Yes, and even though I'm a horse specialist, I would have preferred to feed it to horses, but I think we can all agree that horses like to die. Just simply looking at the hay, you could see the mold and you could see that crust that had formed on the bales and we knew we couldn't feed it to horses. We collaborated with Alfredo De Constanzo on our department and we fed it to Angus cow-calf pairs. Those cows had calved in the fall so the hay sat outside for an additional four months while we waited for those cows to come off pasture and calf.
Then we basically did a preference trial. We set out three bales at a time, one was net wrap, one with B-Wrap, and one with twine. Miraculously, guess what? The cattle always chose to consume the bale that was wrapped in B-Wrap.
Joe: I've looked at the numbers on this too, and again, not really close at all. They always chose the B-Wrap first and they always ate way more of it. They didn't eat anything else until they were forced to. It's a big difference and they can tell. We've known this, this isn't anything new. We've known that cattle will choose the better quality hay, they can smell the mold, they can do that, and it's not a big difference.
What's interesting to me is this has long-term health effects. Quality hay without all the added mold and spoilage and anything else these cattle consume has long-term health effects for just dry matter intake, body condition in general, but also for fertility and pregnancy, either current pregnancies, dropping them depending on what toxins are present. Then even just getting pregnant by being able to have the correct body condition.
Hopefully down the road that's where we're going to go with some of this, is try to show that it does have a long-term impact. I think that's maybe in the works or we're trying as hard as we can.
Krishona: We're certainly trying. With that initial study, we didn't look at the mold content, but we knew when we fed it to the animals that that was an important factor. We did look at the mold content and the bales wrapped in B-wrap had significantly less mold. Then the bales in twine had the highest level, and then net wrap was intermediate. When you're doing an intake trial and measuring what the cattle eat, you can correlate things. We knew that the cattle intake or what they preferred to eat was correlated to the mold concentration.
Like you said, Joe, that's not a surprise. Others have found that as well across multiple species; sheep, goats, cattle. It was just an interesting facet of the results that the cattle certainly somehow would seek out obviously through smell or taste and would prefer that hay that was better quality.
Joe: This is a good deal, a big deal. It's not just cows. We focus on cows on this podcast. It's not just beef cows either. This is a solution, a very good solution for people that don't have hay storage. Now, still the gold standard, I'm not advocating to use B-wrap instead of a building, but I think there's a really good leg to this and it's something that people should be considering.
How different does it look? That was my question. I haven't seen a ton of pictures of B-wrap. Does it look like a net wrap? Doesn't look like the big white net wrap.
Krishona: It's not encapsulated or enclosed in the plastic wrap. It literally looks and feels like Tyvek that people use when they're building a house. That's a moisture vapor barrier, but the Tyvek is actually held in place by a wrap of B-wrap. If you look at it, it is like a membraney papery kind of product that's hard to rip, almost like a landscape fabric. It's breathable but it definitely just provides more coverage to the bale.
When you're trying to make sure water doesn't penetrate the bale, the more coverage you have, the better. Obviously, a little twine string wrapped around every two or four inches just doesn't provide the coverage that net wrap or B-wrap does.
Bradley: When we talk about B-wrap, we're not talking about wrapping like white plastic around the bales. That's what I originally thought of it is, [inaudible 00:13:03] [crosstalk]
Emily: That's what I picture in my mind, [unintelligible 00:13:05]
Bradley: White plastic around the bales. That's not what this is at all. They still can breathe from the ends of the bale. It's very different. People are thinking it's wrapped. It's not totally wrapped like a bale like that.
Krishona: It wraps the same as net wrap or twine. It's just that it's more of a solid covering and it's a dark gray light blackish color, but then again, it has that layer of net wrap. Joe, that's probably what you were seeing. It does keep it, it helps hold it in place. A few other things that we found is, twine takes forever to bind. It was an average of just under a minute per bale. Net wrap was the fastest, and B-wrap was intermediate because you're essentially wrapping it with the B-wrap and then holding it in place with that net wrap.
It took about 30 seconds of bale which doesn't seem a lot, but if you're trying to get through a field of 600 round bales, time is money. I think that's also why twine has gone out. Simply takes so long, and the farmer we were collaborating with, he really had to twist his arm to put twine in that round bale.
Joe: I could see that. It does take a long time. Go ahead, Em.
Emily: As is tradition, I have a dumb question. That question is, what direction did you have the bales when they were outside because I'm thinking about-
Krishona: That's a good question.
Emily: -where that exposed end, one was on the ground and one was up, or was it hotdog style?
Krishona: That's actually a really good question. Throughout that full year, we always look at dry matter because dry matter is what you're buying, what you're selling, what you're feeding. We used a newer John Deere baler, and that's one of the limitations or complaints we hear about B-wrap is it's only available, it's a John Deere product. If you have, and we are not endorsing John Deere whatsoever, it's just that's the only baler that you can use the B-wrap with. That is a limitation.
We had a newer baler and it made a very nice dense bale, and we stored these bales on pallets because in Minnesota lately, we've been getting this rain in December. We knew we'd have to move those bales every three months and we couldn't risk them freezing to the ground and then having a huge dust with the wrap coming off. They were stored on pallets and they were stored on the wrap edge.
Those cut edges that are exposed were spaced about three inches to five inches apart from one another to allow some airflow, and that is really one of our recommendations. If you're going to store round bales outside, you have to store them on some kind of a well-drained surface, preferably a pallet. If something else, a gravel pad, a cement pad, something that will help put that barrier between a lot of ground moisture and then forming a really dense bale and stacking it in like that sausage roll really helps preserve it.
If you're stacking them inside, you can stack them like a soup can because then it's just a space saver, and of course, you have that protection from the roof. You're trying to limit that environmental exposure from that cut edge. Sunlight, moisture, and that's what we look for. Even at the end of the year, our twine bales only lost 7% dry matter. The B-wraps maintained it, and those net wrap bales lost 5%. Really not huge losses from being stored outside, likely because of how we chose to store them. Emily, that was a very long answer to your question.
Emily: Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I have another question. Oh, no, Joe, you can go.
Joe: I just wanted to say that the thing I always come back to when I talk about hay storage and bale storage is, especially with round bale, you look at how much of the volume is in the outer six inches. That's my big thing I always come back to. It immediately to me justifies figuring out a way to do it better. If you don't have indoor storage, you should think about how you could get it. If you're not using a product like B-wrap, you should think about it.
When you're talking about a five-foot bale, a five-foot round bale, 33% of the bale is in the outer six inches. A third of that bale is in the outer six inches, which is the most exposed to the weather. It's the most exposed to the rain. A bunch of it is on the ground potentially if you're not storing it up or on a well-drained surface. To me, that's the thing that really I come back to all the time, especially with hay being expensive, it's gotten really expensive and you can't afford to just throw it away through the bale. If you want to do something about it, the break-even is pretty easy to come by.
Krishona: Absolutely, Joe. I'm a practical person. I grew up on a dairy farm. We have beef cattle. I think the biggest thing to come out of here is, if you're going to store hay outside, really if you're storing round bales for the first 90 days, it doesn't matter. Obviously in Minnesota, most of us are storing round bales for much longer than that. Perhaps you put some hay in the shed, you have equipment to put in the shed.
I understand it's expensive for that shed space, but really the hay that maybe you're going to feed come March and April before you're on pasture, while you're calving, maybe that hay is wrapped in B-wrap just to preserve it better or maybe that hay is stored in the barn. I think practically, nobody's going to put all of their hay into B-wrap, but maybe the percentage of your hay supply that you're going to use in late spring, maybe whatever that percentage is, either that hay is stored in the shed or you wrap it in B-wrap or do a combination of some of those options.
Joe: Em, what were you going to say? You had something.
Emily: I did. I feel like I'm always the one who asks this question whenever we're talking about studies and different things. Did you look at labor at all or did you notice any big differences in one type of wrapping being more laborious than another? I don't know if you looked at that, thought about it from an economic standpoint or anything.
Krishona: Emily, that's a great question too. The problem with B-wrap is it is expensive because you don't wrap as many bales at one time. You are having to change out that role more frequently. That has also been a complaint of some farmers is, like you said, time is money, labor is money, you're getting on the tractor. Those things are not light. Net wrap, you can bale a lot more bales. It's really quick. B-wrap, you are having to change out that wrap.
Now, we did not take that into consideration, nor did we take into consideration the possible upcharges to a baler that you might have to have. The farmer that we worked with, the B-wrap kit was included in the special when he purchased the baler. Others might have a different situation with their dealership. Labor and time and really cost are all things. We did not specifically look at the time it took to bind the bales or change out that net wrap in this study.
Joe: That's a good question, Em. If you think of it as a $2 margin over the other, because you spent $8, but you got the bales that was worth $10 more. That labor could eat up that $2 pretty quick. I think that's where it comes back to, you don't have to wrap all your bales with B-wrap. This is a tool in the toolbox that is clearly effective, and you should probably think about how to use it, but you don't have to wrap everything. Which would be the ideal situation where you have a chance to decide what you're going to wrap and how much you need to wrap and then go from there.
I had a question. How did you pick up the bales? Can you still pick them up with times, or do you have to be really careful with these bales that are wrapped in B-wrap?
Krishona: When we moved the bales, we had on the skid loader, we just had a bale spear. We would just spear the bales from that cut edge and move them around. Obviously, when we took our hay samples because, of course, we were taking samples frequently, they looked like little Swiss cheese blocks by the time we were done. You do have to be careful about puncturing the integrity of that B-wrap. We actually filled the holes with wine corks, and no, we did not drink that much wine, we just got the corks.
Emily: Oh.
Krishona: Come on, I know.
Emily: Bummer. Gosh.
Krishona: We filled them with corks, and then we just used that gorilla tape and put it over that hole, just because we did not want to ruin the integrity of the B-wrap because obviously, in a real life situation, you're not going to have 36 holes on each side of the bale when you go to feed it. Joe, we did remove all those corks, and we fed those whole beef cattle just to make sure we wouldn't cause any problems with them.
Joe: I don't think they would even notice.
Emily: I was wondering, I'm like, "Did they feed the bales with the corks in?"
Joe: They probably could have. I don't think they would have cared. No, I had seen a picture, and I was like, I wonder if those are sampling holes, if those are spear holes or what. Now that makes sense. You want to maintain that integrity as much as you can.
Krishona: Importantly, we haven't asked. Right before we fed the bales, we did remove their wrap. I know, especially with net wrap, and you all can probably validate this, but I think there's been research in the decoders that show that when they do neat crops here and cattle that have not had the wrap removed, that wrap is still in the room and it can cause massive problems.
Joe: Twine too.
Krishona: We did remove everything immediately before we fed it.
Joe: That's a big thing. It's a pet peeve of mine. I know people are strapped for time, I know it's a pain to cut everything, then move the bale, and then make sure you got everything off. I think it's a huge gain.
Emily: It's also a pain to have dead cows.
Joe: Oh, yes, I have plenty of cows that are just full in that wrap. They'll eat anything. If you put it in the bunk, it's going to end up inside them. I've taken halters out of cows. I've taken lots of baling twine. I took a section of hose out of a cow one time. There's all, not all small section, a 10-foot-long section. I don't know how the hell it happened. There's a lot of different stuff, you got to be careful with that kind of thing.
Krishona: Really, it's accidental ingestion. They're just eaten away. As they're taking in that long-stem forage, it just keeps coming and coming. We say the same thing with horses, but man, if a horse would have any net wrap, I'd guarantee you it would be a colleague that would not end well.
Joe: Horses are-- we'll call them fragile. What else, is there anything else you want us to ask you, Krishona, that we haven't? I don't know if there's anything else that we need to cover.
Krishona: No. I think the only other surprising thing is that we did stratify the hay samples that we took. Like you mentioned, we know that that outer six inches of the bales where 30 something percent depending on the physical size of it, is where most of the hay and the dry matter is located. Even with the twine bales at the end of the year, our spoilage did not go beyond that six inches, which was surprising because when you've looked at those bales, when we went to feed them, they looked tough. They were brown and gray, and that's why we knew we couldn't feed them to a horse.
The minute you scratch that surface, and the cattle just take their heads and flip that layer off. The minute you got past that, it was really great-looking hay. Of course, that weathered layer on the B-wrap was incredibly thin.
Joe: That's what I see. When I see bales that are outside, and they've become slumped, and I know they've been outside a long time, and they are either just net wrapped or twine, what you've done is just taken a third to half of your bale and made bedding, because the cows are going to just get rid of it and get to the hay they want to eat. If you're okay with that being bedding, that's fine, but hay's too expensive in my mind to just make bedding that way.
I think we've covered it all. We better quit. We could probably just talk all day, but it's time. We should wrap this episode, B-wrap this episode. [chuckling] If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals, 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, extension.umn.edu. There is an article just about this search for bale wrapping research or B-wrap. You should be able to find it. It'll pop up. You can see everything that we talked about today in written form. Please check us out on Facebook at UMNBeef and at UMNDairy, and on YouTube, UMN Farm Safety and Health.
Emily: UMN Extension Pharmacy.
Joe: I always get that [unintelligible 00:26:36]
Emily: So close yet so far. [laughs]
Joe: So close. Then there is a horse Facebook that is extensive and very well-followed and very well-managed, and that is at?
Speaker 1: UMN Extension Equine Facebook page.
Joe: Perfect. That is great. I get Krishona's newsletter, I check out Facebook every once in a while, big following, big following. That's all we got. We'll be back next week. Thank you, everybody.
Emily: Bye.
Joe: Bye.
[music]
Emily: I can't believe how shook we were when Krishona was like, $8 a bale. I was like, "What?"
Krishona: You guys are so good. I can see why people love this.
Joe: Oh, thank you.
[music]
[00:27:25] [END OF AUDIO]
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