I’ll start with a question: What is your time worth?

If you have time (see what I did there?), take a second to come up with an answer.

If I had to guess, you answered one of two ways: You either went straight to calculating what an hour of your time is worth based off your current compensation, or you answered with some form of “my time is priceless.” Both answers are correct, in my opinion, because either way you look at it, there’s a profound value associated with our time. Ironically, in today’s world of high-priced time-saving gadgets and efficiency-optimizing gizmos, it seems like more and more of the conversations I have revolve around not having enough time.

I’m sure you’re wondering, “What does this have to do with Crystalyx^® penciling out?” Well, I would argue that adding value to a rancher’s time is the most important feature of feeding Crystalyx, especially when it’s fed in our patented single-trip BioBarrel^®. Let’s dive in and put a pencil to it.

Jon Albro’s recent blog post “The economics of self-fed supplements: How Crystalyx pencils out” did an excellent job of identifying the additional costs associated with hand-feeding relative to supplementing with Crystalyx, and it helps support my position from the opening paragraph. I’ll reuse the chart from his blog and take it to the next level with the added time- and cost-saving benefits of the BioBarrel, even when compared to Crystalyx in our traditional plastic or steel barrels.

Looking only at the orange parts of the columns, which represent labor and waste on a per-head, per-day basis, you can see there’s a considerable difference between Crystalyx in a plastic or steel barrel and the hand-fed supplement. To paint an even clearer picture, the labor and waste cost per ton of Crystalyx to feed 100 cows for 120 days is only $240, compared to the $2,400 labor and waste cost associated with hand feeding. So, we see that Crystalyx in our other container options has an obvious advantage, but supplementing in a BioBarrel widens the gap even further: it essentially cuts the cost of labor for Crystalyx in half. Instead of a $240 cost for 100 cows over 120 days, it’s only $120. That’s a labor savings of $2,280 over the course of the winter, or essentially two free tons of Crystalyx.

              Now, if you answered my initial question with “My time is priceless,” this paragraph will likely resonate more with you than the cost savings. As an example, let’s say that a rancher spends two hours every 12 days putting out, checking, and picking up plastic or steel Crystalyx barrels. That would be 20 hours spent supplementing cows over the course of a 120-day feeding season. Like the labor cost savings, supplementing in the BioBarrel would cut this in half, to just 10 hours spent supplementing his cows. Using one hour a day as an average for hand-feeding cows over the course of a 120-day feeding season, easy math tells us that the rancher would spend 120 hours feeding his cows, or 110 hours more than when supplementing with Crystalyx in a BioBarrel. Think of what you could do with an extra 4.5 days in a winter. And over the course of 50 years? That’s 225 days.

I recently had a long visit with a cow man I really admire. He made the comment that we have to get back to “making the cattle work for us, not the other way around.” He certainly didn’t insinuate that we needed to quit taking care of our cattle; he’s got cows as good as I’ve ever been around. He meant that we need to implement management strategies that get the most out of our cows but also let us take care of other business and enjoy life. Crystalyx in the BioBarrel is a step in that direction.

I’ll wrap up like I started, with a question: What would you do with an extra 225 days?