50% Less Feed Expense: Why We Changed Our Cattle Operation

The tub I was using before, I was two to one on consumption. So I was already spending two hundred and fifty dollars on tubs without the mineral, without the hay savings, without the wormer, without all the added it I just we just talked about. I'm Roger Givens. I'm from Elk City, Oklahoma. We would always, you know, have some sickness. We had all the time in the weenie. Prior years, you know, not a lot of death loss, but we'd get a lot of sickness. We'd be pulling some, darkening some, had a sick pen, those kind of things. We had no sick pen last year. Was one dart and done. I was into mineral and I fed a good mineral, I felt like, for many years. But that's also costly to do, so really you gotta know what you're doing, your consumption there is, and that was one of my deductions off to put into this package, was my mineral cost and hay cost and fly control, worm control, and protein. You know, you get in the protein side, there's protein there. Been on Riomax, this will be my third year. I tried some tubs on pasture too and then I just committed to the whole thing. When I started seeing that I hay, I was feeding a little less hay. You you're not gonna cut it in half, but if we can cut four bales a month out of this pasture, a hundred dollars a bale looks like this year's gonna be that, maybe more. There's one tub right there. We feed about a tub to a tub and a half in here, depends on what size the calves are, The hay alone may pay for it. Put all that together and with the herd health, the wormers in it, that's a big deal to me. We keep them pretty well warmed year round. The mineral package in it's good. The consumption is right in line where I need to be, and by the time I took all the deductions out, the mineral out, the tubs out, I feed probably fifteen less hay, maybe twenty per year. You start deducting all that out and all a sudden this tub becomes very reasonable if not basically break even or you're not spending any more money on it. You're just paying it up front. One thing we did notice last year was some good fly control and it was noticeable. We had some but they was not covered up with it. So obviously we liked that. Seen virtually no sickness at all. We pulled one calf last year, didn't pull it, we darted it. On the ones that I weaned on this tub, I weaned them on this tub. So yeah, the health just continues all the way through on the program, which was another selling point for me. They're already on it. You'll start seeing the difference. You start seeing the difference at weaning. If we can keep from losing a calf right now in the weaning process, just one calf, that's about three grand to us. If you lose three or four, you can buy a lot of tubs. That's the benefits that we're seeing in this as we go along. At three or four thousand a head, some of it's five thousand if you want get into pairs. I'm a cow calf guy slash stocker guy. We obviously want to, one, if we can keep her around longer, that's a huge deal. If we can keep that cow an extra three to four years, say five years even, keep her healthy, keep her going, keep her breeding back, then that's a huge advantage for us on the cal side of it. For a guy to do this, he's got to sit down and he's got to figure his costs. Until you do that, I don't know that anything you're doing is really you're gonna know. You're just kinda throwing a dart at a dartboard. And they've earned it with me because I was an easy one to get on. I don't just jump on the bandwagon and take off on the next train.