Head of the Herd - The Dollars are in the Details: Results of using 701x products on the 701x Test Ranch

With record beef markets, I know many ranchers are looking at expanding and wanting to capitalize on this great opportunity. Unfortunately, ranchland is also selling for record highs. Instead of purchasing more land how can ranchers expand? I believe there are three other ways ranchers should be looking at expanding:

1. Increasing stocking rate

2. Reducing mortality

3. Improving breeding efficiency

1.

I'm by no means an expert and will never claim to be, no one knows your land better than yourself. I've read many articles about the benefits and drawbacks of mob and rotational grazing systems to improve stocking rates. I did much of this research to improve the practices at the 701x test ranch in Grassy Butte, ND. For reference, this land is just north of Medora, ND along the Little Missouri river in the badlands. It is rough and rugged with little to no cell service, albeit a perfect testing ground for our tech. The stocking rate per acre is low, as we have over 5,100 acres that we're raising 140 cows and 17 heifers on this year. 

On land this vast, mob grazing just simply was not feasible. The main issue is that there was no way for us to get water to a new pasture every day without significantly increasing our labor force, which is already stretched too thin, among many other reasons. However, we decided to utilize a twice over rotational grazing plan developed by Dr. Llewellyn Manske of NDSU. This system worked without adding labor and was the most advantageous to our operation. We actually ended up having to combine two of our smaller pastures into one for it to work properly.

Now, we utilize just 5 pastures for all of our cattle and move our cattle every 8-15 days from June 1- July 15 and then double the duration per pasture from July 16-October 14. We're on our third year of this management system, and we're noticing more lush and healthier grass, better water retention as our grass stays longer during droughts, and increased weight gains of our cattle. By doing this, our grass has higher crude protein content in the later season, allowing our calves to put on more weight. We're now at the point where we're able to increase our stocking rate by 10% each year for the next four years, allowing us to expand our herd and capitalize on the current market opportunity. No additional labor, additional calf weight gain, and an improved stocking rate made this twice over rotation system a win, win, win for us. 701x plans to add a grazing manager feature into their herd management software. Thus, when you draw in your pastures, it can give you recommendations of which pastures to place cattle in and for how long. 

2.

No rancher wants to talk about this, I know, but it's the harsh reality of our industry. There is an estimated $3.9B in lost, stolen, and dead cattle every year in the U.S. and with current market prices that number is likely much higher now (per USDA). About 6-7% of calves die from birth to weaning and another 2-3% die at backgrounding and feedlot operations (per APHIS). The beef calf crop is roughly 28M, so that's just under 3M calves every year that never make it to processing and are essentially wasted. 

Every rancher cares dearly about their animals, and 701x's technology is here to enhance management by providing deeper insights, sooner. Complications during calving contribute to this loss, and the xTpro provides an alert to aide during this time. The xTpro also provides health alerts so you can catch sick cows, heifers, or bulls sooner and so you can treat them. The xTlite also provides health alerts and can be used on freshly born calves. If you decide to retain that calf for breeding, at weaning is when 701x recommends putting an xTpro on.

The xTpro takes a GPS position every 5 minutes and if that animal goes outside of its assigned pasture in our app an out-of-fence alert is triggered. When the xTpro's are taking GPS positions they scan for xTlite tags through a wireless network and check in those calves that are within about a 50-100ft radius as a relative GPS location based on that xTpro tag. If in remote satellite areas xTlite's will only check in on behalf of its mothers xTpro tag, however if your ranch has good cell service 701x recommends 1 xTpro for every 10 xTlites to get good relative GPS tracking. These health and out-of-fence alerts from both tags can help you reduce lost, stolen, and dead cattle on your operation.

Just this year alone at the 701x ranch we have had two pairs and one yearling escape that we likely would not have found without 701x tags. That's nearly $15k that could've walked away right there. We've also had 4 calves trigger health alerts that we've treated with antibiotics and saved. One thing to note is that we made a studied and informed to decision to amend our vaccine protocol at the ranch. We did not give preventative vaccines to this group. From a R&D standpoint it allowed us to better understand the capacity of our wearable devices and at the same time gives us some insight into how our calves perform without this routine practice. We will see where we go from here, but I'd point out we saved $12K+ on vaccines alone this year compared to last, and the yearlings we just sold last week went for the third highest price in the country.

3.

Open cows are undeniably the #1 revenue loss to any cow-calf operation. Every year at preg check we pray for a low open rate. There has been tons of research dollars thrown at studying female fertility. What about the bulls? Because there is only one bull for roughly 25-30 cows, getting a sample size of bulls large enough to perform a study is a challenge. I was shocked to find out there are very limited studies on bull fertility. There are bull soundness exams, sure, but does that really give us the true picture of a bulls performance? Bulls are generally the most expensive animals on an operation, and investments can quickly get into the tens of thousands of dollars for good genetics.

The xTpro for bulls provides the best ROI. It is also a great way for ranchers to dip their toes into our tech, gain an understanding of how our tags and software work before adopting on a mass scale throughout their herd. Let's face it, if a bull is in the neighbors pasture it's not breeding your cows. If a bull isn't healthy, he's not breeding effectively. The xTpro's out-of-fence and health alerts can mitigate these problems. Additionally, the xTpro also provides a daily mount count and a bull not mounting alert. This gives you a broad overview of what is going on in the pasture and the ability to review a report in our app to compare all of your bulls against each other to see who is truly doing the work and who is being lazy.

Female fertility is a serious issue as well, that's why we've added estrus detection to the xTpro. For the seedstock producers doing A.I. or E.T. work this serves as a helpful tool giving you alerts prior to when you would perform these tasks to aide in timing better and increasing conception rates. For commercial producers this may not seem as necessary, however we've found it very insightful at our own commercial operation. Some of the things we found are that our cows did not cycle until the bull was placed with them, we found which cows do not cycle at all, we know exactly which cows cycle early and which were late, as well as which aborted. We still preg check at our ranch, however this tool was able to give us an early indicator of which were open and bred, serving as a digital preg check tool.

Some of the things I'm mentioning might sound crazy, but I can assure you I'm speaking the honest truth about what we're seeing from our test ranch and tag data. Every bull, heifer, and cow is outfitted with an xTpro and every calf is outfitted with an xTlite at our ranch.

If you're not currently using our tech, I highly recommend getting some xTpro's on your bulls for breeding season. What I've noticed is that the following year after testing tags on bulls, many of our customers adopt xTpro's for their heifers the following year and xTlites for all of their calves.

There are no minimum order quantities or infrastructure you must set up with our system, so feel free to start with just one xTpro and get comfortable. If you would like to learn more or have any questions please reach out at info@701x.com or give us a call at (844)-444-7019.⁠