Bruce Keaster – Belt, MT

Seen a lot of savings on our on our pastures. Generally, figure about five and a half to six acres of pair around through here. We've been even last year through the drought of that we had of twenty twenty, we did four and a half acres of pair on on ours, still had adequate grass left. Cattle came off in good condition. They weren't weren't malnutritioned, weren't low body scores. Been running pretty consistent, six body score better on everything. We're paying right around fifty dollar an acre cash rent up here is kinda kind of a common thing. You can knock out an acre here off of every cow that that saves a lot of money. Mean, fifty fifty bucks and you don't need four hundred another four hundred acres. It's another twenty thousand. So all of a sudden you got forty forty five thousand dollars in your pocket and you still have all the extra added benefits through the mineral, the health benefits of it. And it really saved on the last year too with the drought. We didn't think we'd get through. We put the same amount of number in the pastures and it didn't rain. We pulled it out and we still had old grass in the pasture. I didn't know the tub saved that whole deal. We had stretched it a lot because there was a lot of people selling cows and we didn't sell anything and we didn't pull them out early. And this year, most of the pastures around here are pretty much nothing. And we drove through everything. We still got, you know, shoots of grass and tufts of grass all over the place. Not a lot, but it we kept them. It made a huge difference. As far as paying for itself, you know, you got to feed and you start saving instead of a lot of guys are up to forty five, fifty five pounds. It was figured somewhere in there a big cow and even when they had the calf on them sixty pounds. So if you're feeding thirty pounds, yeah, it's gonna easily pay for itself without you see a bit. I mean, we, you can see it on the cow calf pairs too, bigger calves. We calve in May, June, and we're weaving seven hundred and some pound calves off of Dallas. So it makes, yeah, we can see the difference really easy. You just go through each step and see We're running more cows than we used to run on the same acres. That is a big deal. Because I used to on on my pastures, they're not big pastures, but on my pastures, I used to run twenty five head and they would have it grazed down to nothing in five months easy. Now I can run thirty, thirty five on the same pastures, and they can stay there another month longer easy on any given year. And this year, they got to stay two months longer, and there's still grass left over. Well, yeah, it's high priced, but it's like if if you can afford or not. But I think you can afford it because you cannot afford not to feed it because you can get your cattle to market faster. They're healthier. You could run more cattle on your land or you can stay there longer before you have to move on to an another patch. The cows are way healthier. They're way more content. They're happy. They're happy cows.