It all began in 2006 with a homeless man!
Rod Stewart, a resident of Johnston, SC, was eating dinner at a local diner when a local homeless man came by his table and left a product flier. The question sparked by that flier has now become the best cattle feeding program, for producers and consumers, through more than 20 years of extensive research and development.
At the time, Rod Stewart was raising hundreds of newborn dairy calves, feeding them up to 600 pounds, and selling them as feeders to the Midwest feedlots. Rod worked at the Savannah River Nuclear Facility but raised calves before and after work. The local homeless man told Rod he needed to look into a product for his calves. Rod did and what followed through an extended chain of contacts across the entire country, individually related, but collectively nearly all unassociated, was a final connection between Rod and myself, Ken Hamilton.
Rod was initially looking to improve nutrition in his sizable calf-growing operation. A year later, the focus completely changed to “how to continue feeding calves without going broke!” Commodity prices were skyrocketing and cattle prices were dropping and the only visible outcome was losing money.
Rod asked, “how do I feed cattle and not go broke?” I replied that there was only one variable that we had any control over and that was feed efficiency. We couldn’t change market prices, and we couldn’t change digestion time, so I told Rod we had to look at improving feed efficiency. Cattle (ruminants) are not efficient at digesting and converting feed into weight gain, so this variable was our only option.
We agreed that feeding cattle grains, commodities, and expensive concentrates was completely wrong for the calves to begin with. Ruminants are not designed to eat grain. They will, but it is extremely unhealthy for the animals. Rod’s recurring monthly vet bills proved this. We agreed that grass and other natural forages were the proper feed, but the feed conversion on grass-based forages was much lower than grain conversions.
Our dilemma was how to improve feed conversion of grass to exceed that of grains. Everyone said we could not do this, but through another unlikely series of unrelated contacts, we found a scientist that set us on our beginning path to anaerobic predigestion and fermentation of grass-based forages. After numerous other failed attempts, this new avenue immediately showed great promise. The calves stopped being sick, death losses plummeted to near zero, and calves rarely got sick at all. Weight gain improved dramatically also. As Rod experimented more and more, our field results began to vary widely from what the lab results said was possible. In time, what worked in the lab no longer worked in the field, and what was working in the field could not be replicated in the lab.
After less than a year, our scientist gave up trying to help us. We were routinely accomplishing what wasn’t possible in the lab and he had nothing more to give us. We continued researching, testing, and refining at Rod’s South Carolina operation for nine years. His cattle were being grown in about half the time of grain-fed and one-third the time of grass-fed, with virtually all carcasses grading prime. In time, Rod reduced his calf operation to only growing the animals he could raise and slaughter locally. People loved the meat and Rod had customers on a waiting list and even offering to pay in advance just to make sure they received it.
After nine years of fermenting forage and feeding cattle, Rod took an early retirement from his engineering job due to an unfortunate accident and extended recovery time. I purchased his equipment and moved the operations to Utah with the objective to mainstream everything we had learned through Rod’s operation. Rod and I had proven the technology worked, but it was labor intensive and time consuming, making it unfeasible to scale to production operations. We have been able to mainstream the process, while maintaining much of the gains seen in Rod’s amazing results.