The Young and the Ambitious
Ty and Katie Keller have their sights set on raising quality heifers
Ty & Katie Keller
Elsmere, Nebraska
Ty Keller is a cowman. Always has been. Growing up on a Nebraska Sandhills ranch as one of five kids, he always knew he wanted to be a rancher.
Problem was, so did three of his siblings. With four kids interested in coming back home, some of them had to find their own way. So, Ty went to work, learning all he could with boots and horse hooves on the ground. He did a stint in college but didn’t earn a degree. “I ran wheat cattle in Kansas during college and I liked the work better than school,” he says.
Then he went to work as a cowboy on several ranches. “I started getting some cows here and there as bonuses from my ranch jobs,” he says. “Then I met my wife, Katie, in 2016 and she had some cows, too.” The combined herd numbered around 16 cows. “Then, in 2020, we got a big ‘ol loan and bought another 100. So we’ve slowly just kept buying cows and trying to get cows paid for.”
Ty and Katie took two leaps of faith with that purchase. Ty quit his ranch job and a regular paycheck. Then they rented a house and some ground near Elsmere, Nebraska, and struck out on their own. They calve on the rented ground and then truck cows to summer grass where they can find it. In the winter, they truck cows to graze turnips and corn stalks.
Katie works for ABS and she and Ty do custom AI (artificial insemination) work, which helps supplement their income. Beyond that, Ty does leather work and trims and shoes horses for his main income when he isn’t doing custom AI work or looking after his cows. Long term, their goal is to produce high quality replacement heifers to sell to other ranchers.
They’re well on their way to achieving that goal. “We run right around 120 cows and we keep a handful of heifers every year,” he says. “And then, if we need to, we buy some bred cows every year.” Their cow herd was initially black-hided, bred to Hereford bulls to get a F1 black-baldy calf. “That F1 steer feeds really well and that F1 cow is a really, really good cow,” he says.
However, there were a number of baldies in the hundred cows that gave them their start. “So we went to black bulls and now we’re starting to phase out the baldy cows and going back to straight black cows.” Then they’ll go back to Hereford bulls.
They AI all their cows and the black bulls they have on hand as cleanup bulls will last five or six years more, he says. “So I think if we can just keep a cycle of going back and forth like that, it’ll work.”
Using artificial insemination, they have access to the best genetics available, which moves their genetic progress forward at a stepped-up pace. “Our oldest AI-sired heifers are coming with their fourth calf,” he says. Bred to bulls with top genetics in the traits they want in their herd, each subsequent calf crop will be better genetically than the ones before it.
They sell their steer calves after weaning in October at their local sale barn. “And the heifers, they’ll be anywhere from 50 to 100 days weaned when we sell those. We sell to a neighbor who buys all the heifers we don’t keep.”
That makes choosing which heifers to keep and which to sell more of a conundrum than normal. “We’re on a seesaw because we want to sell our good heifers to get our name out there,” he says, “so we don’t want to keep all of our nicest ones every year.”
Someday, that will no longer be a conundrum. “Our goal is someday to be able to keep as many as we want and still sell as many as we need to.”
To produce heifers good enough to stay in their herd and good enough to earn a spot in someone else’s herd, they put a lot of emphasis on their cowherd’s ability to wean a 600-pound calf every year for many years. “If a cow is 12 years old and still raising a 600-pound calf at weaning, we keep every heifer out of her. We strive for that longevity.”
To spur their heifer program along, Ty and Katie AI’d all the cows that responded to their synchronization program in 2023 with heifer sexed semen from a top maternal bull. “Everything else we AI’d to a carcass bull as a terminal cross.”
However, as any rancher young or old knows, the weather is the ultimate arbitrator. “The Sandhills are a wonder, but sometimes they’re hard to deal with,” Ty says. Take the winter of 2023 for example, which was the worst in memory in the Nebraska Sandhills. That was after coming out of a drought in 2022. And that, Ty says, is where Riomax saved the day, and maybe the future.
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Ty was no stranger to the orange tubs. His dad, Shane, is a Riomax dealer and one of the ranches he worked on also saw the benefits of Riomax. For Ty, those benefits carried him through the drought and then a tough winter.
“We had the best breed back and the biggest calves we’ve had in five years,” he says. In fact, breed back has improved 1% to 2% every year, he adds. “And I know Rio has a lot to do with that. I’ve seen it before.”
Even though the young couple has a dream and the work ethic to make it happen, getting the best return on variable costs is necessary. For Ty and Katie, that help came in a Riomax tub, both financially and in the welfare of their cattle.
Come May, cows can look tough, with a loss of body condition due to calving, winter weather and green grass just coming on. “But the cows look good going to grass. They don’t have any catching up to do.”
Beyond that, Ty says herd health isn’t much of a concern. “We’ve never had problems with scours, ever,” he says. “And we hardly doctor anything all summer. I attribute some of that to Riomax.”
Their cows come home from winter grazing around the end of February for calving. They’ll be on Riomax during calving and until turnout on summer grass.
Then there are the dollars and cents. In 2021, hay ran $90 to $95 a ton, Ty recalls. “Then in 2022 it went to $200 or better.” In 2023, there was hardly any hay to be found and he paid $265 a ton delivered. And it was sorry hay.
With Riomax, they had been feeding 15 pounds of hay per day instead of the 25 pounds everyone else was putting out, along with 1 pound of protein cubes a day. He had to bump his hay up in 2023 because the feed was so weak. All the way to 17 pounds per head per day.
It doesn’t take a lot of math to see how Riomax saved the day for the Kellers. Hay at $265 a ton comes out to 13.25 cents a pound. At 8 pounds per head per day less hay consumption, that’s $1.06 in savings. Spread out over 120 head, the Kellers saved $127.20 per day.
His advice? Don’t let sticker shock stop you. “You order two tons and your jaw hits the floor because it’s so expensive. But as soon as you put a pencil to how much hay you save, it’s a no brainer.”
After all, they saw the best breed up and the heaviest calves so far. “Rio bailed us out.”