Fifth-Generation Rancher and Farmer Turns to Riomax to Help His Bottom Line
For Chuck Davis, it’s love of the business and the people in it that keeps him going.
MEET CHUCK DAVIS
Ashdown, AR
The cattle business is a business of relationships. Neighbors helping neighbors, people working together so everyone can be successful.
That’s how Chuck Davis, a rancher and farmer from Ashdown, Arkansas, sees things. And that’s how he learned about the benefits of Riomax® and became a dealer as well as a customer of the orange tubs.
A Fifth Generation Ranch
Davis is the fifth generation to run the diversified operation nestled in the southwest corner of Arkansas and his three sons are the sixth. “We’re right on the Red River,” which forms the border between Texas and Arkansas, “and Oklahoma’s about seven or eight miles from us.”
The operation revolves around a 600-head commercial cow-calf herd and a registered Charolais herd. But that’s just the beginning. “I buy 4-and 5-weight stockers in the fall to run on wheat along with the tail end of my calf crop,” he says. He owns a feed store which his middle son runs, and grows pecans along the river, which his oldest son manages. And to top it off, he raises poultry for Pilgrim’s Pride.
His youngest son helps with the registered Charolais herd. “He’s a banker, but he’s my cattleman,” Davis says. “Without the boys, I couldn’t hardly get it done.”
In addition to selling registered Charolais bulls, Davis uses them as a terminal cross on his commercial cows and runs Red Angus bulls on his heifers. He’ll keep some of the top-end heifers from that mating as replacements, and turns out Brahman bulls on Angus and Angus-cross cows to raise replacement heifers as well. “In our country, it just seems like a little bit of ear helps,” he says.
The commercial cows calve in the fall, beginning in October, and the calving season runs for 90 days. After the calves are weaned in the spring, they’re backgrounded for 45 days. The calves are vaccinated with a modified-live vaccine while still on the cow and bolstered at weaning. They’re wormed and the tailenders that go to wheat pasture are implanted.
The bigger, older calves are contracted with Superior Livestock and sold via video. The steers will weigh about 750 pounds after being weaned 45 days and the heifers will average 685 pounds, he says.
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Riomax® and Relationships
In fact, it was his Superior rep who told him about Riomax®, proving once again that relationships and word-of-mouth are often the way business gets done in the cattle world. His rep buys feed at the feed store and the two have been friends for many years. Davis first tried the tubs in 2022. He breeds all his Charolais cows with artificial insemination and was looking for something to help his registered herd be more productive.
But he knew it would take time to see any results and as this was written, it was still too early. However, he had a place with two different herds of commercial cows of roughly 90 head in each herd. They made an ideal test.
Hay & Forage Savings
Since they were in separate pastures, he put Riomax® tubs and salt in one pasture and the other herd stayed on the liquid feed and mineral that was his usual supplementation strategy. Both herds ate hay out of the same pile, so they were getting the same forage.
He’d heard about the hay savings that Riomax® provides, but was skeptical. And that wasn’t even what he was looking for when he first bought the orange tubs. But what he saw that first winter made him a believer.
“We’d unroll four (round bales) for the ones on the liquid feed. Go to the back (to the herd on Riomax®), we’d unroll three. Or we might unroll three and two.” He says they didn’t save a round bale every day on the Riomax® cows, “but probably four or five rolls a week we’d save on those 90 head on Riomax®. So I got to thinking, ‘Maybe they’re telling me right on this hay saving deal.’ We saw that.”
What’s more, he says those cattle went through the winter maintaining their body condition and looking good. “Then my Charolais, the guy came out to AI those and he said, ‘Man, these cattle, they look really good. A little bit better than normal.’” And the conception rate was slightly better than years past. “So I’m hoping that the longer I stay on it, the better that’ll get.”
In fact, with his strong entrepreneurial spirit, Davis is now a Riomax® dealer. He has a few customers who are just getting started and one who has had his cattle on the orange tubs for about a year. “He’s pretty much sold on them,” Davis says, and since he helps the Superior rep, he talks to a lot of neighboring ranchers.
"You need to commit to a pretty good while."
Some of Davis’ customers are just dabbling with adding Riomax® as a supplement. “But I try to tell them, ‘Look guys, if you’re not going to commit to stay on it for a while, really and truly, you’re not going to do any good just putting out a couple of tubs to see how they do. You need to commit to a pretty good while.’ I think they ought to commit to a year if they really want to tell anything.”
That’s what Davis did. “I committed to stay with it for a year. Now I’ve got it out for all my cows and my yearlings.” That will be another test for the value of Riomax®. The stockers he buys originate from many different farms, are comingled at sale barns and he doesn’t know anything about their background. However, past experience tells him to assume they were weaned in the trailer on the road to the sale barn and haven’t been vaccinated.
Given his robust weaning and vaccination program, sick calves simply aren’t a problem with his calf crop. That’s not true for the high-risk calves he buys. He’ll know as the winter of 2023 goes along how Riomax® works in that situation. Stay tuned.
Impacting the Bottom Line
Riomax® isn’t the cheapest supplement a beef producer can buy. But Davis looks at it this way: “A good rancher, you’ve got to look at your bottom line or you won’t be a rancher very long.” But the bottom line takes in more than just the expense side of the ledger. If a management practice costs more, but delivers a higher return on that investment, then it comes down on the plus side when you figure the true bottom line.
Davis loves what he does. “Of course, I’ve done it all my life. Several generations of us have done it all of our lives. We don’t ever retire. My folks, we just go until we can’t go anymore and then turn it over to the next generation,” he says.
It’s that passion that helps bring success. “When everybody’s sleeping in on Sunday morning, you’re out feeding. You let all your hands off so they can have time with their families but you’re out feeding and tagging and weighing calves before church,” he says. “So it’s something we love to do but you still have to stay in business and you’ve got to watch the bottom line to do that. But it’s the love of being a farmer and a rancher is what being a good rancher means to me.”
