Grazing is good, cheap and easy, but it must be taken into account that grass does not contain the minerals the animals need, and especially that the content of microminerals is completely unpredictable. Remember that minerals account for around 15% of the body weight, which means that the animals must add 15% or 150 grams of minerals to their body tissues each time they grow 1,000 grams / 1 kg. Since minerals typically have an absorption efficiency of 50%, the animals must be supplied with 300 grams of minerals for this to happen.

It is important to have a safe, cheap and easy strategy to ensure the animals' supplementation with minerals during grazing periods so that they can maintain optimal productivity and health in an economic way.

There are four overall strategies:

1. If you do not provide mineral supplements, you can expect a 30% productivity suppression and a low immune status among the animals with increased risk of diseases and death among them. You can read about the importance of mineral supplementation for grazing animal here.
2. The animals can be given a bolus before the grazing starts or access to lick stones / salt blocks during grazing. Both of these solutions will typically supply them with a few, important microminerals. Popularly speaking, it prevents the animals from dying from under-supply of minerals, but the need for macro minerals to ensure optimal productivity is not taken into account in this way.
3. Use of molassed minerals in tubs, buckets and alike is far too expensive in consumption because the kg price is high and much of what you pay for is molasses rather than minerals. The problem is also that the sweet taste causes the dominant animals to eat most, especially if the molasses mixture is soaked with rain, while none of the animals can eat any of it if wind and sun have dried the mass and made it hard as concrete.
4. The use of free-choice mineral supplements in MineralRocker or BasisFeeder ensures that the animals, regardless of the weather, can eat the minerals they need and over-supply is prevented by the salt content.

With MineralCalculator, you can calculate how much mineral feed your cattle or sheep need, and compare the cost of using different mineral feed types; The use of free-choice mineral supplements with MineralRocker or BasisFeeder is normally much cheaper than the use of molassed minerals.

You find MineralCalculator under "FACTS" and "Mineral norms", or by clicking here. For using the app, you need to be registered (click here) and logged in (click here).

An example calculation with 25 suckler cows shows that you save € 1,152 in just 3 months by using free-choice mineral supplements rather than molassed minerals. This corresponds to a saving of 70%, so the return on an investment in a mineral feeder is fantastic. Click on the following link to see the details of the calculation with MineralCalculator: