One thing's for sure: Missouri is cattle country. Missouri is the second largest cattle state in the United States. And those numbers reflect true accounting--the number of cattle tallied are Missouri cattle, not cattle brought into Missouri for backgrounding and finishing. The state's environment, terrain and grasses are conducive to cattle production. One grass that we have learned to love and hate at the same time is fescue. Because of the abundance of fescue, Missouri has traditionally been a cow/calf state. Fescue grows where other grasses won't, produces considerable tons per acre, is tough and stays green nearly all winter. However, it's not a high quality grass for backgrounding cattle or dairy cattle, so we have an abundance of something that is mediocre to poor quality and thereby reserved for mature beef cows. Missouri calves are weaned and generally sold to out-of-state producers for backgrounding and ultimately end up in a feedlot somewhere.

The state's 2 million cows produce calves. Not 2 million calves, of course, but a lot of calves. To keep these calves healthy through the weaning phase (mainly concerning respiratory issues), MFA has developed Cattle Charge. With the new mood of agriculture many producers have elected to use byproducts, also commonly called commodities. In reality all ingredients are commodities, including corn, soybeans, etc. But mostly the term used in the everyday language of a beef producer means "usable byproducts that are available to me." The key word here is usable--coffee grounds and peanut and rice hulls have little merit. However, there are some byproducts that are available and are very good quality. The byproducts commonly offered are corn gluten feed, distillers grain, wheat midds and soy hulls. Many producers have been told that they can feed their animals byproducts and save a ton of money.

The truth of the matter is that you can use these products. All the feed companies do. But what happens is that byproducts are only one or two of many ingredients used to make a preconditioned feed such as Cattle Charge. When you look at the total formula of Cattle Charge, what you see is that, indeed, some of these commodities are in the feed. Yet, in the end, they are only a small portion of Cattle Charge and contribute only a small portion to its performance.

In the table below, you can see the improvement in performance when cattle were fed Cattle Charge versus a commodity blend of corn gluten feed and soy hulls mixed half and half. The cattle on Cattle Charge out gained the commodity ration by 1.86 pounds (4.92 pounds versus 3.06 pounds) per day. As you might expect, commodities were cheaper per ton, but they are also less efficient in converting to gain. Cattle Charge calves had better feed conversion rates, requiring only 3.19 pounds of feed per pound of gain versus 4.52 pounds of feed per pound of gain for commodities. The cost per pound of gain, at 31.7 cents, comes out exactly the same for both treatments. The thing to keep in mind is that the Cattle Charge cattle gained an extra 1.86 pounds per day. At $1 per pound sell value, Cattle Charge animals made $1.86 more per head per day than the commodity fed cattle. Even though Cattle Charge costs more per ton, it is apparent that the feed makes you more money than feeding commodities.

Of course, the main advantage of Cattle Charge is health. We have two large producers in another state that reduced their animal health purchase from over $35,000 per month to less than $4,000 by using Cattle Charge as a receiving ration. This is the savings for one month. This is the improvement in Cattle Charge-fed cattle versus the producer's conventional preconditioned program of hay and liquid supplement. The numbers don't include the reduction in deaths and number of sick cattle.

In our experiment, we had one sick animal in each group, neither of them were seriously ill. If we would have had a sickness challenge component, Cattle Charge would have looked even better.