The cost of poor cattle mineral: why i finally made the switch

Well, you look at over 3,000 a ton makes you I mean, honestly, I kinda just brushed it off. I'm thinking, like, I don't know how I'm gonna justify how is it gonna create that value coming back? Scott We're in Luther, Montana, just outside of Red Lodge. Been in the ranching industry all my life, grew up in it. Got out of it for a while and back in it, and been currently at the ranch I'm on now for coming on twenty years. It's the lifestyle I wanted to raise my kids in. The freedom to just run out the screen door, go do what they do, and, you know, find entertainment of their own. I found myself using a loose mineral and salt, and I was having really a struggle with breed up in my first calf heifers. Getting my yearling heifers pregnant, I was struggling. And it wasn't just a one off. It was pretty consistently year after year. I wasn't getting the results I wanted. There was years I was in the 25% open range, which was unacceptable. I'm always one to try and think outside the box or try and make more out of what I have, try and do a little bit better job than just the normal. You know, the gut feeling with the Riomax is is there's enough people that say it worked for me, and they weren't paid to say that. And if it didn't work, they wouldn't have said it. So I felt like it's gonna be a step in the right direction, and I tried it strictly on my first calf heifer or my yearly heifer through breeding season. I gave them sixty days ahead, sixty days after, so I could, you know, just follow the protocol, see if it helped. And I put all my cow herd on it after that. That tells you the answers I got. So through the vets, talked about vaccine protocols, and we changed our vaccine protocol. We changed our mineral protocol. We changed my pasture rotations, and we achieved a very desirable goal. In that year, not every heifer calved, but every heifer break tested pregnant. I had one get sick and slip a calf. That was AI bred. And then one that was caught by bull, she ended up slipping a calf again. But according to the vet, a 100% conception that year. And I can't tell you which one did it or if it's an accumulating factor of each building on each one, but it worked. Traditionally, I would take my 1,500 pound cows and the standard through the winter was 30 pounds a day. The first winter, well, after I preg tested my first group of heifers, I threw my cows on it and just kept pulling back on the feed. And they went through that winter on 24 pounds. I wanna never go below a six, BCS. I try to stay at six as my baseline. Those cows, everything came through as a six or better. I was really leery about consumption levels, and they started out of the gate just a tick over two ounces, and they hung right at that two ounce to three ounce level a day. Being the math driven guy, you know, that's the same price I was paying for loose mineral. When I take four ounces of loose mineral, two ounces of this, it's really, across the board, about the same money. So everything else I got, I viewed as a benefit. I mean, it feels like the research paid off, is what it really feels like. It's like, it wasn't me being smart. It wasn't me better than the neighbor. It was the people around me, the resources that had the answers, and you just had to swallow your pride and listen to them. You know? So that's kinda my take on that. I would say don't expect it to cure the problem tomorrow, But it is a great tool to accompany solid management practices. It is a great tool and it's financially beneficial in the long run. I have data to support all that. I mean, have great testing records to go back, as far as you wanna go back and look. And the data says it's a very good product that is worth the money.