You know, I'll be honest with you. I'm not a big fan of the the the saying it's the tub that pays for itself. And once again, this isn't for everybody. Well, welcome back to That Ranching podcast. Today, we are in Maddock, North Dakota joined by Travis Maddock, namesake. Did they name you after the town or the town after you Travis? I think it's just a coincidence Trevor. I... Many generations ago Maddocks were pretty prominent in the area. So I had a great great uncle who was a politician and was a legislator when the town of Maddox was incorporated and there's a lot of rumors how the town got his name but the truth of the matter is he was kind of arrogant he just named it after himself So... Just get her done. Just get her done. He was at the legislature at the time and he could write in the name of the town on the document so he just wrote Maddock in. That's how Maddock got its name. Don, well that's where we are today. And not around the kitchen table but out in the feed shed here at Matic Ranch Supply. Talking to Travis, it's pretty intriguing because we go all the way from high level industry and CBA level through the family ranch and then the meat business and you know a lot of things in between. Maybe you can just introduce yourself to the listeners in terms of kind of where you sit in agriculture. You wear a lot of hats. You know, do. I I I it's something that my, you know, my dad taught me about service and being involved and kind of taught us young that the world is run by those that show up, so show up. Right? And and so we try to show up, but it's not just me, if you look at all my brothers and sisters have been on their church boards and school boards and have served at various levels and in volunteerism across the state and I've been fortunate enough to be able to do some at the national level with the with the beef checkoff. Yes. Serving as a director for the Federation of State Beef Councils for the last couple of years I've been able to be involved in upper leadership at the Federation, which also puts me on the officer team at the National Calvins and Beef Association. So been able to sit in on, you know, levels that are meetings that are pretty high level and maybe bring some North Dakota thoughts and wisdom into that conversation, so I've been very lucky that way. As far as our operation, we have Maddock Ranch. Maddock Ranch is kind of the overarching brand, guess you want to say. Several years ago it became obvious to us we didn't inherit our ranch, know, it's something that we've had to build and buy and pay for. We understood that we needed to probably have some more diverse streams of income and to diversify the business a little bit. So in 2023 is when we purchased Louts, Feed and Rental, which is the Matic Ranch supply business now. It's feed and fencing, about that same time is when we became a Rhyzogreen dealer. Got interested in the Riomax product, tried it ourselves, really liked what we saw with our cows and kind of built off of that. And over time we've bought another feed business and we've also our partners in a couple of USDA inspected meat processing facilities thinking, you know, is that we're trying to fill all the pillars up, right? So we've got ranching where we've got row crops and hay and cattle and cattle development. And now we've got retail, farm and feed and retail and animal health, feed where we have some synergies there between particularly the row cropping operation and the feed mill and bringing feed back to our livestock. And now we have a place where we can harvest some of our own cattle and market some of our own beef. It does seem like there's a lot there, but at the end of the day, we're just trying to kind of get, like I said, all the pillars kind of covered underneath the business. And that way, you know, if cattle prices go down, maybe, you know, we get a little bit of relief by having the feed store, having the farm and ranch store, even the meats business. We can balance some of those things out. It keeps us busy, I mean, I'm incredibly fortunate to have just the best support. Our families are great, we get along fantastic. I've got a wonderful wife who keeps me in line and helps me manage the finances, and of course Shane and Lindsay, who I think you'll be talking to Shane here in a little bit about some things. My brother Justin and his wife Rachel, and my mom and dad, Brian and Vicki, they all we all work together incredibly well to kind of bring this all together. Well, that's a great story and a great inspiration to the listeners. Obviously, we as a company at Rhyzogreen are very, very passionate about serving the men and women in agriculture. And here we are in Maddock, North Dakota and hearing this, you know, we've taken it from a high level, we've talked about the family ranch, the family dynamics, brothers working together. And then if we can... Obviously, you mentioned with the feed store, you're handling the Riomax and you're using the Riomax on your own herd as well as the Rhyzogreen. So we've got some synergies going on here but if we can then dive into... You're a PhD ruminant nutritionist, correct? I'm a classically trained ruminant nutritionist. I did some ruminant nutrition work at the University of Florida for a little while but over the past fifteen years I would say I've become more entrepreneurial and less about it. But yeah, I have some training in ruminant nutrition for sure. That's where we want to dive into a little bit today because obviously from where I sit with Riomax and the digestive ingredient Nutrizorb, what that looks like to me across 750,000 mother cows is 15 to 30% feed or forage savings or stretching your pastures by that same amount. From where you sit, you know, if if you can take us down into the science and the chemistry in the rumen of a cow, what Riomax does with Nutrizorb is feeds and stimulates those rumen microbes. How does that look to you and then what correlation do you see on the ranch? Yeah, you know, I know from your standpoint as you're developing this product, marketing this product and talking to producers, know, you got you you'll like to say 15 to 30%, I totally understand that. I think everybody's results with Riomax are gonna be different every all these different production systems out there and I look at it like feeding that cow this isn't a sprint this is a marathon of what I always think about from January 1 to December 31 across time, right? So on our place, we found this product that we really like. Our cows always have Riomax available to them, and sometimes they'll take some, and sometimes they'll take more, and sometimes they'll take very little across that time. But we've essentially replaced our entire mineral program and our entire supplement program with the cows in the spring by utilizing Riomax. Now we've also adjusted our forage a little bit. We've upgraded our hay and done some things. But that was with the intent of saying, Hey, you know what? Even though I own a feed business on the ranch, I'd like for the feed truck to not pull in on those cows quite as often. We really want to make our cows work for a living. Right. And so what Rio does in that regard is you've got the basically the two components which are the Nutrizorb and the Esqort mineral package, right? And so when a cow is feeling a little less than satisfied because maybe forage quality is a little lower, She'll take a little bit more of the Riomax and she gets those two components. And what happens with the Nutrizorb is it goes in and it tells the bacteria, Hey, wake up, we're gonna let you replicate a little faster. So you're gonna get more room in bacteria. And that serves so many different masters in that cow. And the Esqort mineral, that comes along too and that also helps because that mineral is available to the bacteria and the bacteria use that so it's like a double edged sword there. So not only is the Esqort something that can bypass through and the animal can absorb, but it's also good for the microorganisms in the rumen. So those two combine and you get this bacterial surge or you keep the rumen running, right? Yep. And so when that rumen is running at a high level like that, think of it like a marathon runner. So a marathon runner isn't interested in getting a burst of energy, they're interested in having long Sustained. Sustained workable, right? And that's what Riomax does for us, it just keeps that rumen humming. The ancillary benefits of that, of course, is if we make more rumen bacteria, more rumen microbes, we get more microbial protein for that animal too. Absolutely. So we're increasing the protein. So what we're taking is you take a low quality forage, maybe like what we're, you know, we're coming into the October 1 and in our part of the world we have a lot of smooth brome which really loses its quality fast. We have a lot of invaders up here in North Central North Dakota and even in our native pastures. We have plenty of invaders which lose their quality fairly early, their cool season, but they just don't have it. So that cow though, she can take she can get as much out of that as possible. We're making sure that rumen is running at a high level by feeding the microbes and it I say bacteria but we know that there's protozoa and there's all kinds of fungus that there's all kinds of things in that rumen that are responsible for for digesting the in that plant And then we add that mineral package, that specialized mineral package, and now you've got a rumen that's really humming along. So then we're drawing as much energy out of that plant as possible. We're also getting all the vitamins and the minerals out of that plant as possible that are naturally in that plant. The rumen's able to break that all down and release that as well. And then we're getting more bypass protein, or more, not bypass, but more microbial protein working through and going into the small intestine. And so we're just catching everything we possibly can out of that, you know, that dry grass or that lower quality forage. Yeah. So... If I can just interrupt. So we've talked about feeding the microbes and there's more of them, they're more active. And you've alluded to microbial protein and we use that term quite commonly, but can you speak to the viewers in sort of dummy down language what microbial protein really is? Right. So there's really two types of protein, You can break it down as much as want, but let's keep it on two. There's two types of protein that are available to the rumen and cow, and one of them is what's called bypass protein, and that's protein that's in the feed that doesn't get broken down in the rumen and goes into the small gut and the small intestine and is absorbed as a protein. That could be, you know, plant protein or could be, you know, it's all from plants in this day and age, right? It could be soybean meal or whatever. Yeah. But a portion of that then will get broken down and used by the microbes in the gut because those microbes continually, I mean, they go through their life cycle very quickly. A bacteria splits and, you know, grows and dies and reproduces very quickly. And when that bacteria or the protozoa when it dies, well, it's amino acids, right? So it becomes a microbial protein source too, so then that naturally flows into the small gut and the small intestine of that beef animal and that's available as well. And then microbial protein is actually usually the largest part of protein, particularly in a rumenant cow, a grazing animal, that's the largest part of protein available to the animal. So once again, if we're keeping that rumen running and we're keeping those bacteria turning over and just churning, keeping that flywheel moving in a nice steady beat and rhythm, then there's always microbial protein available. So you have good protein nutrition for that animal as well. Well, it's genius but it's working with mother nature. If you think back to the bison, the buffalo that roam the plains, they didn't have supplemental protein or cake or or alfalfa, right? Were grazing animals, they were herd animals. But I think that's the best example of mother nature saw to it that with that diet they were able to create their own protein source. So would you say it's true that if you increase the population of microbes in the rumen whether it's bacteria or fungal or protozoa or whatever, if we increase that population, it's going to correlate to an increased microbial protein level. Of course. Basically, the more protein we can get that way, the less protein we need to supplement. Absolutely. And back to your point about the, you know, the bison, the migrating herds, you know, they weren't here this time of year. They were way down south where the grass and the forage quality was a lot higher. They didn't hang out around here in the fall and the winter, but I don't have the opportunity to take my herd and drift it all the way to Texas and then bring it back in the spring as the I can see you doing it. You know? We're stuck with what we have here, it's important that we give that cow every opportunity to be successful. With outbreak in the bank, and I think that's an important part of this conversation too. You can feed the heck out of them if you want, and that's one way to do it, and if you have those resources, I'm all for it. But for us, we don't have those resources. We do farm some, but we don't have a ton of corn in the bin that's available, things like that. So we try to make sure that cow is working for us. Rio gives us that opportunity to, you know, leave those cattle out on pastures, particularly in the fall a little longer, go out on corn stalks and let them utilize the hulls the leaves and stuff in the cornfield, they do pretty well on that. And then get them all a little earlier in the spring too when we have dormant forage out there that might be stockpiled. Right. Because we're asking, we're basically just giving that room and a little shot of let's giddy up and go. Yeah. And it's worked really well in our place. So I often quote our old nutritionist Peter Fransky, he passed a couple years ago but he used to say that we're not when we're feeding a cow we're not feeding a four legged critter, we're feeding the rumen microbes that feed that four legged critter. And at first you know twenty five years ago that was just sounded like Greek to me. But as we've explored it, it is as sure as I'm sitting here today in Matic, North Dakota that you work with those rumen microbes and you enable them to better break down, better extract nutrients. You spoke about the vitamins, minerals, naturally occurring nutrition in that forage, we're just able to extract more of it. A quick question, we talked about the life cycle of a rumen microbe, what is that? Do you know how long they live? It depends on the microbe. Some of them are as quick as a few hours to several hours. But generally, bacteria turns over very quickly in the rumen. Like, are they're churning very quickly. And so I go back to my marathon analogy, which is I want to always have the opportunity for that bacteria to be as efficient as possible. That's why, and I'm not saying you got to leave Rio out year round, but on our place, having having the tubs out in front of our cattle all year long feels like we're just competing in a marathon. We're just always always giving that cow the opportunity to have the energy and have the nutrition that they need. Yeah. That's that's kind of what that analogy is like. Then because that bacteria now sometimes they're gonna get enough nutrition and protein and you know there are certain times of the year where our grass is nice and hard and full They of can live just fine on that and it and they'll take less of the tub. Yeah. Because the tub is designed that way, it's not not full of molasses, not full of intake enhancers. Whereas then it comes time and we get into grass like we're gonna have over the next six weeks, you know, we'll start seeing the intakes pop up a little bit. She needs a little bit more in order to kind of keep that rumen rocking and rolling and she can feel satiated and feel like she's still nursing. Now we won't wean until probably the end of November, beginning of December. Starting to put some pressure on these cows right now too because the bulls are out with them as well. Calve the beginning of summer so we're still coming towards the end of our breeding season here. But yeah, so there's a lot of pressure on that cow right now so we want to make sure that that rumen that's feeding the animal, right, that rumen has all the opportunity to be successful. Well, I love your analogy about the marathon and we always say cows, like kids, thrive on consistency. Yeah. And so a consistent diet is much better than something with peaks and valleys. You refer to using Riomax year round and that may not be a fit for everybody. But typically guys get on... Get better results with lower inputs at a low daily intake versus peaks and valleys Yeah. Or on and off. But a question we get with guys out West, I was in Wyoming recently meeting with a guy and he said he had come from Utah where he said they didn't depend on cake and cubes. He was his concern was if we're let's say we're in dry conditions and we're caking or cubing our cows and you get a little burst of grain maybe twice a week or three times a week, How does that fit in with the whole consistency and managing that pH of that rumen and the rumen microbes? Most of the empirical research would suggest that you'll get some performance increase, right? You will. There was an interesting study several years ago that came out of the High Desert in Eastern Oregon, where they were only, you know, supplementing maybe twice a week with a couple three pounds of a higher protein, a 20% or 30% protein cake, right? Sure. And they did see a little performance increase. Their conception rates were a little higher and their more consistent. That's not going to really... I mean, you're not... Depending on, once again, the nature of the cake too. Has it got more fiber in it? Does it have more energy? Sure. More starch? Yeah. Once or twice a week, which you're not going to get the rumen pH to really fluctuate a lot or get on a roller coaster. But if you're got a high starch or say a cake that has a lot of distillers grains in it or something that's got more starch in it, but it's got more corn in it, not necessarily distillers grains, so grains pretty high fiber and protein. But then you'll see that roller coaster a little bit and then you can actually throw the rumen off kilter a little Yeah. And then you're you're messing with the microbes, right? So you get that pH to dip down and get a little acidic and so now we take the lactobacillus and we turn it into a different type of bacteria and then that gets established and then we go back and forth. Don't want that. At least I don't want that with my cows. I want my cows to be nice and consistent. I want my cows on a high forage diet. Now, I'm not saying if you cake that's a bad thing, certainly. And everybody has their production system and what works for everybody works for you. Yeah. But this is one way, like, we used to offer cake in the spring, either a wheat mid or a commercial cake, and we've been able to go away from that completely with the reel. Sure. We no longer need it. We don't see our cows starting to peel body condition score like they did before we got on the Rio. Yeah, well, so that that was actually our first our first experience with Rio is I got it in in the winter and we started using it in lieu of offering them, you know, three, four pounds of wheat meds a day. And I noticed not only did their body condition score not peel back at all, but we also started to notice the manure paths were better. That was my next question. Their rumen metabolism straightened out. And that's when I called you guys back and talked to Twain and I said, well, I'd be interested in dealing this product because we saw that within about ten or fifteen days, which I thought was incredible, I started noticing the manure really just getting right. So Travis, he's talked a lot about the rumen microbes and we can't see those with the naked eye. But if we zoom back out, we can see and manage and monitor the manure. Right. And so I really like where this is going. Yeah. Because I can see that and I think everybody that's listening to this can relate to that. Like they've seen manure that stacks up, they've seen manure that's super runny, and they've seen manure that I call just right that is like pancake batter consistency with a little divot in the middle. Yeah. But what's that telling us? If your manure is hard and comes out and it stacks, right, that means you're not getting the fiber out of it. You're not digesting it. You're not getting a thorough digestion. Yeah. Or that could be from a number of things. It could be because you don't have enough protein, so your rumen's not running, you know, the way it should. But that always tells me that I'm probably... My forage quality is either way too low and I need to increase forage quality or my rumen's not running right. I'm not getting anything out of that forage. On the other end, they're runny. You know, we all see cows get runny when you turn them into lush green grass and they get a lot of moisture and then also the protein's high and so the protein and the energy gets out of whack a little bit. Yeah. And then then the rumen is running in a different direction and it's just everything's just flying through. So you want a you want a nice calm rumen is what you want. Right. And that's when you see what you talked about the pancake batter. A nice thick batter where you get a nice o rings is what I call them, right? You get a ring and another ring and another ring kind of what it looks like. You get like three or four o rings in there and it's flat. It's just a nice patty. Not not the beehive. No no no no. The o rings are flat. They're nice and flat. That's what I'm looking for. Not runny, but nice and flat. That tells me that the rumen is digesting the fiber in there, most of it. Yeah. It's getting it's getting that fiber digested and that also tells me that it's releasing all the other good nutrition in that plant, the vitamins, the minerals and things like that that I'm looking for. Yeah. And so, you know, that first spring that we went on the reel, that's what I saw. And like I said, it didn't take very long. So Travis, you're a scientist, you're an educator, you're a rancher, but you're also an entrepreneur. And you shared, you know, the different revenue streams that you manage within the ranching family if you like. Can you talk to us a little bit about the economics of feeding microbes and this manure? Can we convert that to economics and look at it from a business perspective? What we found with particularly this tub is yeah there and I think that's the biggest rub right so we deal with Riomax and the biggest complaint we have on Rio I know what you're gonna say is, 'Baw dang they're expensive man they're just so expensive.' Yeah. So but what we found on our ranch is that it's it and I'll be honest with you, I'm not a big fan of the saying it's the tub that pays for itself because that on our ranch, it doesn't just pay for itself, it makes us money. It actually it actually makes us quite a So bit of money, get tell Twain that. Yeah. It's it actually it's it's a quite an economic benefit for us and for a number of reasons. We're kind of short selling ourselves. A bit when you say that, I do think so. Okay. Once again, this isn't for everybody. Yeah. But we do run our cows, know, we calve in June. Our expectation is our cows are gonna run pretty rough through the winter. We're talking, you know, stockpiled grass or corn stalks or things like that. What we don't want is we don't want those cows in the yard and then we have a lot of manure to move out and things like that. So that's an ancillary benefit, economic benefit too because I keep my cattle out on my cropland and a they're little fertilizing for And me out there, they're working for you. If you hear thread through all of this, his cows are working for him, not him for his cows. Trying, know, we save diesel, we save an awful lot of depreciation on machinery, the whole nine yards. Now that doesn't mean that we don't feed in the yard, of course we feed calves, we develop heifers, we do we do have some silage, we do some things like that. Sure. But in terms of the overall cow herd, we managed to eliminate all the processed feed on the cows. Like I said, we used to either get cake in or for a few years we would go and just pick up loads of wheat mid pellets from we have a pasta plant about sixty, seventy miles away. That's still an expense and that's expensive feed no matter what how you look at it. That is outside of bounds of trying to feed a cow herd when you have that, particularly for us as once again we're trying to get the cows to make a dollar. And so yeah, the tub is expensive and there are times where those cows will take more Rio and there are times where they'll take less, but overall and I haven't done the math in a year or two, but all in we were about 30¢ a day, 25 to 30¢ a day. Yeah. All in. That included my all my protein supplementation and my mineral. Well, I can't beat that with anything. So the economics have always worked really well for us and I'll tell you, if it didn't work for us I wouldn't have the Rio out of the cows. I believe that. I wouldn't. Yeah. Shane and I wouldn't be feeding our cows Rio if I didn't believe it was, you know, economically sound. The last part of this is just, you know, we'll average about a tub per 50 cows every month, which most of the other tubs we're having to replace them every ten days or twelve days. Well, I'm only replacing tubs every month now. Yeah. So that also means that I'm not dragging tubs around, I'm not ******** around. Well, actually I'm dragging tubs around because we do rotationally graze and so I got the tubs from one paddock to the next paddock. Yeah. But I don't have a bunch of tubs in the back of my pickup and I'm constantly picking up plastic tubs out in my pastures. They last a lot longer so we have less labor there. For us, it's always it there's been very little downside of us using the Rio tubs, let's put it that way. And once again, if there was a downside, I wouldn't have them out there. Yeah. They work for us. So you've talked about the cost per head per day and I believe that's a good sound practice, whatever program you're on, is to look at your apples to apples cost per head per day. But then if you can take it a bit further, how does it pay for itself and make you money? Like what are the returns that you would see? From year to year, it'll vary a little bit, but we definitely see a tick up in our stocking rate. There's no doubt about it, right? The cows get satiated or they get satisfied a little earlier on in the process. So what we're saying is, you know, in the past maybe it took six acres on a cow, maybe we're running a cow on five acres now, pair. I know we're getting some savings there, I know we're getting hay savings, I know where you're going with this. We are getting hay savings. I'll tell you that that first winter, it's hard to know now because they've been on Rhyzorb for five, six years, but that first winter, you know, my dad, who's a, I mean, he's kind of a no foo foo dust guy right and he's like what are we doing this for kind of out of the gate and and about three or four weeks in he said well I don't know what's in those tubs he said but I was and he was doing the winter feeding he does a lot of our winter feeding he's still 80 years old but he likes to go out, and this was probably in March when we did have the cows in the lot. And he said, But I was giving them nine bales of hay, and they were looking around, and now they eat about six bales of hay, and they're laying there chewing their cud. And I went, Okay. And so those types of things. And I think you've got plenty of testimonials from a lot of other ranchers that will say something similar to that, right? Yeah. They got it took a couple of weeks, we saw the manure get right, and then you saw the cows just go, I'm happy. And they started eating less. Yeah. They really did start eating less because they were getting more out of the hay. Extracting the They were just getting more all the nutrients too, not just energy, but their protein needs were being made, their vitamins and mineral needs were being met. And so you could just see it and yeah, we went right out of the gate. We probably were down about a third, right? About a third of our intake, we pulled off the top. And now I don't know, it seems like, yeah, I mean, the cows are always happy. They're always content. You know, we don't have a lot of great hay up in this part of the world. Is, alfalfa is hard to come by. We have got a lot of cool seasons and a lot of invaders in our native grasses even with things like Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome and a number of things like that. Yeah. But when we are feeding hay and they're they, you know, we like I said, we always have Rio in front of them. They seem to do very well on it and so I'm confident that not only on pasture are we getting more out of the pastures, probably able to rest some pastures a little bit that we might not to particularly in times of drought, but then also during the winter I know we're saving money on hay. So you've talked about about a 30% hay savings you talked about the increasing in stocking carrying capacity is that a similar percentage or not because it's the same size It's It would be very hard to do the math on the stocking rates, Trevor, unfortunately. That, I mean, all I can do is just give you my best guess. I would guess probably closer to 10% to 15% savings on stocking rate. But that's really hard to calculate. It just is. Just because year over year we are so reliant on moisture and so a little drier, we got to extend our, you know, our grazing times a little bit more. You know, we catch a really nice wet winter, we just hop in from pasture to pasture to pasture to pasture to keep ahead of it, so Okay. It's hard to While I've got you here, more question, I'm gonna jump into a slightly different topic. 2026, we've had a focus on the feedlot space. Now traditionally for, you know, a quarter of a century, we've focused on cow calf and that is still our core, our main focus. But we're looking at the first sixty days in a starting phase for incoming calves. Now working with Doctor. Ryan Rathman from Texas Tech, he has showed us that when the immune system is really functioning and in good shape, It will take way less fuel in terms of energy and hence the body redirects that energy and it goes to weight gain. He went on to say that he's seen it in the meat quality. So you're a meat scientist, he's saying that with a healthy immune system versus a calf that's had disease challenges in the feed yard on the same diet, the same genetics, we're seeing more marbling on that healthy calf than one that had to get treated with antibiotics. Can you speak to that from a meat scientist point of view? No doubt about it, right? So if you take CAFE and cafe one and let's say they're the same genetically there it's a biological system there's just so much there's so much noise in all of it. Yeah. But let's say we take two identical DNA cattle and we take one and we stress them out a little bit and we get them a little sick and we don't get them on feed right and we don't give them the right mineral nutrition and then we take calf A1 and he's perfect and he never gets sick, his ears never fall down, he's on a perfect diet and we feed them both for two ten days, right? We know that calf A1 is going to have a higher marbling score. He's going to have a higher palatability product than cafe. Yeah. Calf A has been fighting all the way and so marbling is fat and fat depositions rely on available excess energy. Got to have a little excess energy in the system, right? Right. In order to lay that marbling in. The external fat's not the only thing, it's also the marbling fat. Inside of the muscle. Inside of the muscle and that's what creates flavor. A lot of the flavor profile in a beefsteak or even ground beef is built on that fat profile, right? So no doubt in my mind, yeah, that if you can keep that calf healthier, you know that they're going to have a higher marbling score. All things once again staying even. And as I mentioned, across a population of cattle, the cattle that generally are healthier, generally are less stressed out during their feeding, they're going have higher quality beef. Yep. And feedlots get incentivized for, obviously, the Absolutely, score and the absolutely. So it makes a lot of sense to and it's not just the quality of the meat either, of course. We're talking about pounds of gain, everything. Keep that animal eating, keep them healthy, keep their ears up, and and get them out as fast as you can. Time is money so. Well to wrap up here, I want to hit on one last topic that I know you guy the Matic family is pretty progressive in terms of the way they, you know, the different business entities, revenue streams, managing the ranch. There's one more thing that I know you guys are progressive on and that is stewardship and a regenerative approach. I'm not sure if that's the right term. Yeah. That works. Can you just touch on how the Riomax tools and the Riomax methodology ties in to what you guys are doing in your regenerative practice? You know, it's funny because when we got into Rio, that wasn't really in my brain set. Know, what I was thinking about was, hey, I'm trying to take as much advantage of my low quality hay and forages as possible. But the synergies between the two things, I mean, at our place, we were really we put a lot of emphasis on things like soil health, right? Sure. And soil health is everything to us at the end of the day. Soil health is what pays the bills as much as anything. Yeah. And to have a healthy soil, you have to have a healthy ecosystem, a microorganism system in that soil. Back to microbes. Right, just back to microbes. Otherwise, it's just dirt. So we want soil, we don't want dirt. Dirt, there's a lot of dirt getting farmed in this country where farmers will put a seed in and then they got to come along and they got to add all the nutrients, the nitrogen, all the phosphorus, the potassium, all the sulfur in order to get that plant to grow. Kind of propping it up. They are. And you know, it's a system that works for some guys but it's an artificial system. We want to have a nice natural system in ours. So we're really interested in making sure that our dirt is soil and that it's got a healthy microorganism, healthy organic matter base to it. And very similar to what Rio does in that cow's rumen, right? Yeah. Same thing, it's feeding those microbes. The microbes in the soil will provide a lot of nitrogen for you. They'll sequester a ton of carbon down there and provide a carbon backbone for those roots to tap into to take nutrients up into the plant. There's so much at similar synergies between what we do with Riomax in the cow's rumen and what we're trying to do with our soil health to grow to grow grass, to grow corn, to grow soybeans, to grow anything on our place. So we want we're really interested in making sure the soil is healthy and for that you got to have that population of soil microorganisms working. Yeah. And I would just add for Riomax, when we first excluded the sulfates and oxides out of our formulas, it was not for soil health reasons, it was for bioavailability reasons in the cow. Doctor. Spears from North Carolina State did that work showing that sulfates and oxides had a way lower availability to the cow. But the unintended positive consequence of that decision we made years ago was that those sulfates and oxides have been proved to have a negative unintended negative consequence on your soil microbes. Right. So I think stewardship is about managing your land for today but for next generation. And it's sometimes what you don't do versus what you do in practices. There's no doubt in my mind that the manure we're getting out of our cows in particular that are on a Riomax, you know, offered Riomax, I know that that manure is probably accentuating our soil health as well, right? Because we have got that, that manure is gonna have a bacterial load in it as well. Sure. It's gonna have, you know, a lot of positives. So it all fits in our whole total philosophy that we have on the ranch with our soil health and with how we manage our cows. Well, Travis, thank you so much Oh, it's been a pleasure. For imparting your wisdom to us. I'm going to leave this podcast a lot smarter than I came. Oh, I don't know about that. And thanks for joining us on the podcast. We'll see you next Thursday morning.
AUDIO VERSION
You know, I'll be honest with you. I'm not a big fan of the the the saying it's the tub that pays for itself. And once again, this isn't for everybody. Well, welcome back to That Ranching podcast. Today, we are in Maddock, North Dakota joined by Travis Maddock, namesake. Did they name you after the town or the town after you Travis? I think it's just a coincidence Trevor. I... Many generations ago Maddocks were pretty prominent in the area. So I had a great great uncle who was a politician and was a legislator when the town of Maddox was incorporated and there's a lot of rumors how the town got his name but the truth of the matter is he was kind of arrogant he just named it after himself So... Just get her done. Just get her done. He was at the legislature at the time and he could write in the name of the town on the document so he just wrote Maddock in. That's how Maddock got its name. Don, well that's where we are today. And not around the kitchen table but out in the feed shed here at Matic Ranch Supply. Talking to Travis, it's pretty intriguing because we go all the way from high level industry and CBA level through the family ranch and then the meat business and you know a lot of things in between. Maybe you can just introduce yourself to the listeners in terms of kind of where you sit in agriculture. You wear a lot of hats. You know, do. I I I it's something that my, you know, my dad taught me about service and being involved and kind of taught us young that the world is run by those that show up, so show up. Right? And and so we try to show up, but it's not just me, if you look at all my brothers and sisters have been on their church boards and school boards and have served at various levels and in volunteerism across the state and I've been fortunate enough to be able to do some at the national level with the with the beef checkoff. Yes. Serving as a director for the Federation of State Beef Councils for the last couple of years I've been able to be involved in upper leadership at the Federation, which also puts me on the officer team at the National Calvins and Beef Association. So been able to sit in on, you know, levels that are meetings that are pretty high level and maybe bring some North Dakota thoughts and wisdom into that conversation, so I've been very lucky that way. As far as our operation, we have Maddock Ranch. Maddock Ranch is kind of the overarching brand, guess you want to say. Several years ago it became obvious to us we didn't inherit our ranch, know, it's something that we've had to build and buy and pay for. We understood that we needed to probably have some more diverse streams of income and to diversify the business a little bit. So in 2023 is when we purchased Louts, Feed and Rental, which is the Matic Ranch supply business now. It's feed and fencing, about that same time is when we became a Rhyzogreen dealer. Got interested in the Riomax product, tried it ourselves, really liked what we saw with our cows and kind of built off of that. And over time we've bought another feed business and we've also our partners in a couple of USDA inspected meat processing facilities thinking, you know, is that we're trying to fill all the pillars up, right? So we've got ranching where we've got row crops and hay and cattle and cattle development. And now we've got retail, farm and feed and retail and animal health, feed where we have some synergies there between particularly the row cropping operation and the feed mill and bringing feed back to our livestock. And now we have a place where we can harvest some of our own cattle and market some of our own beef. It does seem like there's a lot there, but at the end of the day, we're just trying to kind of get, like I said, all the pillars kind of covered underneath the business. And that way, you know, if cattle prices go down, maybe, you know, we get a little bit of relief by having the feed store, having the farm and ranch store, even the meats business. We can balance some of those things out. It keeps us busy, I mean, I'm incredibly fortunate to have just the best support. Our families are great, we get along fantastic. I've got a wonderful wife who keeps me in line and helps me manage the finances, and of course Shane and Lindsay, who I think you'll be talking to Shane here in a little bit about some things. My brother Justin and his wife Rachel, and my mom and dad, Brian and Vicki, they all we all work together incredibly well to kind of bring this all together. Well, that's a great story and a great inspiration to the listeners. Obviously, we as a company at Rhyzogreen are very, very passionate about serving the men and women in agriculture. And here we are in Maddock, North Dakota and hearing this, you know, we've taken it from a high level, we've talked about the family ranch, the family dynamics, brothers working together. And then if we can... Obviously, you mentioned with the feed store, you're handling the Riomax and you're using the Riomax on your own herd as well as the Rhyzogreen. So we've got some synergies going on here but if we can then dive into... You're a PhD ruminant nutritionist, correct? I'm a classically trained ruminant nutritionist. I did some ruminant nutrition work at the University of Florida for a little while but over the past fifteen years I would say I've become more entrepreneurial and less about it. But yeah, I have some training in ruminant nutrition for sure. That's where we want to dive into a little bit today because obviously from where I sit with Riomax and the digestive ingredient Nutrizorb, what that looks like to me across 750,000 mother cows is 15 to 30% feed or forage savings or stretching your pastures by that same amount. From where you sit, you know, if if you can take us down into the science and the chemistry in the rumen of a cow, what Riomax does with Nutrizorb is feeds and stimulates those rumen microbes. How does that look to you and then what correlation do you see on the ranch? Yeah, you know, I know from your standpoint as you're developing this product, marketing this product and talking to producers, know, you got you you'll like to say 15 to 30%, I totally understand that. I think everybody's results with Riomax are gonna be different every all these different production systems out there and I look at it like feeding that cow this isn't a sprint this is a marathon of what I always think about from January 1 to December 31 across time, right? So on our place, we found this product that we really like. Our cows always have Riomax available to them, and sometimes they'll take some, and sometimes they'll take more, and sometimes they'll take very little across that time. But we've essentially replaced our entire mineral program and our entire supplement program with the cows in the spring by utilizing Riomax. Now we've also adjusted our forage a little bit. We've upgraded our hay and done some things. But that was with the intent of saying, Hey, you know what? Even though I own a feed business on the ranch, I'd like for the feed truck to not pull in on those cows quite as often. We really want to make our cows work for a living. Right. And so what Rio does in that regard is you've got the basically the two components which are the Nutrizorb and the Esqort mineral package, right? And so when a cow is feeling a little less than satisfied because maybe forage quality is a little lower, She'll take a little bit more of the Riomax and she gets those two components. And what happens with the Nutrizorb is it goes in and it tells the bacteria, Hey, wake up, we're gonna let you replicate a little faster. So you're gonna get more room in bacteria. And that serves so many different masters in that cow. And the Esqort mineral, that comes along too and that also helps because that mineral is available to the bacteria and the bacteria use that so it's like a double edged sword there. So not only is the Esqort something that can bypass through and the animal can absorb, but it's also good for the microorganisms in the rumen. So those two combine and you get this bacterial surge or you keep the rumen running, right? Yep. And so when that rumen is running at a high level like that, think of it like a marathon runner. So a marathon runner isn't interested in getting a burst of energy, they're interested in having long Sustained. Sustained workable, right? And that's what Riomax does for us, it just keeps that rumen humming. The ancillary benefits of that, of course, is if we make more rumen bacteria, more rumen microbes, we get more microbial protein for that animal too. Absolutely. So we're increasing the protein. So what we're taking is you take a low quality forage, maybe like what we're, you know, we're coming into the October 1 and in our part of the world we have a lot of smooth brome which really loses its quality fast. We have a lot of invaders up here in North Central North Dakota and even in our native pastures. We have plenty of invaders which lose their quality fairly early, their cool season, but they just don't have it. So that cow though, she can take she can get as much out of that as possible. We're making sure that rumen is running at a high level by feeding the microbes and it I say bacteria but we know that there's protozoa and there's all kinds of fungus that there's all kinds of things in that rumen that are responsible for for digesting the in that plant And then we add that mineral package, that specialized mineral package, and now you've got a rumen that's really humming along. So then we're drawing as much energy out of that plant as possible. We're also getting all the vitamins and the minerals out of that plant as possible that are naturally in that plant. The rumen's able to break that all down and release that as well. And then we're getting more bypass protein, or more, not bypass, but more microbial protein working through and going into the small intestine. And so we're just catching everything we possibly can out of that, you know, that dry grass or that lower quality forage. Yeah. So... If I can just interrupt. So we've talked about feeding the microbes and there's more of them, they're more active. And you've alluded to microbial protein and we use that term quite commonly, but can you speak to the viewers in sort of dummy down language what microbial protein really is? Right. So there's really two types of protein, You can break it down as much as want, but let's keep it on two. There's two types of protein that are available to the rumen and cow, and one of them is what's called bypass protein, and that's protein that's in the feed that doesn't get broken down in the rumen and goes into the small gut and the small intestine and is absorbed as a protein. That could be, you know, plant protein or could be, you know, it's all from plants in this day and age, right? It could be soybean meal or whatever. Yeah. But a portion of that then will get broken down and used by the microbes in the gut because those microbes continually, I mean, they go through their life cycle very quickly. A bacteria splits and, you know, grows and dies and reproduces very quickly. And when that bacteria or the protozoa when it dies, well, it's amino acids, right? So it becomes a microbial protein source too, so then that naturally flows into the small gut and the small intestine of that beef animal and that's available as well. And then microbial protein is actually usually the largest part of protein, particularly in a rumenant cow, a grazing animal, that's the largest part of protein available to the animal. So once again, if we're keeping that rumen running and we're keeping those bacteria turning over and just churning, keeping that flywheel moving in a nice steady beat and rhythm, then there's always microbial protein available. So you have good protein nutrition for that animal as well. Well, it's genius but it's working with mother nature. If you think back to the bison, the buffalo that roam the plains, they didn't have supplemental protein or cake or or alfalfa, right? Were grazing animals, they were herd animals. But I think that's the best example of mother nature saw to it that with that diet they were able to create their own protein source. So would you say it's true that if you increase the population of microbes in the rumen whether it's bacteria or fungal or protozoa or whatever, if we increase that population, it's going to correlate to an increased microbial protein level. Of course. Basically, the more protein we can get that way, the less protein we need to supplement. Absolutely. And back to your point about the, you know, the bison, the migrating herds, you know, they weren't here this time of year. They were way down south where the grass and the forage quality was a lot higher. They didn't hang out around here in the fall and the winter, but I don't have the opportunity to take my herd and drift it all the way to Texas and then bring it back in the spring as the I can see you doing it. You know? We're stuck with what we have here, it's important that we give that cow every opportunity to be successful. With outbreak in the bank, and I think that's an important part of this conversation too. You can feed the heck out of them if you want, and that's one way to do it, and if you have those resources, I'm all for it. But for us, we don't have those resources. We do farm some, but we don't have a ton of corn in the bin that's available, things like that. So we try to make sure that cow is working for us. Rio gives us that opportunity to, you know, leave those cattle out on pastures, particularly in the fall a little longer, go out on corn stalks and let them utilize the hulls the leaves and stuff in the cornfield, they do pretty well on that. And then get them all a little earlier in the spring too when we have dormant forage out there that might be stockpiled. Right. Because we're asking, we're basically just giving that room and a little shot of let's giddy up and go. Yeah. And it's worked really well in our place. So I often quote our old nutritionist Peter Fransky, he passed a couple years ago but he used to say that we're not when we're feeding a cow we're not feeding a four legged critter, we're feeding the rumen microbes that feed that four legged critter. And at first you know twenty five years ago that was just sounded like Greek to me. But as we've explored it, it is as sure as I'm sitting here today in Matic, North Dakota that you work with those rumen microbes and you enable them to better break down, better extract nutrients. You spoke about the vitamins, minerals, naturally occurring nutrition in that forage, we're just able to extract more of it. A quick question, we talked about the life cycle of a rumen microbe, what is that? Do you know how long they live? It depends on the microbe. Some of them are as quick as a few hours to several hours. But generally, bacteria turns over very quickly in the rumen. Like, are they're churning very quickly. And so I go back to my marathon analogy, which is I want to always have the opportunity for that bacteria to be as efficient as possible. That's why, and I'm not saying you got to leave Rio out year round, but on our place, having having the tubs out in front of our cattle all year long feels like we're just competing in a marathon. We're just always always giving that cow the opportunity to have the energy and have the nutrition that they need. Yeah. That's that's kind of what that analogy is like. Then because that bacteria now sometimes they're gonna get enough nutrition and protein and you know there are certain times of the year where our grass is nice and hard and full They of can live just fine on that and it and they'll take less of the tub. Yeah. Because the tub is designed that way, it's not not full of molasses, not full of intake enhancers. Whereas then it comes time and we get into grass like we're gonna have over the next six weeks, you know, we'll start seeing the intakes pop up a little bit. She needs a little bit more in order to kind of keep that rumen rocking and rolling and she can feel satiated and feel like she's still nursing. Now we won't wean until probably the end of November, beginning of December. Starting to put some pressure on these cows right now too because the bulls are out with them as well. Calve the beginning of summer so we're still coming towards the end of our breeding season here. But yeah, so there's a lot of pressure on that cow right now so we want to make sure that that rumen that's feeding the animal, right, that rumen has all the opportunity to be successful. Well, I love your analogy about the marathon and we always say cows, like kids, thrive on consistency. Yeah. And so a consistent diet is much better than something with peaks and valleys. You refer to using Riomax year round and that may not be a fit for everybody. But typically guys get on... Get better results with lower inputs at a low daily intake versus peaks and valleys Yeah. Or on and off. But a question we get with guys out West, I was in Wyoming recently meeting with a guy and he said he had come from Utah where he said they didn't depend on cake and cubes. He was his concern was if we're let's say we're in dry conditions and we're caking or cubing our cows and you get a little burst of grain maybe twice a week or three times a week, How does that fit in with the whole consistency and managing that pH of that rumen and the rumen microbes? Most of the empirical research would suggest that you'll get some performance increase, right? You will. There was an interesting study several years ago that came out of the High Desert in Eastern Oregon, where they were only, you know, supplementing maybe twice a week with a couple three pounds of a higher protein, a 20% or 30% protein cake, right? Sure. And they did see a little performance increase. Their conception rates were a little higher and their more consistent. That's not going to really... I mean, you're not... Depending on, once again, the nature of the cake too. Has it got more fiber in it? Does it have more energy? Sure. More starch? Yeah. Once or twice a week, which you're not going to get the rumen pH to really fluctuate a lot or get on a roller coaster. But if you're got a high starch or say a cake that has a lot of distillers grains in it or something that's got more starch in it, but it's got more corn in it, not necessarily distillers grains, so grains pretty high fiber and protein. But then you'll see that roller coaster a little bit and then you can actually throw the rumen off kilter a little Yeah. And then you're you're messing with the microbes, right? So you get that pH to dip down and get a little acidic and so now we take the lactobacillus and we turn it into a different type of bacteria and then that gets established and then we go back and forth. Don't want that. At least I don't want that with my cows. I want my cows to be nice and consistent. I want my cows on a high forage diet. Now, I'm not saying if you cake that's a bad thing, certainly. And everybody has their production system and what works for everybody works for you. Yeah. But this is one way, like, we used to offer cake in the spring, either a wheat mid or a commercial cake, and we've been able to go away from that completely with the reel. Sure. We no longer need it. We don't see our cows starting to peel body condition score like they did before we got on the Rio. Yeah, well, so that that was actually our first our first experience with Rio is I got it in in the winter and we started using it in lieu of offering them, you know, three, four pounds of wheat meds a day. And I noticed not only did their body condition score not peel back at all, but we also started to notice the manure paths were better. That was my next question. Their rumen metabolism straightened out. And that's when I called you guys back and talked to Twain and I said, well, I'd be interested in dealing this product because we saw that within about ten or fifteen days, which I thought was incredible, I started noticing the manure really just getting right. So Travis, he's talked a lot about the rumen microbes and we can't see those with the naked eye. But if we zoom back out, we can see and manage and monitor the manure. Right. And so I really like where this is going. Yeah. Because I can see that and I think everybody that's listening to this can relate to that. Like they've seen manure that stacks up, they've seen manure that's super runny, and they've seen manure that I call just right that is like pancake batter consistency with a little divot in the middle. Yeah. But what's that telling us? If your manure is hard and comes out and it stacks, right, that means you're not getting the fiber out of it. You're not digesting it. You're not getting a thorough digestion. Yeah. Or that could be from a number of things. It could be because you don't have enough protein, so your rumen's not running, you know, the way it should. But that always tells me that I'm probably... My forage quality is either way too low and I need to increase forage quality or my rumen's not running right. I'm not getting anything out of that forage. On the other end, they're runny. You know, we all see cows get runny when you turn them into lush green grass and they get a lot of moisture and then also the protein's high and so the protein and the energy gets out of whack a little bit. Yeah. And then then the rumen is running in a different direction and it's just everything's just flying through. So you want a you want a nice calm rumen is what you want. Right. And that's when you see what you talked about the pancake batter. A nice thick batter where you get a nice o rings is what I call them, right? You get a ring and another ring and another ring kind of what it looks like. You get like three or four o rings in there and it's flat. It's just a nice patty. Not not the beehive. No no no no. The o rings are flat. They're nice and flat. That's what I'm looking for. Not runny, but nice and flat. That tells me that the rumen is digesting the fiber in there, most of it. Yeah. It's getting it's getting that fiber digested and that also tells me that it's releasing all the other good nutrition in that plant, the vitamins, the minerals and things like that that I'm looking for. Yeah. And so, you know, that first spring that we went on the reel, that's what I saw. And like I said, it didn't take very long. So Travis, you're a scientist, you're an educator, you're a rancher, but you're also an entrepreneur. And you shared, you know, the different revenue streams that you manage within the ranching family if you like. Can you talk to us a little bit about the economics of feeding microbes and this manure? Can we convert that to economics and look at it from a business perspective? What we found with particularly this tub is yeah there and I think that's the biggest rub right so we deal with Riomax and the biggest complaint we have on Rio I know what you're gonna say is, 'Baw dang they're expensive man they're just so expensive.' Yeah. So but what we found on our ranch is that it's it and I'll be honest with you, I'm not a big fan of the saying it's the tub that pays for itself because that on our ranch, it doesn't just pay for itself, it makes us money. It actually it actually makes us quite a So bit of money, get tell Twain that. Yeah. It's it actually it's it's a quite an economic benefit for us and for a number of reasons. We're kind of short selling ourselves. A bit when you say that, I do think so. Okay. Once again, this isn't for everybody. Yeah. But we do run our cows, know, we calve in June. Our expectation is our cows are gonna run pretty rough through the winter. We're talking, you know, stockpiled grass or corn stalks or things like that. What we don't want is we don't want those cows in the yard and then we have a lot of manure to move out and things like that. So that's an ancillary benefit, economic benefit too because I keep my cattle out on my cropland and a they're little fertilizing for And me out there, they're working for you. If you hear thread through all of this, his cows are working for him, not him for his cows. Trying, know, we save diesel, we save an awful lot of depreciation on machinery, the whole nine yards. Now that doesn't mean that we don't feed in the yard, of course we feed calves, we develop heifers, we do we do have some silage, we do some things like that. Sure. But in terms of the overall cow herd, we managed to eliminate all the processed feed on the cows. Like I said, we used to either get cake in or for a few years we would go and just pick up loads of wheat mid pellets from we have a pasta plant about sixty, seventy miles away. That's still an expense and that's expensive feed no matter what how you look at it. That is outside of bounds of trying to feed a cow herd when you have that, particularly for us as once again we're trying to get the cows to make a dollar. And so yeah, the tub is expensive and there are times where those cows will take more Rio and there are times where they'll take less, but overall and I haven't done the math in a year or two, but all in we were about 30¢ a day, 25 to 30¢ a day. Yeah. All in. That included my all my protein supplementation and my mineral. Well, I can't beat that with anything. So the economics have always worked really well for us and I'll tell you, if it didn't work for us I wouldn't have the Rio out of the cows. I believe that. I wouldn't. Yeah. Shane and I wouldn't be feeding our cows Rio if I didn't believe it was, you know, economically sound. The last part of this is just, you know, we'll average about a tub per 50 cows every month, which most of the other tubs we're having to replace them every ten days or twelve days. Well, I'm only replacing tubs every month now. Yeah. So that also means that I'm not dragging tubs around, I'm not ******** around. Well, actually I'm dragging tubs around because we do rotationally graze and so I got the tubs from one paddock to the next paddock. Yeah. But I don't have a bunch of tubs in the back of my pickup and I'm constantly picking up plastic tubs out in my pastures. They last a lot longer so we have less labor there. For us, it's always it there's been very little downside of us using the Rio tubs, let's put it that way. And once again, if there was a downside, I wouldn't have them out there. Yeah. They work for us. So you've talked about the cost per head per day and I believe that's a good sound practice, whatever program you're on, is to look at your apples to apples cost per head per day. But then if you can take it a bit further, how does it pay for itself and make you money? Like what are the returns that you would see? From year to year, it'll vary a little bit, but we definitely see a tick up in our stocking rate. There's no doubt about it, right? The cows get satiated or they get satisfied a little earlier on in the process. So what we're saying is, you know, in the past maybe it took six acres on a cow, maybe we're running a cow on five acres now, pair. I know we're getting some savings there, I know we're getting hay savings, I know where you're going with this. We are getting hay savings. I'll tell you that that first winter, it's hard to know now because they've been on Rhyzorb for five, six years, but that first winter, you know, my dad, who's a, I mean, he's kind of a no foo foo dust guy right and he's like what are we doing this for kind of out of the gate and and about three or four weeks in he said well I don't know what's in those tubs he said but I was and he was doing the winter feeding he does a lot of our winter feeding he's still 80 years old but he likes to go out, and this was probably in March when we did have the cows in the lot. And he said, But I was giving them nine bales of hay, and they were looking around, and now they eat about six bales of hay, and they're laying there chewing their cud. And I went, Okay. And so those types of things. And I think you've got plenty of testimonials from a lot of other ranchers that will say something similar to that, right? Yeah. They got it took a couple of weeks, we saw the manure get right, and then you saw the cows just go, I'm happy. And they started eating less. Yeah. They really did start eating less because they were getting more out of the hay. Extracting the They were just getting more all the nutrients too, not just energy, but their protein needs were being made, their vitamins and mineral needs were being met. And so you could just see it and yeah, we went right out of the gate. We probably were down about a third, right? About a third of our intake, we pulled off the top. And now I don't know, it seems like, yeah, I mean, the cows are always happy. They're always content. You know, we don't have a lot of great hay up in this part of the world. Is, alfalfa is hard to come by. We have got a lot of cool seasons and a lot of invaders in our native grasses even with things like Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome and a number of things like that. Yeah. But when we are feeding hay and they're they, you know, we like I said, we always have Rio in front of them. They seem to do very well on it and so I'm confident that not only on pasture are we getting more out of the pastures, probably able to rest some pastures a little bit that we might not to particularly in times of drought, but then also during the winter I know we're saving money on hay. So you've talked about about a 30% hay savings you talked about the increasing in stocking carrying capacity is that a similar percentage or not because it's the same size It's It would be very hard to do the math on the stocking rates, Trevor, unfortunately. That, I mean, all I can do is just give you my best guess. I would guess probably closer to 10% to 15% savings on stocking rate. But that's really hard to calculate. It just is. Just because year over year we are so reliant on moisture and so a little drier, we got to extend our, you know, our grazing times a little bit more. You know, we catch a really nice wet winter, we just hop in from pasture to pasture to pasture to pasture to keep ahead of it, so Okay. It's hard to While I've got you here, more question, I'm gonna jump into a slightly different topic. 2026, we've had a focus on the feedlot space. Now traditionally for, you know, a quarter of a century, we've focused on cow calf and that is still our core, our main focus. But we're looking at the first sixty days in a starting phase for incoming calves. Now working with Doctor. Ryan Rathman from Texas Tech, he has showed us that when the immune system is really functioning and in good shape, It will take way less fuel in terms of energy and hence the body redirects that energy and it goes to weight gain. He went on to say that he's seen it in the meat quality. So you're a meat scientist, he's saying that with a healthy immune system versus a calf that's had disease challenges in the feed yard on the same diet, the same genetics, we're seeing more marbling on that healthy calf than one that had to get treated with antibiotics. Can you speak to that from a meat scientist point of view? No doubt about it, right? So if you take CAFE and cafe one and let's say they're the same genetically there it's a biological system there's just so much there's so much noise in all of it. Yeah. But let's say we take two identical DNA cattle and we take one and we stress them out a little bit and we get them a little sick and we don't get them on feed right and we don't give them the right mineral nutrition and then we take calf A1 and he's perfect and he never gets sick, his ears never fall down, he's on a perfect diet and we feed them both for two ten days, right? We know that calf A1 is going to have a higher marbling score. He's going to have a higher palatability product than cafe. Yeah. Calf A has been fighting all the way and so marbling is fat and fat depositions rely on available excess energy. Got to have a little excess energy in the system, right? Right. In order to lay that marbling in. The external fat's not the only thing, it's also the marbling fat. Inside of the muscle. Inside of the muscle and that's what creates flavor. A lot of the flavor profile in a beefsteak or even ground beef is built on that fat profile, right? So no doubt in my mind, yeah, that if you can keep that calf healthier, you know that they're going to have a higher marbling score. All things once again staying even. And as I mentioned, across a population of cattle, the cattle that generally are healthier, generally are less stressed out during their feeding, they're going have higher quality beef. Yep. And feedlots get incentivized for, obviously, the Absolutely, score and the absolutely. So it makes a lot of sense to and it's not just the quality of the meat either, of course. We're talking about pounds of gain, everything. Keep that animal eating, keep them healthy, keep their ears up, and and get them out as fast as you can. Time is money so. Well to wrap up here, I want to hit on one last topic that I know you guy the Matic family is pretty progressive in terms of the way they, you know, the different business entities, revenue streams, managing the ranch. There's one more thing that I know you guys are progressive on and that is stewardship and a regenerative approach. I'm not sure if that's the right term. Yeah. That works. Can you just touch on how the Riomax tools and the Riomax methodology ties in to what you guys are doing in your regenerative practice? You know, it's funny because when we got into Rio, that wasn't really in my brain set. Know, what I was thinking about was, hey, I'm trying to take as much advantage of my low quality hay and forages as possible. But the synergies between the two things, I mean, at our place, we were really we put a lot of emphasis on things like soil health, right? Sure. And soil health is everything to us at the end of the day. Soil health is what pays the bills as much as anything. Yeah. And to have a healthy soil, you have to have a healthy ecosystem, a microorganism system in that soil. Back to microbes. Right, just back to microbes. Otherwise, it's just dirt. So we want soil, we don't want dirt. Dirt, there's a lot of dirt getting farmed in this country where farmers will put a seed in and then they got to come along and they got to add all the nutrients, the nitrogen, all the phosphorus, the potassium, all the sulfur in order to get that plant to grow. Kind of propping it up. They are. And you know, it's a system that works for some guys but it's an artificial system. We want to have a nice natural system in ours. So we're really interested in making sure that our dirt is soil and that it's got a healthy microorganism, healthy organic matter base to it. And very similar to what Rio does in that cow's rumen, right? Yeah. Same thing, it's feeding those microbes. The microbes in the soil will provide a lot of nitrogen for you. They'll sequester a ton of carbon down there and provide a carbon backbone for those roots to tap into to take nutrients up into the plant. There's so much at similar synergies between what we do with Riomax in the cow's rumen and what we're trying to do with our soil health to grow to grow grass, to grow corn, to grow soybeans, to grow anything on our place. So we want we're really interested in making sure the soil is healthy and for that you got to have that population of soil microorganisms working. Yeah. And I would just add for Riomax, when we first excluded the sulfates and oxides out of our formulas, it was not for soil health reasons, it was for bioavailability reasons in the cow. Doctor. Spears from North Carolina State did that work showing that sulfates and oxides had a way lower availability to the cow. But the unintended positive consequence of that decision we made years ago was that those sulfates and oxides have been proved to have a negative unintended negative consequence on your soil microbes. Right. So I think stewardship is about managing your land for today but for next generation. And it's sometimes what you don't do versus what you do in practices. There's no doubt in my mind that the manure we're getting out of our cows in particular that are on a Riomax, you know, offered Riomax, I know that that manure is probably accentuating our soil health as well, right? Because we have got that, that manure is gonna have a bacterial load in it as well. Sure. It's gonna have, you know, a lot of positives. So it all fits in our whole total philosophy that we have on the ranch with our soil health and with how we manage our cows. Well, Travis, thank you so much Oh, it's been a pleasure. For imparting your wisdom to us. I'm going to leave this podcast a lot smarter than I came. Oh, I don't know about that. And thanks for joining us on the podcast. We'll see you next Thursday morning.
Today we're joined by Travis Maddock of Maddock Ranch in Maddock, North Dakota, to discuss feeding rumen microbes, what manure and hay use tell him about his cows, and how Riomax pencils out on his place.