#29 | When Ranchers Don’t See Results On Riomax

There's customers that go so far as to ask us to pay him five thousand dollars to not badmouth us on social media. Welcome back to that ranching podcast. We're thrilled to have you. This is the next episode of the naysayers on social media and how we respond to that. Darren says, I heard they're so good they quit eating grass and hay altogether, lol. I haven't tried them. I wanted to, but I know a couple guys that did and didn't see a difference. Now firstly, when we're hearing that feedback, I would challenge were we measuring the results? Some of the time what we hear is if they didn't do it for long enough or it wasn't in a situation where they could actually measure that performance, it is tough to see results because the cows didn't have enough time to acclimate to it or there was no comparison to know what what the results were. And an example of that, a guy using Rhyzogreen. We have plenty of these pictures where you can see the side by side difference, and guy saying, you know what, I can't see from the road the visual difference, and so I feel like it didn't work. I'm okay with that, but what we go and do or encourage him to do is cut a sample, you know, like a square foot of plants from the treated and then plants from the control, this is alfalfa, and invariably what you see is you have less atrophy on the rhizogreen, in other words, you have more leaf growth closer to the ground and less yellowing of that stem, and that equals tons. Right? But if you're not weighing it or you're not measuring it, you're just eyeballing it, I get it. It might look like there's no difference, but that's an example of if you don't measure it, you won't know how much it helped. It's like me complaining back to the Ford dealership that this was supposed to see increase in fuel efficiency on this new EcoBoost, and he says, so have you been measuring? And I'm like, no. No. That's that's a dumb example, but What what I will say when we did a study a few years back on our customers, we asked for feedback on if they felt like Riomax paid for itself in their operation, and eight out of ten ranchers said it paid for itself. One and a half said not sure yet, still deciding, and then half a rancher or five percent said no. And I think what that highlights there is, does it work for everyone or with the environmental changes that happen year on year with ranchers? There's scenarios absolutely where something didn't go quite as planned. I think that would be stupid if we wouldn't say that that, you know, there's times when, like we said in an earlier episode, the science works. We know when we're feeding the rumen, the microbes inside the rumen of a cow, we're gonna have an impact. Now, we've had it year over year where if someone's comparing to last year and there's a drastic change in the forage quality or, you know, maybe they got rain one year and didn't get rain the next. There there's things that change that are gonna drive the cows needs up and down and that can vary results quite drastically. So those are scenarios where there is times ranchers, you know, they maybe use the product. And if we're comparing to last year, they ate the same amount of feed. But if we did a feed test on the actual grass, the forage quality this year is that much less or poor quality than the year prior. So there there's environmental factors, I think, that play a massive role. Now is every Riomax customer across all of US and Canada one hundred and twelve percent happy with the Riomax program? I don't think that'd be a fair thing to state. No. I mean, we've got mother nature and a lot of variables, but that's not an excuse, that's a reality. And to anyone that feels like they haven't been taken care of, I apologize. That's not what I want for you. What I want for you is that we can work with you to help resolve the issue, and if it comes to a point where we can't resolve it and you don't want in and and you've got your reasons, we would we would shake hands and and leave like gentlemen, you know? But to Darren was it Darren's question? Yes. And he he said maybe a bit of tongue in cheek, but I appreciate the the humor and the challenge, Darren. Can I feed my cows nothing? You know, get by with no grass or hay? Something like that. The answer is no. If you follow the marketing, you'll hear that usually it's between that fifteen and thirty percent hay or forage savings or extending your pastures by the same fifteen or thirty percent. So we are not claiming to eliminate hay or or grass from the diet. That is still your global nutrition. And like Twain said, when you have global nutrition declining, it it will need to be compensated with something. So we're not by any means saying that you can get by without global nutrition. Riomax is a supplement and that means supplement. Fifteen to thirty percent is what we typically see. We have seen higher, but that's the the numbers we see. Definitely not a hundred percent. I was just gonna add. So now if if you are in the category, maybe you've you've tried Riomax, you didn't feel like you saw the result you're looking for, absolutely. Let's let's talk about it. I would say from a Resolve twenty four standpoint, which is our customer service team, is we wanna be in touch with you. And what we would ask, and I'm just gonna put this out there, is there may be things that we ask you to do or some corrections to make to the program. Know, if the forage qualities change drastically or something that our team can see that would make Riomax fit better in your situation or actually just help your herd as an overall, we ask you to take those recommendations seriously. We work with a lot of third party people looking at liver biopsies from cows. We look at a lot of different things. So when we have a problem, we take it seriously. But then when we make recommendations, we ask for that to be followed. We've we've had it in recent times where there's customers that we've had one or two that I can think of that had challenges and then wouldn't take the recommendations of our team. So in turn, we didn't have the results we were looking for in the Riomax program. And then we've get got some negative feedback on that and we had one go so far as to ask us to pay him five thousand dollars to not badmouth us on social media, which I can say this with absolute conviction and assurance as a family business and knowing what Riomax stands for. We are absolutely not going to pay someone money to not talk about us. Now, if there's a legitimate challenge or we've had overconsumption or something that we can go back to the Riomax product and say, hey, we legitimately owe this person money for something that actually happened in their situation. A hundred percent, I think, Trevor, you'd back this up. We we're not afraid to to make things right if that's what it comes down to. And I've personally, if we've had we've had over consumption cases where customers on the program, they had over consumption, they quit. I've seen Trevor go take them a check for that over consumption amount, not expecting their business back just to make it right. I'm not saying that to flatter you, that's just that's the kind of company we are. But when we're in the situation where someone's almost trying to hold us over the barrel and say, hey, if you don't pay me money, this is we're not gonna stand for that. Yeah. Don't treat us like a corporate giant. We're a family business, we have a heart, we care, and we want to work with everybody, do the best we can, like Twain said, if there's a problem that you feel has not been resolved, reach out. I will say because of our growth, because of the results we see, it does bring out some heel biting that we never saw before, you know, when we were a tenth of this size, no one said a boo squeak. And just because we're growing, because of the impact we're making on men and women that we serve and we appreciate and we we eat, sleep, and breathe, you know, the needs of these beloved people, don't knock us for that. So that wraps us up for this week of That Ranching podcast. We'll see you next week.