Horses

We wintered our cows and coming first calf heifers on FiberMate 20, Redmond salt, and long stem hay. This spring, we were pleased with the healthy and vigorous calves. We like the value of the balanced minerals and protein provided by the FiberMate 20.

I can really tell the difference on the performance and condition of my bulls since I’ve been using SweetPro. What I really like about it is that it really keeps my bulls healthy. They really muscle up on it, it keeps them fresh and their stomachs working well. My bulls travel better since they have been on the supplement

Just thought I would drop you an email and let you know some of our results over the course of the winter. We fed the backgrounder tubs to about 1250 head of yearlings, and Redmond salt and conditioner to the other 1250 head of yearling on our place. On a bad year we suffer from about 120 cases of coccidiosis in our yearlings. This year we only doctored one (and we are not even sure if he was actually sick with it or not). Although we still had some foot rot out of one truckload of cattle that came in our sickness was next to nothing this year, which was good considering how bad of a winter we had. The product really works. Thanks. Just a little side note here about the gains we have had with our yearlings on SweetPro and Redmond products. Over the last week we have sold about 600 head of yearlings in two bunches. They were started out on the backgrounder tub and then switched to FiberMate 18’s part way through the summer. They ate about .75 lbs per day of the tubs and were space fed as well. We had Redmond salt on the side and they were just on summer rangeland and we still gained 2.99lbs on one bunch and 3.02 lbs per day on the other. These particular cattle didn’t have fly control and no growth hormones either.

Our heifers have been a very interesting study in fetal programming. We have 67 heifers that were born here from mother cows that were on SweetPro for their entire breeding and gestation period. We have 20 heifers that are from our other ranch that’s Reno’s brother runs, and those heifers’ mothers were only on SweetPro during the harsh winter months in the last trimester of gestation. Out of our current total of 29 calved out heifers, only THREE are from the other ranch’s bunch, the remaining 26 that have calved are from our bunch here, (the remaining herd of heifers from the other place is being calved out by my niece/nephew, and they have 11) meaning, our heifers bred up on the first cycle at a rate that is over twice as fast than the other ranch’s heifers. Its a good comparison b/c the mother cow and bull genetics are the same in both herds, and the heifers from both places were all consolidated as yearlings into one pasture for breeding last season, so they all grazed the same range, serviced by the same bulls. Conception rate for our group of heifers was significantly higher at preg testing as well.

For the past three years, we have been developing our replacement heifers and supplementing our cows post calving on SweetPro tubs and Redmond salt with great success. In addition to the hay savings we have experienced, the general health and fertility has also seemed to improve. I am a real believer in the benefits of the added enzymes and probiotics contained in the SweetPro tubs.

My brother Ryan and I had attended a Ranching for Profit school and we adapted pieces of their philosophy of minimal winter feeding for what we needed on our ranch. We had increased the size of our operation and needed to be able to do more with less work. In order to minimize both the time and cost expense of feeding hay, we stock pile enough forage during the year to be able to utilize a winter grazing program and once every 10 days they put out enough SweetPro supplement calculated to last the herd until the next deliver. I’m not saying we never feed hay. We do when the snow gets too deep, but I’d rather be doing something else than feeding $150/ton hay all day every day. Feed efficiency for us was a good selling point. Range conditions can make feed efficiency hard to quantify but we did our own field trial, and put the SweetPro up against what we were using at the time. At the end of the season, we liked what we were seeing with SweetPro

Just thought I would drop you an email and let you know some of our results over the course of the winter. We fed the backgrounder tubs to about 1250 head of yearlings, and Redmond salt and conditioner to the other 1250 head of yearling on our place. On a bad year we suffer from about 120 cases of coccidiosis in our yearlings. This year we only doctored one (and we are not even sure if he was actually sick with it or not). Although we still had some foot rot out of one truckload of cattle that came in our sickness was next to nothing this year, which was good considering how bad of a winter we had. The product really works. Thanks. Just a little side note here about the gains we have had with our yearlings on SweetPro and Redmond products. Over the last week we have sold about 600 head of yearlings in two bunches. They were started out on the backgrounder tub and then switched to FiberMate 18’s part way through the summer. They ate about .75 lbs per day of the tubs and were space fed as well. We had Redmond salt on the side and they were just on summer rangeland and we still gained 2.99lbs on one bunch and 3.02 lbs per day on the other. These particular cattle didn’t have fly control and no growth hormones either.

Love our ARROWQUIP CHUTE — fits all sizes of animals, quiet, easy on the workers and the cattle.