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It's a Family Affair
The weather dictates the terms, but genetics and Riomax help the Hansens succeed
Mike Hansen
Ekalaka, Montana
There’s an old tale about an Alaskan sourdough who hung a bottle of hootch outside his cabin window as a thermometer in the winter. If the homemade firewater was frozen, he knew it was colder than 70 below.
Mike Hansen uses a real thermometer, but the idea is the same. “My thermometer quits working at 40 below,” he says. It’s been known to bottom out on those really cold winter nights. On the other end of the scale, he’s seen summer temperatures upwards of 115 degrees.
Such is life on Six Creeks Farm in the southeast corner of Montana, near Ekalaka.
Six Creeks Farm, like many farms and ranches, is a family affair. And it takes a lot of family when the operation is spread across 4,500 acres of farmland and 50,000 acres of private and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) acres of southeast Montana prairie.
“My grandpa, my dad and his two brothers bought the first place in 1982,” Hansen says, and they ran the outfit until about eight years ago, when Hansen and his wife Brandy, along with his parents Mike and Penny, and sister Megan, bought out the uncles. Along with one hired hand, that’s the crew. Hansen’s two young children, daughter Zoey and son Whitey, are the next generation to grow up on the ranch.
They farm wheat, canola, barley for grain and hay, chickpeas, and sudan grass. “Everyone always asks how many cows you’ve got and it seems like it’s always a moving number here in the desert where we live,” he says. They’ve had as many as 1,700 and as few as 600, depending on drought. Overall, however, they average around 1,200 mother cows. “And then we background our calves and run them as yearlings and sell them in the fall.”
The yearling Angus steers are sold weighing around 980 pounds at a special Labor Day sale at the sale barn in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. He says buyers come back every year to bid on the steers because of their performance. A recent bunch which sold September 1 were on feed until late November, he says, “and I think they gained between 5 and 6 pounds a day.”
They keep all their heifer calves and breed them AI, then turn out cleanup bulls. They’ll choose their replacements from the AI heifers conceived in the first cycle, then sell bred heifers at the same yearling sale. “The same two brothers have been buying the second cycle bred heifers for three, four years,” Hansen says.
The Hansens calve their first calf heifers starting around the middle of March in a barn. “The old cows, we don’t start calving them until around the 25th of April and the majority of them calve through May.”
That’s because the mama cows calve on big pastures, several thousand acres each, and on the flat prairie, there’s little protection from the weather. “So about three years ago, we decided we’d calve in May when it’s nice out and not have to worry about it. They take care of themselves. Check them once a day, make sure everybody’s behaving.” In fact, he says in the 10 years he’s been back on the ranch, he can’t recall pulling a calf from a mature cow.
“I don’t have a good answer as to why we still calve the heifers when we do, other than I start farming and help gets pretty thin.” Heifers take more time and effort to calve, and with only one hired hand on the place, keeping a balance between work and more work becomes important. Plus, calving the heifers a month early gives the babies an early start and the mamas more time to begin cycling again.
The Hansens are very selective with the bulls they buy, looking for high efficiency, performance tested bulls. They’ll also cherry pick the bull calves from their replacement heifers and keep some intact to add to the herd.
The cows summer on BLM allotments from June through November, rotating from pasture to pasture. They come home in November and winter along the creek bottoms from which the operation gets its name. After weaning, the calves go to the operation’s feedlot for backgrounding.
Summer grazing is the yardstick on why their cow numbers fluctuate. Water on the BLM acres is captured in dirt tanks during spring runoff. Without enough winter snow and spring rains, water holes dry up and forages don’t grow.
Riomax Fits The Plan
The Hansens have been using the orange Riomax tubs since 2019 after a discussion with their dealer, initially putting them out during the fall and winter. “Then he convinced me to keep them out in the summertime instead of my mineral.”
He says the cattle consume about a tenth of a pound per head daily on summer pasture, “and it seems to do everything it’s supposed to do. We’ve been having real good breed back, big calves and fat cows, so that’s why we keep doing it.”
The Hansens have always had fertile cows and were seeing around 8% to 9% open cows before switching to Riomax. “We’re probably closer to 3% to 4% now,” he says. “Last year, we didn’t have green grass after probably the 15th of June, and out of a thousand cows, we didn’t even fill a pot with dries.” In all, they culled around 35 open cows.
Is that because of genetics or Riomax? How about both.
In fact, Riomax serves another purpose—Hansen uses it as his guide on when to rotate pastures.
“About the time they start eating too much, you better look at the pastures because they’re telling you they’re out of grass,” he says. “That’s about how we move the cows or make decisions anymore because once they start getting up there over a third of a pound or so a day, we go look around and yeah girls, you’re right.”
“The thing I notice the most is just how the cows never really get skinny looking, even with big calves on them in the fall,” he says. “They never get the shrunk-up-take-this-baby-away-from-me look to them.”
Since all the calves go to the feedlot after weaning, weaning weights aren’t all that important. “But they seem healthier because the calves start eating on the tubs (while still on the cow) and they seem like they wean a little easier and they’ve got a good coat on them.”
He started including Riomax in his backgrounding ration a couple years ago. Prior to that, the ration included a product to control coccidiosis. “We haven’t had any coxy problems,” he says, “and they’re gaining 2 to 3 pounds a day. We feed them a couple pounds of our own barley and a couple pounds of distillers to condition the ration. But the rest is mostly grain, hay and grass.”
Likewise, they pull the tubs when they start feeding the cows and include Riomax in the winter ration. “We aim to not to have feed hay before the first of the year, and we generally make that happen.”
But dry winter grass eventually needs help. “Once the winter pasture is gone and I move the cows closer to the house, I’ll feed the cows with a feed wagon so they’ll get the mineral. They seem to do really good on that.”
Before Hansen and his sister bought out their uncles and came back to the ranch, the cow herd was fed protein cake. And the family continued that for a while. “There’s a place for it, Hansen says of feeding cake, “but I don’t like the way the cows act, chasing you around. And the fat ones, they’re the boss cows. It seems like they get most of it and the skinny ones that need it, they get bullied off the line and don’t get as much as they should.”
Plus, he says Riomax is a labor saver. With both the tubs and in the ration, all the cows have a chance to get the Riomax they need. “The skinny ones get to be at the barrels as long as they want and the fat ones can be there as long as they want. All you got to do is buzz down there in the Ranger and make sure the water’s still running.”
He says the initial cost certainly gave him a start, but with the consumption guarantee, the decision was a little easier. “Even with how expensive it is, by the time you figure out buying mineral and cake, the barrels were the same money.”
That’s just the start. With more and healthier calves, the orange Riomax tubs pay for themselves and then some.
Stretch Pastures & Pack Pounds on Calves This Summer
Article preview: Cow & Bull Prep Critical for Breeding Success
Percent of calf crop weaned is the single largest factor influencing profitability. After all, you can’t sell a calf that is never born. With calving season underway or finished for some ranches and looming for others, now is the time to start thinking about this year’s breeding season. Here are some tips to ensure you have a successful calving season next year.
First, let’s consider the cows:
The body condition of your cows going into the breeding season is critical for setting up your herd for reproductive success. According to Olivia Amundson, Extension cow-calf specialist with South Dakota State University, cows should be in at least a body condition score (BCS) of 5 at calving and first-calf heifers should be in a BCS of 6.
Then there's nutrition. “Nutrition drives reproduction,” Amundson says. That’s especially important for your coming two-year-olds. They’ve just had their first calf, they’re lactating and have just a short period to get in shape for the next go-round. That means an increasing plane of nutrition is critical to ensuring cows can repair their reproductive tract and begin cycling before breeding season begins.
RANCHING AIN'T EASY.
FOR ALL THE WORK THAT YOU DO, YOU DESERVE
MORE IN RETURN.
15 - 30% FORAGE SAVINGS
3 - 10% INCREASE IN CONCEPTION RATES
10 - 40 LBS. INCREASE IN WEANING WEIGHTS
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