Transcript
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the latest “Block Talk ” podcast brought to you by CRYSTALYX® Brand supplements. Springtime in pastures throughout CRYSTALYX country brings calving opportunities and concerns. Mark Robbins, Research and Nutrition Manager for CRYSTALYX, has been thinking about all the nutrients that are critical for spring calving herds.
ANNOUNCER: So Mark, what nutrients should cattlemen be concerned with right now because you’ve got spring calving herds out there that are going to need some special attention.
MARK: As we look at this time of year and realizing that we are into calving for most people. A lot of this could be used a couple months prior to calving. But, generally with you beef cow herd you want to make sure you make sure that you’ve got, kind of in the order of importance is energy, and then protein, and then macro-minerals like phosphorus and calcium and magnesium. Then you want to look at trace minerals and vitamins. And then possibly, additives…calving is a very important time of the year. That’s when you kinda start the whole game for the calf crop. You don’t wanna be scrimping on nutrition for your cattle. So, most all of those that I just mentioned are just very important this time of year.
ANNOUNCER: Well, you did mention a lot of them. Are there some of those nutrients that are more important than other ones?
MARK: Yeah, you know right now, where we’ve seen a lot of moisture, we’ve had, out here in western South Dakota, a couple of pretty good heavy, wet snows and we’ve got supposedly a couple more coming. So, it looks like we’re going to have ample moisture to get the grass started this year. And the thing that you have when you get here into April and that green grass starts coming around, is you can have some situations where you have grass tetany. And I gave you that order of importance of energy, protein, macro-minerals, trace minerals, vitamins. The thing you want to be careful of is different times of the year, different ones of those can trump some of the others. And, for sure, if you have pastures that are prone to grass tetany, or inducing grass tetany in your cattle, magnesium is going to be your number one nutrient that you want to get out there for your cows.
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Related article: Bouts of grass tetany could be just around the corner
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ANNOUNCER: Why is daily magnesium so important for lactating beef cattle?
MARK: Daily’s kind of the key word there. Cattle can’t store magnesium. Now, some of the trace minerals you can look at some storage in the liver. Magnesium is not something that can be stored. It’s a macro-mineral; it’s needed in much larger quantities, somewhere around ten to twelve grams a day in gestation. The trick is when they go to lactation that’s going to almost double, something like twenty, twenty-two grams a day, and since they can’t store it, now you have to provide that every day. The thing that you want to make sure of is that you’ve got a supplement that the cattle are going to every day. Self-fed supplements like CRYSTALYX are a very good way to do that. Available 24/7, around the clock. You have multiple feeding stations. You don’t have to worry about boss cows. It tastes good with the molasses; you can be assured of that daily intake of magnesium.
ANNOUNCER: You’ve got to make the supplements available, but they also have to like the taste of it. So is that the case for most of these supplements that do have magnesium oxide?
MARK: Yeah. Magnesium is actually very unpalatable. That’s one of the reasons that in the springtime of the year with our CRYSTALYX sales really tend to go up because a lot of people that do have grass tetany issues, they like to use CRYSTALYX as a very good way of getting that magnesium to the cattle every day…and if you’re in a part of the country where you do have some fescue forages and you’re looking for a mag product, we do have a product that’s called CRYSTALYX® High-Mag Fescue-lyx™. And that product actually contains an additive called FEB200™, that helps with fescue forages if they’re infected with endophytes.
ANNOUNCER: It’s important to talk about the availability of this in terms of how often do you have to restock, because time, not just for cattle, but for other things that are going on in the ranch or the farm. CRYSTALYX takes care of some of that, how they can do as far as stocking rates, right?
MARK: That’s a very good point to bring out. Springtime’s a very busy time. Some of our customers that have cattle are farmers as well; they’re putting a crop in. Other people, if they’re cattlemen, they’re probably busy feeding stored hay or forage or moving cattle around…the nice thing about the CRYSTALYX products is we have enough of them with those additives that you can just about pick the right one and you know that you’ve got all the bases covered for those other nutrients like protein, calcium, phosphorus, trace minerals and vitamins. So, it’s a complete package, kind of foolproof where you can just put it out and the cattle just generally eat it at the correct levels. It’s one of the best things about CRYSTALYX is that predictable intake.
ANNOUNCER: And it’s also nice that you don’t have to worry about what the weather’s like, because, spring weather, you can get rain, you can get snow. You’re not going to have to worry about it getting washed away, replacing it, that sort of thing.
MARK: It’s very weatherproof, it’s windproof. Like you mentioned, if you do get a storm, you’ve got the barrels out there. One of the first things you’ll see after the storm and cattle get to walking out, going through the snow, looking for forage, they’re going to seek out those barrel and hit that supplement whether you’re out their in the pasture with them or not, they’re going to find the supplement.
MARK: If you’ve got questions on this you can always go to our website at www.crystalyx.com. It’s got all the different products that are in there. You can look under magnesium supplements or do a search on that and get the supplements that I mentioned, plus there’s quite a few other ones. We’ve got some region-specific supplements as well with mag in them. Just an awful lot of information on our website.
ANNOUNCER: You can learn even more about all the nutrients that are critical for spring calving herds by reading Mark’s latest blog on the CRYSTALYX website. That’s it for this “Block Talk” podcast brought to you by CRYSTALYX Brand Supplements an easy way to provide self-fed protein, vitamins and trace minerals in a low moisture supplement formulated for all types of feeding situations from low quality forages to fly control and everything in between. Learn more about all that CRYSTALYX has to offer by going to www.crystalyx.com. It all adds up to Results by the Barrel.
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