I’m one of the unfortunate cattlemen who raise cattle in Wyoming; that’s the area of the Louisiana Purchase that the early immigrants passed through as quickly as possible for more hospitable climate. Some say its God-forsaken.  At one mile above sea level, we experience tough conditions due to cold, too much moisture in the winter then too little moisture during the growing season.  Obviously, this is a tough area to produce calves, but I was born here and this is my heritage going back generations.

We raise black baldy calves from Hereford and Black Angus cattle.  They tend to be hardy, but hardiness alone can’t withstand unrelenting weather. We have built shelters for the calves to take refuge in from birth up to a couple of months old.  Our operation includes irrigated hay fields so we have the calves up and off the hayfield by early April.  We have many years of experience of fighting scours in these young calves, with the loss of too many from “purple gut” (enterotoxemia).

In 2012, we were amazed that the calves weaning weights were as good as we had ever had.  From that year on we have fed Riomax® tubs year-round with predictable results, which also include:

• General herd health: No cancer eye since 2012!  No periparturient prolapses and very few post-calving prolapses.  No incidence of footrot in the cattle; especially appreciated not having any in the bull battery
• As we sell weaned calves, we are especially thankful for the impact feeding Riomax® tubs from mid-summer through fall has had on helping to prevent “sudden death” syndrome which strikes black calves especially hard and is largely a result of pneumonia.
• We have benefited greatly with the Rio tubs. We are stretching our precious hay stock. Without question, the cows are making better use of the hay they are fed due to the stimulation of the enzymes in the gut.  This fall in Wyoming has been a steady stream of wet and cold weather.  Our feedlot where we are backgrounding the weaned calves are in knee-deep of slop. Thank God for His grace, and thank you Rio Nutrition for the great recipe in Riomax® tubs. We have set a record for not having a single calf that needed treatment during the 50 days since weaning!

-Larry Chamberlain

We run a spring and fall herd of our own along with recipients for other ranchers. The ET work we do is mostly frozen, some fresh. We had a group of 129 Registered Angus recipients come in.

We gave them Riomax® in March for 90 days before transferring embryos. Of those 129 cows, 68.2% stuck, most of the embryos were frozen too, some were IVF. These dry cows went straight to stockpiled native grass and Riomax®, that’s it! So our feed costs were virtually nothing and we still got awesome conception rates!

We had a group of 32 head of club calves, they had 71% stick on conventional frozen. This group started Riomax® in March as well. Another group of 12 cows had only been on Riomax® for 30 days and they had 69% stick. We are very happy with these numbers.

We flushed a 10 and 11-year-old cow, they got 13 and 10 embryos from them! We flushed a 13-year-old cow just to see, typically you’re lucky to get one embryo from a cow that old but we got 3 from her! Pretty happy with what Riomax® has helped our customers see, especially with it only being fed to the cows for a few months so far.

-Tim Voboril