Why His Cows Stopped “Balling” for Feed

I planted oat barley pea fairly lightly mixed with turnips, radish, and kale. I zero tilled it, just intending to graze it this fall. So, yeah, running a hot wire on it and kinda just giving the cows a few days of grazing, and then I'll give them a little bit of hay because it's pretty hot feed. So, just kinda playing around with that. It's kinda trying to build the organic matter up in the soil as well. I'm Roger Groot from Topley, BC. It's a small town in northern Northwestern BC. We run three hundred cow calf operation, my wife and I, and we have four kids. And we've been on Riomax for two years. Conception rates were not as good as I was always hoping for. We used mineral blends that were developed for our area. It did its job, I guess. I met Kurt at a cattlemen's meeting and he was like, Mike, you gotta try this stuff. So I thought, well, to give it a fair chance, I'll I'll give it two years. And if I see similar results in two years, then I think it's definitely doing its job. I was like, woah. That's pricey. Typically in the past, if we bought protein tubs, they've kind of run that two hundred or less, one hundred and seventy five to two hundred dollars a tub. When he said, know, the price stayed on them. Was a little bit shocked, but yeah, he kind of told me they wouldn't consume it like they would those other products. And he's right, they don't consume it like like a protein tub. So it was after Christmas sometime in the New Year. And so I I got enough tubs to get us through that calving season. So I kinda started it. I don't know. It was maybe three, four weeks before calving. I was a little bit shocked at first. They were really consuming it pretty hard. I was like, oh man, this is getting expensive. But they did slow down. Then this past year, we put them on Riomax basically from the time they got weaned in the fall until grass again. So we ran them through it all winter. I think mostly probably in the manure that it seemed like it was a different texture, consistency. Yeah, maybe a little more contentness in the cows not balling for feed. Well, we've been a drought for three years, so our crops have been poor. Some of our feed wasn't very good. It got browned off halfway through our harvest and just the feed quality wasn't really there. So that was another reason why I wanted to use Riomax. I think it helped for utilizing that poor feed. Seemed like the rumen was working better. The cows were just getting more out of the feed we were giving them. Which is huge for us. We feed close to two hundred days. If we can cut back percentages on our feed, it adds up. Last winter we were running our cows at twenty five pounds a day on marginal grass hay. Before we were closer to that thirty pounds a day. The feed prices change every year, but it definitely is significant. I was a little nervous if I was cheating my cows out on their feed, but they seemed to come through it good and calves were healthy at calving. Have definitely noticed in the last two years that our conception rates are a lot better than they previously were. I wanted to give it two years just to try it and after two years we noticed that we had good results. Typically we would preg check between cows and bred heifers three fifty head. And we would see around twenty kind of open and some more lates out of that. Whereas now, the last two years we've seen this year I think we were six open out of all of them and four lates. And I think last year was about the same. A bred cow these days is pretty valuable. So it's worth a lot I think. And even, yeah, get them grouped tighter in that first cycle. We've noticed that when we were preg checking that we had a lot more cows in that first cycle. Yeah, I think we've probably had a little less like scours and stuff like that. Yeah, definitely noticed that. I mean, we've been drier, so we just haven't had as much water around either, I think, during calving as typically we've had in the past. So it's hard to exactly say, but I think it does help for the calves. I would say it's paid for itself.