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Multimin question

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rancherfred

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I have read much of the propaganda about Multimin and have had our vet suggest a couple of times that it might help us with a couple of health issues that we are dealing with. What I am interested in is hearing from people that are using it and what problems that you are trying to address with the injection.
 
Which mineral or vitamen is does your vet feel you need? I prefer a good loose mineral program.
 
PATB said:
Which mineral or vitamen is does your vet feel you need? I prefer a good loose mineral program.
Click to expand...

+1 Years ago I used to give Vitamin ADE injections here but it is much easier and more tissue friendly to give vitamins through diet.
 
What kind of troubles are you having?
Does your vet sell Multimin? Here most folks use a loose mineral
and that solves their problems--meaning a year round mineral
program...it's amazing what that can do for the immune system.

It enhances the colostrum which gives the calves an immune
system that can fight off most things we see during calving
season.
 
Back to multimin itself. I too would like to hear from people that have used it in the past. I feed a good loose mineral but have thought about giving my replacement heifers a shot of it before breeding and see if it makes any difference. I haven't done it because I thought it was expensive when giving the recommended dose. I would not use it as a mineral replacement buy as a mineral supplement.

Has anyone used it themselves?
 
The issues that we are trying to deal with are relatively new, within the last five years, so I have a hard time believing that it is actually a mineral deficiency. It seems more likely to me that it is a disease problem than a mineral deficiency. We went for enough years without any mineral at all and didn't have any of the problems we are seeing now. I know that it isn't a cumulative thing where it just took some time for the deficiencies to show up because there have been several generations of cows come and go that received at best, infrequent supplementation.

As to whether or not the vet sells it, I don't know, what difference does that make? Should I be suspicious of someone telling me I need a mineral supplement if they also sell mineral?
 
rancherfred said:
The issues that we are trying to deal with are relatively new, within the last five years, so I have a hard time believing that it is actually a mineral deficiency. It seems more likely to me that it is a disease problem than a mineral deficiency. We went for enough years without any mineral at all and didn't have any of the problems we are seeing now. I know that it isn't a cumulative thing where it just took some time for the deficiencies to show up because there have been several generations of cows come and go that received at best, infrequent supplementation.

As to whether or not the vet sells it, I don't know, what difference does that make? Should I be suspicious of someone telling me I need a mineral supplement if they also sell mineral?
Click to expand...

Fred, whether you want to believe it or not, FH is more interested in helping folks than she is in making money off you. (although every little bit helps :D )

You are much better off to feed a loose mineral and let your cattle build up what they need than to give them an injection that will only stay in their system for 3 weeks at the most.
We test our feed every 3 or 4 years and have a mineral made specifically for our operation. We add in some Bovatec or Rumensin to help with coccidia and feed efficiency.
We only use mineral during the winter months as it is difficult to keep it in front of them in our range situation.
All in all it has made a significant difference in the health of our cattle and stregth of the immune systems in our calves.

Hope this helps, gcreeck.
 
Multimin contains trace mirnerals that are not necessarily in loose minerals. We have used it for years and it greatly helps through periods of stress and in reproduction. You can improve your conception rates and is very benificial in AI and ET programs.
We give it to our bulls 3x / yr, cows 2x / yr and calves at a week and prior to weaning.
Not trying to push any product on anyone but we have always had a very good mineral program but when we were suggested to use this it gave us very good results and find it well worth the expense.
 
We used multimin last spring on the ylg hfrs prior to AIing. Looks like it helped with conception, but we are not quite done getting AI calves from the hfrs yet so not sure on conception rate. Several people in this area that used it seemed to be positive on MM and plan on using it again. Had local vet call it "snake oil" a year ago and now he is changing his tune. I'd have to say the jury is still out, but it looks promising at this point that it helped. We feed loose mineral year round too.
 
We have been using Multimin90 for a few years. Not as a substitute for minerals but as a supplement to loose minerals. We give it to donors and recips before flushing/transfers, to calfs at weaning and to feeder steers about every 90 days. Our embryo production and conception rates have improved. I don't know if it is because of the multimin or if we have just been lucky, but I'll keep using it.
 
How many cc's/ml's do you give to a yearling heifer and when do you give it to them in relation to breeding time?
 
30 days prior, animals up to a year of age 1cc/100lbs, over a year of age 1cc/150lbs is what I was told
 
I remember a while back you mentioned a problem with lepto in your cows. Is your vaccination program not working or is something else going on?
 
I don't know. We vaccinated and AIed the ones that were open last calving season as well as our replacements. The ones that we figured were open from the lepto bred up great, considering they were probably infected last year. If memory serves me we had about 65 hd that were open this past spring that we AIed, of those this fall 4 were open. I was pretty happy with that, but the replacements were an entirely different story. I think we had about 130 head handled the same way and vaccinated in the same manner as the older cows. We ended up with 38 open out of that group. In my opinion that is an entirely unacceptable number. The odd things is that these cattle are going anestrous. It isn't as if they aren't getting pregnant, or are sloughing the embryo, they just simply aren't cycling.

That is one of the problems that we are trying figure out. The reason that we are so reluctant to accept that it is mineral problems is because the cattle are running in the same area and being managed in the same manner as the herd has been for the past forty years. The area we operate in doesn't have any significant problems with mineral deficiencies. I know the salesmen would argue with that, but the university research that I have seen tends to support what I have seen with my own eyes. I know of a couple ranches, one a major purebred operator, within our general area that haven't fed mineral for years with no ill effects. Our own mineral program can best be described as infrequent at best and it has been that way for years. The only time we really see a problem is in the spring with a little bit of grass tetany, depending on the pastures we are in. These problems that we are trying to straighten out are recent issues. All of the reproduction as well as a couple of other health problems have cropped up within the last five or so years. That leads me to question the notion that it is a mineral problem. The relative newness of the problems suggest to me that it is instead disease and not mineral deficiencies.
 
rancherfred said:
That is one of the problems that we are trying figure out. The reason that we are so reluctant to accept that it is mineral problems is because the cattle are running in the same area and being managed in the same manner as the herd has been for the past forty years. The area we operate in doesn't have any significant problems with mineral deficiencies. I know the salesmen would argue with that, but the university research that I have seen tends to support what I have seen with my own eyes. I know of a couple ranches, one a major purebred operator, within our general area that haven't fed mineral for years with no ill effects. Our own mineral program can best be described as infrequent at best and it has been that way for years. The only time we really see a problem is in the spring with a little bit of grass tetany, depending on the pastures we are in. These problems that we are trying to straighten out are recent issues. All of the reproduction as well as a couple of other health problems have cropped up within the last five or so years. That leads me to question the notion that it is a mineral problem. The relative newness of the problems suggest to me that it is instead disease and not mineral deficiencies.
Click to expand...

I would tend to disagree. Have some liver biopsies done. The problems over the last few years may be the chickens coming home to roost. I'd say mineral cost for a year is less expensive than 38 opens and other assorted grief. Nobody who is successful is doing things exactly like they did 40 years ago, IMHO. No disrespect intended, rancherfred.
 
@loomixguy: 40 years for the "chickens" to come home to roost? You do realize how many generations of cows were managed in this manner without a problem. That seems a stretch to me. I don't mean to come across as too hard on the mineral salesmen because I am sure that for some areas it is vital to feed. What we have seen over decades of ranching in this area does not bear out the need for year round supplementation.

@gcreekrch: I am not entirely sure what type of major genetic change you are talking about. Our base herd is Red Angus. In the 80s we were crossing with Salers. By the early nineties we had had enough with the disposition problems. We loved the cows productivity but hated the disposition. After that we went back to breeding straight Red Angus. We did that for a few years until we started to see our weaning weights creeping down. Then we tried some South Devon and that was an absolute disaster from a performance standpoint. Cattle were poor keepers and poor producers, however the health problems didn't start showing up then. That would have been around 2000. We only tried that a couple of years. When we saw the disaster the half blood bulls turned out to be we went back to Red Angus. In 2009 we had our first calf crop with some half sim calves. We used our first half blood red sim-angus bulls in 2010 and had our first calf crop out of those bulls this past spring.

That is, in a nutshell, the genetic history of our herd. This is a herd that has an english base but shifts to continental breeds enough to keep some heterosis.
 
Similar to the genetic result we are striving for, British base and touch of exotic for a little "extra".

What I was leaning toward was a major change in cow size to fit your operation is prepared to give in return for a calf. Looks like my shot in the dark went through my foot!

You have tested bulls for trich?

Do you ever test feed for any changes out of curiosity?

In my opinion this problem is caused by one of the following or a combination of.

Feed

Mineral Imbalance

Disease

Genetic Inferiority


Once you get me on a riddle I can be hard to get rid of. :wink: :D

Best of luck getting this one deciphered.
 
We tested our bulls this past week for trich and don't have the results yet. I also took tissue samples just to rule out BVD-PIs.

What I am leaning towards is the possibility that it is nutritional as a result of the disease. I have done quite a bit of studying from various sources on the effects of lepto hardjo-bovis. There are several systems that it can affect. The most obvious one is reproductive. In addition to the reproductive is the possibility of mastitis. We have seen a fairly high rate of udder problems over the last several years, but I was attributing them to a shift in calving periods. We moved from February to May calving and I was thinking that the better nutrition when our cows were freshening was causing the problems with the udders. After studying some on HB I am now beginning to suspect that my udder problems may have its roots in lepto instead of nutritional. Thirdly there is also evidence that lepto can damage the kidneys in some cases.

This is where I am making some leaps that I am not able to completely defend with the research available to me but it seems fairly logical, others may disagree. I am thinking now that during the last couple of years we have had a fairly high rate of HB infection on these heifers, starting as calves. Because it was undiagnosed and untreated it ended up damaging the kidneys and as a result limits the animals overall ability to thrive on the feed they are getting. Calving in May means breeding in August. The last couple of years we have had unusually wet springs followed by very dry summers. This leads to pastures that are pretty well burned up by the time we are going into breeding season. On the cows that don't have damaged metabolic systems the feed is still adequate, because we are a short grass prairie ecosystem, to meet the nutritional requirements of the animals. The animals that have compromised systems, because of the damage from the lepto, may not be able to extract adequate nutrition from the dry grasses to meet their maintenance needs. That would put them into a decreasing plane of nutrition, and as a result an anestrous state that they don't recover from until the following spring when they are once again on abundant, highly nutritious grass.

I don't know if this is the correct explanation, but it is the best that I can come up with seeing as how our production system, i.e. the pastures we run on and the nutritional profile the cattle are exposed to, hasn't changed in any significant manner for quite some time. I would like it to be something as simple as putting out some mineral to solve the problem, but I am afraid that the effects of this infection are going to take a few years to be resolved.
 

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