Thin Cows, Expensive Hay, And Overconsuming Mineral

I was told that the consumption was a third of a pound per cow per day and they were consuming twice that. My wife and I are first generation ranchers and so we've slowly since I was a kid started building up a cow herd. We went from, you know, a hundred cows to now four hundred cows over the three or four years. The price of cows was climbing pretty high so I was having to buy some as many thin cows as I could get my hands on because the better cows were just way too expensive. So we were fighting thin cows and dry grass and not very much feed and hay around here is very expensive. There's a lot of people that own three horses on three acres and they all want to spend a lot of money on hay. In general, hay around here is over two hundred to two hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred dollars a ton for good quality hay. So if I have to feed much more than one ton of hay per cow, it starts to get pretty hard to to keep my costs in check. At that time, we were using more minerals and then, you know, a full mineral cake, you know, in order to maintain good mineral intake in the wintertime is tricky and so we were looking for options and so we we tried Riomax to kinda help get those thin cows to do more with less. I was told that the consumption was a third of a pound per cow per day. This particular herd of cows kinda had a little bit of a run on it early in the season right after I weaned their calves and I don't know if they were coping on the Riomax tubs or what, but they kinda did a little ate more than what we were expecting and so I called the dealer and said they kinda went through twice what I was expecting for right after I weaned calves. Then I talked to your territory manager a little bit and told him kind of the the situation, how many tubs were available for how many cows, for how many days, and you know, what was the conditions so that they know that I wasn't trying to cram three hundred cows on two tubs every day, but that they had plenty of access and they weren't fighting over it. He said no problem, they sent me a check for what we kind of expected was the over consumption. It's a relationship based conversation and then after that they've settled right in. I'm expecting it was a little bit of coping after they weaned their calves and kinda got got onto some new dry grass and just didn't have much going on. And they leveled out just like they should and they're they look good. They're getting the right nutrition when they need it and there's probably more to just keeping that gut biome in a nice level of condition for the gestation of the calves inside of them than anything. We wanna keep that nice and smooth. We don't want bounces up and down. I know they have access to, you know, the the bare crucial vitamins and minerals they need and and then they they can break down, you know, even if we were to get two or three feet of snow out here, there is a lot of brush out in these hillsides that are, you know, that's three or four feet tall and I don't have to lay awake at night wondering if these cows have access to something and also that something is something they can actually break down. I mean, my goal every year is to feed something less than one ton of hay per cow. So I mean, that's not very much feed. I think we're gonna get through this winter at something around a half a ton per cow depending on what March brings us if we get a lot of snow or not. So yeah, so they're not getting much but they're in good shape. What we found is there's a lot of people that wanna wanna get to know their farmer and wanna know where where their animal their food comes from and how it grows and what what are those animals fed their whole life. If we're getting our cows a much wider variety of an ecosystem of biodiversity in their in their intake and they're able to do something with that intake and have the biology in their rumen to break though the forbs and the brush and the grass and shoot even maybe some of the cactus out here down to where they can actually digest it and turn it into protein. It also boosts the value of the protein. It's got a wider diversity to it and it has a different flavor, different texture, but maybe even a little bit more nutrient dense. It's a big bill for me to pay every year. This makes way more sense for us. We have four times as many cows and this isn't so. I don't have as much time to be here. There's return on investment if not for anything but my time.