www.12stonesgrasslandsbeef.com<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
….in Thistle Hill cows and beef. But it’s no secret, we’ve been saying for some time we think (next to Wooz’ care, of course) it’s our mineral program.\u00a0 Visitors invariably remark that they have never seen a group of healthier, more vital animals than those at Thistle Hill. We do a lot of experimenting, try various grazing plans, top-seed clover, spray with different natural fertilizer combinations.\u00a0 But the one thing we’ve held constant is our mineral program. It’s a cafeteria-style approach, where the cows don’t have a mixture of all the essential minerals as designed by “experts”\u00a0but select from trays of the individual minerals.\u00a0 They do actually self-diagnose.\u00a0 Soils vary from pasture to pasture and season to season.\u00a0 The needs of the animal change depending on age and whether it has a calf.\u00a0 No one bag of minerals can possibly cover all the variations…and all contain something the cow doesn’t need and not enough of something they do. Our good friend and fellow cattlemen Bill Roberts of 12 Stones Grasslands Beef is the source for our minerals and it’s a program designed by another friend, Jim Helfter.\u00a0 Bill is about as smart a fellow about cattle raising as anyone I know and I check with him on what we’re experiencing here almost weekly. At my urging (and I’m sure others) Bill has finally written an essay on\u00a0mineralization and we’ll link to it here and finally keep it in the links section of this blog.\u00a0 Here’s Bill Roberts’ overview: Proper Mineralization of Beef Cattle for Optimal Health Now this program isn’t cheap compared to a bag of minerals from the Coop, particularly at first.\u00a0 But you’ll notice the difference pretty quickly in your animals.\u00a0 We also save money in cutting back on our fertilization program.\u00a0 This is a diesel-free way of spreading all those good minerals that you put into your cow onto your pastures. And the cow pays us back when it’s time to sell her. By the way, if you want to know more about this—and Bill—he has a website, too.\u00a0 www.12stonesgrasslandsbeef.com <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7,8,21,26,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-minerals","category-nutrition","category-on-the-soap-box","category-roberts","category-soil"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1507"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1520,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507\/revisions\/1520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thistlehill.net\/wpblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}