CRYSTALYX® Producer Spotlight

"It was a revelation for me to see how those barrels keep cattle there. I don't think it works, I know it works."

Steve Roth
IX Ranch Company
Big Sandy, MT

August, 2000/September, 2000

Steve Roth wants his cattle herd’s health dictated by his mineral program, not by a needle. But he never imagined that attention to detail would pay "grass dividends".

Dairymen get two report cards a day to help them track how nutrition impacts performance, but cow-calf producers get just two: at pregnancy checking time and weaning. Roth focuses his scrutiny on both aspects. “Fertility is my big thing,” he admits, adding that a gain of even 2 percent is important to him. “Weaning weights are nice because they pay the bills, but so does the bred cow. You’ve got so much money into a young cow.”

Weaning weights are even more important on the IX Ranch because steer calves are sold right off the cow to feedlots. Handling over 3,000 calves makes a pre-conditioning program involving vaccinations impractical so Roth relies on mineral supplementation to help assure that the calf ’s immune system is operating at its peak efficiency.

“If I can have the calf properly supplemented at weaning with mineral, that’s my answer to pre-conditioning,” he explains.

A mineral program isn’t less expensive than vaccinating on the surface, but providing mineral does save time and labor – especially when the mineral program is CRYSTALYX ® . Being able to have his best hand doing things other than feeding is one of the most notable benefits Roth has seen since he began feeding CRYSTALYX ® ’s BGF-30.

But as pleased as Roth was with the barrel program, he never thought about using the barrels as a management tool to entice cattle into undergrazed areas until he took his full-time crew to a meeting at the Montana State University Northern Agricultural Research Center at Havre. Roth was introduced to Derek Bailey, a beef cattle researcher at the Center. “Derek turned out to be a really good deal for me,” Roth says. The Roth family has been on the IX Ranch, near Big Sandy, MT, since 1955. In all those years, they’ve never had luck getting cattle to utilize a 6,000-acre pasture that includes Ryan Butte.

Steve can remember his father sending him out to drift the cattle up on the butte, only to have the cattle beat him back down to the horse trailers. In recent years, Steve had tried to use water developments — piping, reservoirs and tanks — to lure cattle up to the higher, pristine stands of rough fescue and blue bunch wheatgrass. It’s probably one of the best watered pastures in Montana, but still the cattle would not stay up there.

Bailey’s research looking at how effective CRYSTALYX ® barrels are in enticing cattle to historically underutilized terrain intrigued him. So in the summer of 1999, Bailey put the CRYSTALYX ® barrels to the test on Ryan Butte. Even Roth was amazed.

Cattle involved in the trial were “trained” onto the barrels for about two weeks before the trial began the first week of August. Cattle were pulled off the pasture in mid-September because livestock water was beginning to dry up, nonetheless that was about10 days longer than cattle have traditionally remained in that pasture. Three-ton of CRYSTALYX ® (24 barrels) was distributed for the 850 pairs involved in the trial. Barrels were placed on the edges of slopes, on a skyline, so cows could see where the next group of barrels had been placed or if another cow was licking a barrel.

By the end of the trial, enough cows had walked up to one set of barrels that they’d worn a path. The ranch hands took 500-some pairs off one side of the butte when they’d normally only gather 100 to 125 pairs. A check of grass consumption showed more grass was eaten around the barrels than around the water tanks. Roth calls the results “astounding.”

“It was a revelation for me to see how those barrels could keep cattle there,” Roth says. “I don’t think it works, I know it works.” Instead of hanging out by the fence along the road, pairs were up on the butte grazing. He thinks the barrels offer real opportunities for cattle producers to get more use out of high country plus entice cattle out of fragile riparian zones.

“If I have a place I want cattle to graze, I know how to get them there.” That’s a plus Roth hadn’t expected from his mineral program.