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Thank you for joining us today for this month's University of Wisconsin Division of Extension Badger Dairy Insights. A monthly webinar series offered on the third Tuesday of each month. Badgery Insights provides the latest dairybased information to improve animal welfare, breeding and genetic selection, automation and modernization, and nutritional decisions for producers, dairy workers, managers, and agricultural professionals. My name is Heather Sleser, the dairy educator for Marathon and Clark


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counties, and I will be your host today. Since this is a webinar format, please use the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit any questions or comments. As this webinar is being recorded, we will send you a link to the recorded webinar within a week so you can share it with others you work with. Remember, sharing is caring. Our speakers today are Dr. Paul Fricky and his PhD student, Whitney Brown. Whitney grew up on a dairy farm in Belleville, Wisconsin. She received her bachelor's in dairy science from W River Falls in


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2019, her master's in animal science from the University of Wyoming in 2003, and she is currently in her second year of her PhD with Dr. Paul Freriy. Dr. Paul Fricky was raised on his family's road crop and dairy farm located near Pilion, Nebraska, where his family continues to farm today. Dr. Dr. Fricki joined the faculty in the department of dairy science at the University of Wisconsin Madison on July 1st, 1998. His research program focuses on understanding the bi the biology underlying the numerous reproductive


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problems encountered in modern dairy cattle. Dr. Frickie has authored or co-authored 109 peer-reviewed journal publications, 145 abstracts, and six book chapters. Whitney, at this time I would like to turn it over to you. All right, Heather, thank you so much. Uh, thanks for having us. Um, so I'm going to start out here and just get us kicked off. And I want to do a little bit of background to kind of set Whitney up for the presentation that she's going to give. And this is um some data from a uh review article that I uh wrote


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published with my colleague Dr. Milo Wilbank. And in it, what we're looking at here, the line you're seeing on the screen, this purple line, is the phenotypic trend in days open from 1955 to 2020. And of course with days open and reproduction, we want shorter days open rather than longer longer state days open. So shorter days open is better. So you can see there there's this long-term trend from 1955 all the way up to the year 2000 when we see this long-term trend for increasing days open. That's reflective of poor


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reproductive performance or decreasing reproductive performance. But what you can see is that in the year 2000 there was a radical shift and we started to see a dramatic decrease in days open. So I call this period from 2000 to 2025 or to today this kind of a quarter of a century a reproduction revolution. And so we've been able to dramatically improve reproduction. And so one of the ways we've been able to do this in the box you can see there is by increasing the service rate. We can use time AI


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programs. Most of our farms have bought automated activity monitoring uh technology. So, we have good ways that we can uh put semen into cows, which is the uh service rate. But Whitney, if you want to hit the button there. This is a trend um that I kind of predicted that we would see, and it's something that we worked on for a long time. You can see the initial decrease in days open was not reflected by an increase in conception rate. Average conception rates up until about 2015 were in the mid 30% range for our lactating dairy


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cows. Over about the last 10 years, we've seen a dramatic improvement in the conception rate. And uh that's exciting. And if you want to just hit that button again, Whitney, I think there's two primary reasons for this increased fertility. It's um the adoption of fertility programs like a double offsync program which actually increase conception rate compared to breeding cows to an estrus as well as this concept of the high fertility cycle. And I believe I've done um a a webinar on the Badger Dairy Insight on the high


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fertility cycle. It's just that if we can get cows pregnant quickly after the end of the voluntary waiting period, they're going to um not have long lactations, they're going to cave at a lower body condition score and therefore they won't lose a lot of body condition and that leads to better reproduction. So I think uh we've just seen this revolution and it's had an impact on what farmers are doing as far as their breeding programs. So Whitney, just go to the next slide. So I pulled this off of um an article from Hordes Dereman in


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in 2024. What that blue line is showing is the units the millions of units of domestic beef seaman sales. And you can see concurrent with about I said about 2015 is when we started to see the conception rate start to go up. Uh you can see it's kind of concurrent with that there was a a a slight increase. And around 2017, we see this dramatic increase in beef semen sales. So, go ahead and hit the button there, Whitney. Um, of the 9.4 million units of beef semen sold domestically in 2024, 7.9 million units were used in dairy herds.


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That's based on the National Association of Animal Breeders. That was up a million units from the years uh the year before. And I'll talk about this on the next slide. Go ahead and hit the button there. Um, sexorted dairy semen was at 9.9 million units in 2024. And if you hit it once more, conventional dairy semen was at 6.2 million units. So another concept I want to talk about here is uh sex sorted uh dairy semen and why people are using it. So go to the next slide. Um I just pulled this off of uh dairy


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herd management an article from June 5th. And uh this is a number that you know we've all been discussing and that we're all very aware of. Deer replacement heers and beef cross calves are fetching record-breaking prices this spring with Holene springers hitting $4,200 and beef cross calves surpassing $1,600. And so what we've seen over time is a dramatic change in in the types of semen that are being used. These beef crossbread calves are extremely valuable. where people are using more beef on dairy and then to take up the


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slack they're using a lot more sex seammen even in the lactating dairy cows but particularly in the non-lactating heers and I think this is going to kick us off uh really nicely to hear what Whitney has to say and some of the projects that that she's been uh working through so she'll go through the background go ahead and go to the next slide there Whitney um we're very interested in um replacement heers uh how they're growing own how they're reproductively managed. And so this was a title of Whitney's uh


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departmental seminar that she gave last semester. She's going to give us some background and uh talk about the latest data that she has. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you Whitney and you can take it away. Perfect. Um so as Paul kind of introduced, I'm working on um looking at modifying Heer's reproductive synchronization uh protocols. Um, and this was the title of my seminar, the modifications to a 5-day cedar sync protocol to improve synchrony of dairy heers for time day. And I'm going to start off with a little


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bit more background, which is rearing heers is very costly. Um, estimated about $2,355 from raising that calf from being born to entering the milking herd. And the majority of this cost can be found in the cost of what it takes to feed those animals. And this is one good thing because this is a cost that we can manage by getting those heers to enter the milking herd sooner and decreasing that cost on feed. Um, and one of these ways we can have them enter the herd sooner is um synchronizing um inseminations to


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increase uh to decrease um the times you have to in to breed them. And this study here from uh 2013, they looked at um different reproductive synchronization protocols, but they found out that the 5day cedar sync protocol is the best one for getting heers pregnant and um increased pregnancies per eye by at 59%. Compared to the other two.  Yeah. And I'm just going to jump in there real quick, Whitney, on this. Um, just to remind everybody that bottom protocol, that fiveday cedar sink protocol, that's kind


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of considered the gold standard protocol. Now, that's the one you're going to find in the in the dairy cattle reproduction council recommended protocols for dairy heers. And that conception rate uh 59% just under 60% is pretty typical, I would say, Whitney, for um conception rates to conventional se. So, just a little bit of background on that. That's kind of the standard standardized protocol. Go ahead, Whitney. And um just looking at like a characterization of um holstein heer fertility from 2006. So this is all


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conventional semen and um heers um had the greatest proportion was about around that 50 to 60% conception rate. So that um protocol that cedar sync protocol um did not decrease the fertility. It was about average with um normal inseminations across the US. and with that mean of 57%. And I'm just going to briefly walk through um as Paul described the gold standard 5day cedar sync protocol. And this protocol has two main issues. Um the first is that in between our second prostaglandon and time dayi about 30% of


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heers are going to experience estrus early and so they're going to be needed going to need to be inseminated early which um kind of defeats the purpose of a time dayi program if you have to breed animals twice in the same protocol. And so to fix this problem, um Megan Paul's other student um looked at a study looked at keeping this um cedar in for 6 days instead of 5 days. And the thought was if we keep that cedar in for an extra day, they're not going to experience that early estrus. And that is exactly what they saw. um


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those heers here in the 5-day group in that blue color um about 12% came into estrus early and about only 1% came into estrus early in that um 6 day group. So the six day group eliminated that early estrus. And when looking at pregnancies per eye with that conventional semen, there was no difference between pregnancies per eye at day 32 or at day 67. So the next study was let's look at this experiment but with sex semen because a lot more heers are being inseminated with sex semen. So let's see what that


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looks like. And in this study they had three different protocols. They had one where there was just a treatment of prostaglandon and then watch for estrus and inseminate. And then we did the 5-day cedar sink protocol and the 6 day and again that 5day had a about 30% estrus detection in that blue color about becoming coming into estrus about 24 hours early and only one heer came into estrus early in the six day group. But when you looked at pregnancies per eye when they were inseminated with sexed semen, the was a decrease in


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fertility with that 6-day protocol. It was about the same as normal estrus detection, but something was going on with that six-day group that um wasn't optimal for sex semen. And just a quick like um background of kind of why we think this might be happening is we remove in the 5-day protocol we remove the cedar at that um the 5day at the first prostaglandon and about 30% will come into estrus early so 48 hours later of those ones that don't come into estrus early their estrus onset will be about 52 to 59 hours after that first


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prostaglandon and then ovulation will occur about 80 hours after that first prostaglandon. Um which is 13 to 20 hours before ovulation um is when you inseminate which is optimal timing. But when we remove the cedar at the second prostaglandon, we eliminate that early estrus of onset of estrus. But their onset for those heers is pushed back to probably about 64 to 71 hours after the first prostaglandon. And ovulation probably won't occur until 96 hours later. So timei is occurring about 20 to 27


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hours before ovulation. So inseminating these heers with sex semen, it just might not be able to um insemination is not um good relative to when ovulation occurs.  Yeah. And Whitney, the one comment I would have here that I always tell everybody, one of the worst mistakes you can make with sex is breeding too early relative to ovulation. And as you've explained it here, um that's exactly what we did by leaving that uh progesterone in for an extra 24 hours. We push ovulation later. We kept time day at the same time. So


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we're putting semen in too early for the sex seam and it dropped fertility by about seven percentage points. So this group from Ireland decided let's see if we can improve this six-day protocol. And they did this um they did the same exact protocol having that cedar in for six days removing it at that second prostaglandon. Um and so that was their control group and then they tested just inseminating um giving that G&RH in the morning and then inseminating 8 hours later.  So they read our paper.  Yeah.  Yeah. They read


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our paper and we basically speculated that this this would be a good way to address that particular problem that you were talking about before. So they basically did the did the next experiment which is great and they saw an increase in uh fertility with about 9 percentage points um when they delayed that insemination. So, we have found a way to fix that first problem of the fiveday protocol. And I mentioned that there was two main problems. And the first problem, the next problem is that only about 25 to


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40% of heers will ovulate to that first G&R. Um, ovulating to this first G&RH will help set them up well for the rest of the protocol, um, theoretically. And um so we want them to ovulate there, but a lot of them don't.  And you know, Whitney, a lot of people ask ask me the question, why don't they ovulate? I mean, in a in a cow protocol at that first gener treatment, we will see ovulatory responses above 60%, 60 to 85% I would say. There's two problems with heers. Number one, they have more follicular waves. So there's a lot of


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times during a a random stage of the cycle when there's not an ovulatory follicle there. But the other thing about heers is they have higher progesterone and when they have high progesterone if there's a corpus ludium there even if they have an ovulatory follicle um you don't get a big enough LH search to cause. So so that's the reason heers are different than cows. We use different protocols with heers than cows. And so you're setting up really nicely kind of the two major issues we have with this


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protocol. And and so go ahead and show kind of what we were thinking to deal with this.  Yeah. So briefly kind of what Paul had said with our hypothalic hypothalammic pituitary gal access our hypothalammus will release that G&RH um and then our anterior pituitary will release our ganadropins, our LH and our FSH and which will cause ovulation of that ovary. But it will but if there's progesterone um that blocks that G&RH um LH surges um so we won't get that um ovulation if there's a lot of progesterone there.


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And this um was done in a study where they looked at G&R induced LH surge when cows had high versus low progesterone. And when they had high progesterone, they had a delayed um increase, but their mainly their surge was not as great as um with high progesterone as it was with that low progesterone. So that low progesterone really allows for that LH search to um to magnify. So, how do we fix this problem of them not ovulating when we know progesterone might be high? And this study from 2019 looked at pre-synchronizing these heers


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um giving them a treatment of prostaglandon 2 days before that first G&R of the cedar sync protocol. And so they looked at progesterone at G1 uh and they saw that when they were pre-synchronized, they had lower progesterone than those in the control group. Um and more of them ovulated to G1 um from the pre-synchronized group, 86% versus 19%. and um pregnant there was a tendency for pregnancy to be affected at day 32 and day 60 when those heers were pre-synchronized with greater pregnancies per AI.


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So now that we have two fixes to this protocols problem, this kind of leads into my study which is um going through my hypothesis which is pre-synchronization with prostagland and 2 days before beginning the cedar sync protocol will increase ovulatory response to G1 and heers submitted to a 6-day cedar sync protocol with delayed insemination will have more pregnancies per eye regardless of pre-synchronization with prostaglandin compared to to a standard 5day scar sync protocol. And these are some heers um from the one of the farms


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that I did my study at. Um they had some gernzies, so I had to take some pictures. None of them were part of the study, but they're just  Yeah, we didn't enroll any gernzies, but maybe we should have  maybe. Um so I had four different treatments. So heers were either um in our five-day group um randomly assigned to receive progesterone or prostaglandin sorry receive prostaglandon or to be an untreated control and then they would um two days later receive G&R with that cedar insert which was kept in for 5


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days and prostaglandon prostaglandon then prostaglandon and then timed day and G&R um there and with our six day cedar sink group um very similar our pro prostaglandon um randomly assigned to either receive it or be untreated and then 2 days later give G&RH keep that cedar in until that second prostaglandon and then receive G&R in the morning of breeding and then um inseminate 8 hours later and throughout this study I took blood samples at each um time point um each treatment time point. And then I um to


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look at progesterone throughout the study to see if they were synchronized. And then I also took um did some ultrasounds um throughout the protocol to look at um the follicular weight the ovulatory responses. And just a brief um experimental design. I had two farms that participated in the study and heers were randomly assigned to either the cedar sync um the cedar protocol so either fiveday or six day with that delayed insemination and then um pre-synchronization either they didn't receive it or they did and


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there's about 280 heers per main effect of this treatment um statistically I used general linear mixed effect models and um for progesterone and ovulatory response um and the pregnancy outcomes having farm as a random effect. So to get into this our results from our main effect of pre-synchronization on pro uh progesterone concentrations at the beginning of this protocol. So at prePGF there was no difference um in progesterone levels. But at G1 those heers that received that prepgf had a significantly lower


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progesterone concentration than those that did not receive that preGGF. And um so and then at PGF-1 um there was again no significant differences in those um progesterone levels or pro progesterone concentrations. And when we go and look at the end tail end of the protocol with our second pro progester second prostaglandon in our um G NRH2 um at PGF2 there was an effect of cedar protocol and that is just because that cedar in the 6day group was left in until that day. So they're going to have higher progesterone concentrations


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um than the 5day group. Um, and there was no difference at G2 in progesterone concentrations. Um, I looked at ovulatory response with those ultrasounds and this took about 30 hours of my time. Um, there was 200 2,244 videos that I took throughout this study. Um, I had a lot of undergrads help me um, go through all these videos that I took. and um looking for f those big ovulatory follicles and then seeing if they turned into CLS at um the next scan. And when we looked at the proportion of heers that ovulated to that first G&R,


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there was a significant increase in heers that ovulated um when they received pre um prostaglandon that pre prostaglandon. was about it basically doubled um with that obliatory response. So Whitney, this is this is kind of a key result here, right? I mean, this is your first hypothesis. Um 31.7% aviatory response. If you don't preschronize them because they have higher progesterone, you get progesterone down, we dramatically, that's a big increase.  Double doubled aviatory response. we're getting it into


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the lower end of where we would see in a lactating cow protocol. So, this is really this is good. This is what we were trying to accomplish. So, this is um really kind of an interesting uh aspect of your study here.  Yes. Um when we looked at the proportion of heers that ovulated to the second G&RH, so the breeding G&R, um there was no significant differences between um the combination of treatments um at this time, which I kind of expected this to be a little different, but it was not. Yeah. And also, we talked about this


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yesterday a little bit. I kind of would have expected those Ivatory responses to be in the low 90s, low to mid 90s, but they're  they're sitting right in the mid to high 80s. So, um, again, I think it illustrates that these these protocols and heers are not, uh, they're not like the protocols we have in lactating cows. They don't synchronize them as well. So, that's really your challenge, Whitney, is to figure out how to how to get these efforts to synchronize better.  Yes, it's a big challenge.


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Um so when we looked at pregnancies per AI by treatment um there was um at day 32 and day 60 there was an effect of cedar and that's just because this 6 day group that was not pre-synchronized was very low with their pregnancies per eye. Um but overall there really wasn't an effect of um the treatments on pregnancies pay per AI at day 32 day 60 or um pregnancy loss between um day 32 or day 60  and actually if you look at that the big thing we're looking at here is this what we would call an interaction certainly for the


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fiveday treatment prepGF had no effect on pregnancy outcomes. But in the six day protocol, um that's your interaction, right? It seems that there was an effect there and um improving it by giving that pro uh process plan up front. So that's kind of interesting. And then pregnancy losses across the board are very low. That's typical for for heers.  Yes. So from my hypothesis with that first one where we expected pre-synchronization to increase ovulatory response to G1 um we accepted this hypothesis because that's what


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happened. We saw that big increase um 30 to 30% to 60% between those two groups. And in the my second hypothesis where we expected that 6-day cedar sync protocol with delayed insemination to have more pregnancies per eye um regardless of pre-synchronization we had to reject this hypothesis because um we didn't see that um uh they were they were different. So um so summary our pre-synchronized heers had decreased progesterone concentrations at G&RH1. Our six day cedar heers had greater progesterone concentrations at um PGF 3


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or two. Um, and this was just because of that cedar being left in for that extra day um, in that six-day group. And then our pre PGF heers had greater ovulatory response to G1 than heers that were not pre-synchronized. And for future directions for me, I'm doing a large scale fertility trial this summer, kind of trying to look more into this um, nuances of these protocols. And I'm also working on doing a characterization of dairy heer management on Wisconsin farms. Um working on that this summer. And uh all


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the people that helped me, the farms that um allowed us to do this study and my lab members and all the undergrads that helped. All right, Whitney, that's really great. Um thanks for taking us through that. really uh this is your first kind of major uh field trial uh first attempt to try to look and see if we can improve these protocols. Uh we were able to get double the aviator response. It doesn't seem to be maybe that's not the rate limiting step. We still need to kind of uh play around with this. I think the


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study that you're going to do later this summer is a largecale trial. We want we want to have four or 500 heers. You had about would you have aboutundred and 40. How many?  140 for each group. Yeah.  So, some of the things that we're seeing in your current data set, maybe be just because we have low numbers of heers, it's more of a physiology trial where you took a lot of blood samples and scans to try to see what's going on in the ovaries. But um I think once we get past this study that you're going to do


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later this summer with bigger numbers, we'll have a better answer as far as whether the prepgf is really improving fertility or not. Yes.  So that'll be exciting. Look for that. So anyhow, Whitney, thank you for uh taking us through that. And if Heather's still there, you can kind of wrap us up here. Yes, you didn't lose me. I am still here. Um, so I put it in the chat, but if anyone has any questions at this time, I don't see anything in the Q&A, but um, I'm sure Paul and Whitney would love to answer some of your questions.


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So, feel free to type them into the Q&A. Um, or if you can't find it, I can see you in the chat as well. So, I'll give you guys a little bit of time to get your questions typed in. Um, while you are doing that, I would like to invite you to join us next month on July 15th for our next Badger Insight. The topic is how can nutrition help us in taming inflammation and improving cow health. Uh, to register and learn more about next month's webinar, please visit go periodw period.edu edu back/badger.


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All right, so there is a question that just popped in for you guys. I knew if I talked long enough we'd get one. All right, so how applicable is dairy goats? Uh, okay. So dairy goats. Uh, this is a interesting question. This is from an anonymous attendee. Um, I am not an expert on reproduction and dairy goes. What I can tell you is that obsync type protocols do work in goats. Um, but I'm not sure whether the modifications that we're looking at to the protocols and I'm not even sure if they're modified protocols in goats for


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for an obscync type protocol. So, um, I'm going to kind of punt on that question a little bit because I but I do know that obscync like protocols they they do use them in ghost to synchronize them. So interesting interesting question. Anything out there with dairy heers or lactating dairy cows? We'll have to have um yeah, we'll have to do it. We've got a new paper out Heather was going to mention on timing of insemination um which might be a really good topic for Badger Insight at some point as


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well. So,  yeah, that sounds good. And honestly, I look forward to hearing more about the results after Whitney's summer project and getting more animals in there. So, yeah. All right. Well, I don't see any more that have popped in. Um, Whitney, if you want to go to the next one, I can wrap us up, but it wants to. There we go.  There you go. All right. So for more information on unbiased universitybased dairy resources, please visit extension dairy program on the web. You can also scan the various QR codes there to reach us.


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Uh we also have a QR code for the Badger Dairy Insights which will uh take you to the registration page if you are not signed up for the July one. Uh you can also subscribe to our dairy e newsletter which is always chocked full of valuable information. Uh so don't feel shy. Make sure you check us out. And again, we are also on Facebook. So, thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Dr. Fricky and Whitney for being with us. And Whitney, thank you so much for sharing your research and what you have going


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on. It's I took two pages of notes, so appreciate it.  Yeah. So, awesome. Thank you very much. Thanks. It's been a pleasure.