CRYSTALYX® Takes Montana Cows "To The Top" of the Mountain
Duke & Sam Novich
Mammoth, MT
April, 2004
"Don't bother to fix that upper drift fence. Cows never have gone up there."
That was the advice Sam Novich got from his dad when he took his grandfather's estate cows up on USDA Forest Service South Boulder allotment in the dry summer of 2002.
"Save that work of fence fixing for places that might be more profitable," Duke Novich said. The Novich family have been members of the South Boulder Grazing Association since just after gold was discovered at Mammoth, Montana, in 1872. The Association had kept a summer herder busy, a full-time job, for more than 85 years, until 1999. The herder's summer job was to receive the cattle at the Forest Boundary in mid-June, keep the cow-calf herds that belonged to the nine members of the Association distributed on 16 pastures across 72,000 permitted acres of the South Boulder allotment, and bring them back down in mid-October.
Ron Gibson is the USFS South Boulder Range Conservationist. In the summer of 1985 and 1986 he was the South Boulder Association herder. "As a former Association herder, I know how to steward this country, the cattle and the challenges for cattle grazing distribution," Gibson said.
In that dry summer of 2002, Gibson and Sam Novich decided to try CRYSTALYX® Brand Supplements combined with late-day herding to distribute Novich's estate cows within the Park Creek pasture, a pasture that had not seen cows grazing on it for many years. The cows and the pasture were new to each other, but not new to Sam's dad, Duke, who told him, "Granddad's old bottom-dweller red cows won't even bother with that."
There was a water spring that was high up on the mountain that served as a mark of how far the cows and calves typically would graze.
"The spring is high, and in an ideal spot," Ron Gibson said, "but cattle never did use the pasture above the flat."
There was plenty of unused grass above the spring, and in the drought-plagued year that 2002 was, the Novichs would need to utilize the grass above that high water, or the cows and calves would be headed back to the home ranch. That's where CRYSTALYX® came in.
Sam and his father hauled two CRYSTALYX® barrels along an old jeep trail and placed them high on the ridge above the spring. The cows and calves knew about the black CRYSTALYX® barrels and followed them up to the grazing areas above the spring. It was the first time that either Sam or Duke Novich or Ron Gibson, all veteran mountain cowmen, could remember that cows "went to the top."
"The cured grass sent them in a different direction to the CRYSTALYX®," Sam Novich said. "There is no question about why they went up there."
Ron Gibson agreed. "Holding them up there has always been hard. Salt and everything else had already been tried. You know, I rode that country in '85 and '86. Cows wouldn't have grazed there until the tub was there."
So Sam had to revise his father's fencing advice. "Those cattle fed clean up to the ridge to the back, and on to the top tub. I had to fix fence that no one had fixed in years so I could keep them from crossing over the ridge."
Sam didn't mind the extra work, because he got a bonus from CRYSTALYX® supplementation.
"Those calves shined, and I know they weighed thirty to forty pounds more than any of our calves that had ever come out of that piece of country. They had the best glossy coat I had ever seen on calves that came out of the South Boulder."
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