Bovalyx® 28% B300

The premier block supplement for gains and profitability

What happens when you combine a premier block supplement with the premier pasture ionophore? Answer : Cattle grow faster, pastures last longer and profits increase.

Bovalyx® 28% B300 gives you all the advantages of the Bovalyx® low-moisture block program plus added benefits of Bovatec®, the leading ionophore feed additive for pasture cattle. This self-fed supplement is intended for the increased rate of weight gain in pasture cattle (slaughter, stocker, feeder cattle and dairy and beef replacement heifers).

Bovalyx® low-moisture technology provides a controlled, yet consistent consumption compared to other feeding methods of ionophores in a weather-resistant form. With precise intake of both nutrients and Bovatec®, cattle will get what they need

each day in a self-fed form. This supplement is specifically formulated to contain 300 grams per ton of Bovatec®. Years of Bovatec® data across many studies has shown that you can expect around a 10% improvement in rate of gain in pastured cattle.

Additionally, Bovalyx® 28% B300 contains 28% crude protein. In most situations, grazed forages will be short on protein for growing cattle, therefore the supplemental protein will aid in meeting that protein requirement, in addition to providing Bovatec®. Supplemental minerals and vitamins are also an important component in a growing animal’s diet. Bioplex® organic trace minerals are included in the formula to bring in the most advanced trace mineral technology. Bioplex® organic trace minerals are more bioavailable, meaning they are used more effectively and efficiently by the animal through greater trace mineral retention and tissue reserves. Not only will this benefit a growing stocker, but yearlings will also benefit after being on a good trace mineral program prior to stress associated with shipping, receiving and handling.

Research done in the Southeastern U.S. has consistently proven the benefits of this supplementation program: 1. Results from one feeding trial showed that when cattle consumed 0.4 pounds per head per day of Bovalyx® 28% B300, average daily gain (ADG) resulted in 1.06 pounds, compared to 0.55-0.66 pounds ADG of their counterparts being offered only mineral. While even taking supplement cost into consideration, this nearly doubled the income per head, resulting in greater additional profits. 2. Another trial compared feeding Bovalyx® 28% B300 to a grain mix with added Bovatec® to two groups of grazing dairy replacement heifers. Bovalyx® intake averaged 0.45 pounds per head per day, compared to 2.5 pounds of feed per day. In 114 days, the group on Bovalyx® gained 100 pounds, and the group on the dry feed with Bovatec® gained 45 pounds. When paid on pounds gained, the grazer found greater advantages to the Bovalyx® 28% B300 in not only income after feed costs, but also savings in labor and equipment. 3. A trial in Alabama grazed heifers on Bermuda grass pastures for 90 days. During that time period, the group on Bovalyx® 28% B300 had an ADG of 1.1 pounds with an intake of 0.5 pounds per head per day. The control group only offered salt resulted in a ADG of 0.69 pounds. This had a greater net profit with the Bovalyx® advantage resulting in greater gain and profitability in the end.

All three of these feeding demonstrations saw clear advantages in utilizing lower quality forages in grazing programs while being supplemented with Bovalyx® 28% B300. While we can generally expect Bovatec® to increase gains by around 10%, this would mean Bovalyx® low-moisture block with added Bovatec® could increase gains by 0.3 to 0.4 pounds on higher quality forages or 0.4 to 0.6 pounds on lower quality forages. (Note: these numbers are approximations and individual results will vary).

It is easy to disregard the value of our own time and labor costs. How much time do you spend supplementing or delivering feed to the cow herd? This can nearly be eliminated through Bovalyx® self-fed supplements being available 24/7 in a controlled form. This saves you time and money, and in turn offers more flexibility in your daily schedule. Add that to the nutrient advantages and the benefits of Bovatec®, and this premier supplement easily sorts itself to the top.

For more information and to gain access to Bovalyx® 28% B300, contact your local AFC feed representative:

NW Alabama: John Sims (256) 260-3433 NE Alabama: Chris Wisener (256) 230-5183 S Alabama: David Allen (334) 467-0096

Visiting Dogs

When I hear a truck pull up in front of the house and the pandemonium of dogs barkin’ would wake a hibernating mastodon, I relax. It’s only my neighbor, D.K., come to borrow something of his back.

He doesn’t get this ferocious reception because he’s on the canine list of unsavory visitors or because he has the reputation of annoying domestic animals on a regular basis. It’s because his two dogs usually accompany him on his rounds.

My dogs even bark at his pickup when he drives in anticipating that his dogs will be in the back. On those rare occasions when he comes “undogged,” my dogs give him a withering glare and stomp off. It’s like they are disappointed.

After all, what else have they got to do? Watch the sheep through the fence? Go to the pasture and check the cows? Sneak up on the creek in hopes of scaring the urea out of the ducks?

I watched them the last time I went to D.K.’s to borrow his bush hog. My dogs were leaning out the side already clearing their throats as we neared his place. I deliberately drove by the first turn-in. Both dogs jerked their heads around and glared at me through the back window. I could see Hattie mouthing the words, “Hey turkey, ya missed it!”

I turned in the second drive and we were met with the raucous sounds of a rabbit let go in a dog kennel. I pulled to a stop as D.K.’s dogs surrounded the pickup barking at the top of their dog lungs.

My dogs were leaning out over the side like seasick fishermen returning in kind, bark for bark. It was deafening.

But I noticed D.K.’s dogs never got quite close enough to touch noses and mine knew just how far to lean to avoid actual contact.

One might think it was all for show. Protecting their territory, as if his were shouting, “Don’t you dare get out,” and mine were screaming, “No way we’re lettin’ you jump in this truck!”

Or they could just be visiting like old folks at a reunion, “HOW ARE YOU, TEX! I HEAR YOU GOT A NEW HEARING AID! WHAT KIND IS IT?”

“QUARTER TO FOUR!”

I’ve gotten to where I don’t worry about it much. Dogs like to bark. It’s in their job description. It probably doesn’t irritate the dogs near as much as it does us humans. They just communicate at different decibel levels. It’s part of nature. It’s possible even aphids bark at each other and we just can’t hear it. But it must drive the ants crazy.

www.baxterblack.com

What If We Didn’t Regulate

Or Have Disease Surveillance Programs in Place

(This fictional musing of mine appeared in this publication in May 2010. With African Swine Fever in the Dominican Republic, tuberculosis cases in humans on the rise for the first time in decades, and the other diseases that won’t quite go away, this article is still relevant.)

This will come as no surprise to people that know me; I ate three meals yesterday … did the day before that and the day before that. In fact, there are not many days that I don’t eat three meals a day. I am not a vegetarian, so I eat meat at most meals. Probably like most of you, I take for granted that if I want a ham sandwich, I can have a ham sandwich. If I want a hamburger, I can have a hamburger. If I want a quarter of a barbecued chicken, I can have that too. That is certainly not the case in many other parts of the world. Recently we have been hit with huge budget cuts at the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries. In fact, I don’t know what changes will occur due to budget cuts between the time I am writing this column and the time you read it. That has got me to wondering how things would be if we were not able to regulate or carry out our disease surveillance programs. It could change what I take for granted when I sit down to a meal.

As I pondered the “What if we didn’t?” question, I thought about it in respect to the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The rest of this column will come from the imagination of a State regulatory official trying to figure what life would be like if we didn’t regulate or carry out disease surveillance. Fast forward 20 years … (remember this is fiction and just for the purpose of getting us thinking).

Driving through rural Alabama with my grandkids one Saturday afternoon, one of the kids asks, “Grandpa, why are there so many golf courses around here?” That one is easy to answer because in 2018 we lost all our beef export markets because we were not collecting enough BSE samples to satisfy our export partners that we didn’t have BSE. The market dropped

drastically and those who were marginal producers lost their farms. Tuberculosis had started making a comeback in cattle herds across the country in 2012, but since we were not testing for the disease, nor requiring health certificates, bovine tuberculosis came into Alabama with a vengeance. In fact, it put most of our dairies out of business. For a while the federal government was trying to help the dairy farmers out, but the problem got so big that the federal government could no longer handle the cost. By 2020, cattle farming was a rich man’s game and there was only a fraction of the farms left that were around in 2011. In 2021 though, an Alabama cattle producer took some of his cattle to a show out west where foot-and-mouth disease somehow got introduced. (The United States had discontinued Foreign Animal Disease Surveillance in 2015 since we hadn’t had a case of foot-andmouth disease since 1927. Surveillance seemed like a waste of money.) He brought his cattle back to a show here in Alabama the next week and exposed a large number of farms. Most of our beef cattle farmers got out of the business after that because it was mostly just a hobby anyway. Some of the last farms to go are actually some of the nicer golf courses now.

The grandkids were amazed by my explanation about the golf courses. But in all honesty, two of my grandsons are really showing some promise at getting golfing (the new national pastime) scholarships because there are so many golf courses you can play 18 holes for ten dollars. And most people tell me that they can’t tell the difference between the grass-fed Brazilian beef and the old grain-fed beef we used to eat. I don’t know if I would say it out in public, but there really is a difference in the meat. But for a long time, the Brazilian beef was quite a bit cheaper than domestic U. S. beef. Then about the time most of our farmers and ranchers went out of business, the Brazilian beef price sky-rocketed. They say it was something about having to pay for all their new regulations. I don’t know. I think it’s just because they don’t have much competition. A lot of people think it’s not a bad trade-off. We pay high prices to other countries for their beef and dairy products and they come to the United States and play golf on their vacations.

Then the grandkids wanted to know the story about why we can’t buy fresh eggs anymore. You know that was a really bad deal. It happened back in 2014, not six months after we discontinued our avian influenza surveillance program. It was just an unfortunate turn of events. A man from North Alabama went to a poultry show down in South Alabama. There was one exhibitor who had several of his chickens get sick and die at the show. The man from North Alabama was a school bus driver from a community that had so many poultry farms that you couldn’t swing a dead mule without hitting one. Well you can guess what happened. In about four or five days to a week, those farms had chickens dying so fast they were just having to compost them right there in the chicken house. Everybody was fairly certain that it was highly pathogenic avian influenza. However, since we no longer had any foreign animal disease diagnosticians and the laboratories were no longer set up to screen for highly pathogenic avian influenza, it took six days to get a definitive diagnosis. And by that time---well you know what they say, “No need to shut the barn door after the horse has already got out.” It completely devastated the poultry industry and it just never came back.

I went on to tell the grandkids about how we used to eat hamburgers all the time. But now that it costs $10.00 a pound, we only eat it once a week and maybe on special occasions. We never eat steak because at $40.00 a pound, you can buy a lot of tofu. When the kids asked how all these things happened to cause us to lose animal agriculture here in the United States, my explanation was simple. I told them that several years ago, the economy took a severe downturn. That resulted in fewer tax dollars to fund government programs both on the state and national levels. The elected leaders had to make some hard decisions on what programs to fund and which ones to cut. And I guess they just didn’t understand the importance of agriculture.

Now travel back to 2011. I’m not saying that if we stop regulating, things like I just mentioned will happen. And even though that was a fictitious scenario, it is not so farfetched that it could not happen. We try to strike a delicate balance between assuring the safety of our food, the health of our herds and flocks, and making sure the environment is not contaminated and making sure we do not restrict the farmer from doing what he does best. That is to produce the safest and most economical food supply in the world. Today we at the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries along with our friends at USDA Veterinary Services are regulating, investigating and staying on the lookout for diseases that might cause you to dramatically alter your three meals a day. Now I think I will have a double cheeseburger with a couple of slices of ham on it just because I can.

AccuField® Offers Options for Managing Soaring Fertilizer Prices

Fertilizer prices continued to soar to record highs as the 2021 fall harvest moved into its latter stages, leaving growers with yet another primary concern as they begin planning for next year. And while there’s not much that can be done from the farm level to slow price increases, there are options for making fertilizer applications more cost-efficient.

“The need for precision soil sampling and variable-rate applications has never been greater,” said Daniel Mullenix, Senior Manager of Ag Technologies for GreenPoint Ag. “Most of the fertilizer blends we applied last year were in the $400-per-ton range, but now they’re trending in the $700-per-ton range, and there’s no end in sight.”

GreenPoint Ag’s AccuField®—a full-service ag technology and information platform—is a premiere soil fertility tool and precision agriculture platform at its core, Mullenix said.

“Through this platform, we can help a grower through grid sampling their field on a fairly resolute basis—in 2 ½ or 5-acre grids—or through zone sampling their fields using historical yield data or a digital data-driven approach,” he said. “This gives us an accurate assessment of what’s happening in that field in terms of soil fertility.”

Without such precision, growers may pull one or two composite samples from an entire field, costing them money in the long run.

“By doing that, growers might be basing a fertility recommendation on one or two points in a field,”

Mullenix said. “Random sampling could very well cost a grower more money at a time when they can least afford it.”

When pulling a random sample, it could be from a spot where fertility is high, such as an old dump site for chicken litter, gin trash, or some other soil amendment, he said.

“The residual effect of the nutrient is there, and you could get a sample thinking it is representative of the entire field rather than being skewed due to a historical practice,” Mullenix said.

On the flip side, a random sample could come from a spot in the field with historically low nutrient levels. With AccuField®, grid sampling or zone sampling can be used based on available yield data or field performance, Mullenix said. This allows a grower to know exactly what is happening in a field from a soil fertility standpoint.

“You can spend money more wisely as you variably apply nutrients across a field to maintain nutrients, maximize yield potential, or to stick to a budget,” he said.

“Considering the cost of fertilizer this year, more growers probably will be looking at budgeting. We can help growers assess what is in their soil bank from an agronomic standpoint and what they can use from their soil bank to be mindful of their budget for the coming year.”

AccuField® allows for custom recommendations and custom fertility plans and can incorporate any recommendations from commercial and public testing labs throughout the southeastern U.S., Mullenix said. “If a grower likes a certain aspect of what a specific lab recommends, we can customize their soil fertility plan to include that.”

Mullenix recommends soil sampling as early as possible, depending on the crop situation. “That means as soon as the crops come off,” he said. “If it’s cotton, as soon as the stalks are mowed or pulled, come in behind that, pull soil samples, and then begin putting together and executing a plan.”

If soil moisture is too dry or too wet, it will skew soil sample results. Also, it is important to sample at about the same time each year to avoid seasonal variability in soil tests.

Soil pH is another important factor, Mullenix said. “If we’re mindful of our soil pH, then we give the nutrients that are in the soil the maximum ability to be available to the plants. Managing soil pH in a tight window is imperative. Lime will be the cheapest and most beneficial soil amendment you’ll ever apply, even more so this coming year.” Applying just 1 ton or ½ ton of lime at a time is no longer good enough, he said.

“Rarely ever does a grower not get a good result by pulling the soil samples and then variably applying lime instead of doing a straight rate. The difference in savings on lime usually pays for the soil sampling, lab analysis, and the fee for customized recommendations for a soil fertility plan.”

AccuField® is equally beneficial for tech-savvy growers and for those who prefer a hands-off approach, Mullenix said. “We have growers who want to sit down with paper maps, and they never have to log onto a computer,” he said. “Growers can work with GreenPoint Ag or their co-op to execute a soil fertility or variable-rate lime program.

“On the flip side, some growers enjoy logging into AccuField to set up or tweak their plans themself. If you recognize the need on your farm for technology, let us come out and help work up a plan customized for you.”

Entering its 10th year of service to growers, AccuField® has made a commitment to increase its offerings and deliverables. “Our focus in this 10th year moving forward is to capitalize on enhanced metrics and return on investment tools in bringing precision ag to life for growers in a way they might not have envisioned before,” Mullenix said.

“We started ten years ago with a team of one, and now we have 12 precision ag specialists who serve a 10-state footprint. We have a multi-tier support staff to give farmers what they need and when they need it because farming doesn’t wait on anyone,” he concluded.