Mike Stark – Baker, Montana

“We run a ranch in southeast Montana. We’re currently running about 450 head of mama cows and about 200 head of replacement heifer calves out of our own herd. 

We come across Riomax®, we called and asked about it. At the time I was kind of skeptical of pricing and putting that much money into a program. We went on with it, and found results within about two months of using it. Rio ensured us that it's a results-based tub. 

It was probably one of the first times in all the years of running cattle that we actually were seeing results that easily. So we became very impressed with that product at that point, and we've used it ever since. We've been on it for approximately five years and have seen some very good results. 

Big hay savings, good breed up in our cattle, better weight gains. We see the contentedness of our cattle has really changed along with that, and the manageability of them. The labor going into those cattle is way less than what we were doing before. We've been able to eliminate the timing window of when we put out certain products with all the tools that are in the Rio tub. That's the biggest thing that I have seen, being able to get rid of that timing challenge. Now that we have everything in one tub and it's fed year-round, we got rid of that timing guess. 

I think the hardest part with selling Rio, and it took me a long time to get used to it, was getting my mind over that threshold and staying in that focal point of indirect feeding; learning to work with the customer with what they have on hand to feed and working with their feed products that they already have bought and put in place on their ranches. Whether it be their grass, their hay, cake, corn, whatever they have, you're learning to work with those feeds.”