Mineral Sources, Microbiomes, and Managing Cattle Health Beyond the Basics

Summary

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Cattle Chat Podcast Summary

Episode Title: Mineral Sources, Microbiomes, and Managing Cattle Health Beyond the Basics
Date: July 31, 2026
Host & Panel: Brad White (A), Bob (B), Todd (C), Philip (D)
Produced by: Beef Cattle Institute, Kansas State University

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Episode Overview

This episode addresses key topics in contemporary beef cattle management, focusing on practical approaches to mineral supplementation, the scientific advances in understanding cattle microbiomes, and their implications for herd health. The panel of veterinary professionals from Kansas State University's Beef Cattle Institute fields listener questions—particularly on mineral sources—and explores cutting-edge research on microbiomes. The discussion aims to bridge research insights and real-world application, emphasizing region-specific strategies and the complexity of biological systems in cattle.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Mineral Sources for Cattle: Does It Matter?

[04:05 - 14:18]

Defining "Mineral Source"

• Minerals in supplementation are typically bound to other molecules (e.g., copper sulfate, copper oxide) that influence how well cattle absorb them.
• Chelated minerals are minerals bound to organic compounds, thought to improve bioavailability.
  • (D): "The mineral has to dissociate from that other molecule before it can be absorbed across the gastrointestinal tract..." [05:26]

Bioavailability and Forms

• Bioavailability varies by mineral source:

  • Copper oxide: Very poor absorption, should be avoided in most situations.
  • Zinc oxide: More available than copper oxide, but less so than sulfate forms.
  • Sulfates/Chlorides: Often more available.
  • Chelates/proteonates: Generally more bioavailable, but also more expensive.

• Importance of Forage: Most minerals cattle receive come from their forage (linked to local soil composition).

  • (B): "Your base diet is what's most important. If you want to take a multivitamin, that's probably good." [06:02]
  • Regional variation is significant—what works in Kansas may not work in Nebraska or Texas.

Practical Advice for Mineral Supplementation

• Monitor consumption/disappearance (accounting for intake, wind, rain loss).
• "Trace mineral salt, loose, fresh, as often as they can... Ideally... But in practice that can be a lot of work." (C) [09:56]
• Vitamins in mineral supplements degrade quickly—don’t buy a year’s supply at once and expect efficacy.
• Read the ingredient tag for both amount and source.
  • "A cheap mineral might be cheap because they're using sources that are cheap and it's not very bioavailable." (D) [12:39]
• Using tools—BCI offers a spreadsheet for feed tag analysis to ensure your mineral package covers at least 50% of NRC (National Research Council) recommended levels, counting on forage for the rest.
  • (B): "In general, my recommendation is for the mineral pack... should provide about half of the NRC." [13:37]

Memorable Quotes

• "Monitor disappearance. Now disappearance includes intake as well as wind loss, rain loss, those kinds of things." – Bob [10:29]
• "Just because it's offered for sale, sometimes I put those tags in and it's like 10% of NRC. And in many situations that wouldn't be sufficient." – Bob [14:00]

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2. Understanding the Microbiome in Cattle Health

[15:05 - 24:30]

What is the Microbiome?

• Defined as the ecosystem of microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, etc.) living within and on cattle, especially concentrated in the gastrointestinal tract and rumen.
  • (C): "It's really about that ecosystem, the microscopic ecosystem that exists within all living things." [16:48]
• Most vital for ruminants—their unique microbiome enables digestion of cellulose and drives key metabolic processes.

Shifting Perspective from "Germ Theory"

• Not all microorganisms are harmful; many are essential, some are neutral, and only a few are pathogenic.
  • (B): "A lot of germs are neutral from the cattle or humans perspective and a few are bad. And so we need to be more specific." [17:56]
• Antibiotics and antiseptics affect both harmful and beneficial bacteria, raising new questions about broader impacts on the microbiome.

Practical Implications & Research Frontiers

• Microbiome as a Dynamic System:

  • Diet, stress, and management practices influence microbial populations.
  • Inter-animal differences exist even under identical conditions; genetics play a role.
  • Emerging research connects gut microbiome to systemic health outcomes—
    • In humans: links to obesity, diabetes.
    • In cattle: suspected links to muscle development, marbling, disease resistance.
  • (D): "...the gut microbiome influences the metabolism of the rest of the body." [20:29]

• Group Management and Microbial Homogenization:

  • Cattle from different sources quickly develop similar microbiomes when co-mingled.
  • Potential impact on health, immunity, and performance—more research needed.
  • (A): "They match where their source came from... two, four, six weeks later, they... have a lot more similarity among individual animals." [21:13]

Long-term Impacts of Antibiotics on Microbiome

• Management at different life stages (e.g., metaphylaxis in feedyards vs. antibiotics at birth in cow-calf herds) have dramatically different implications on microbial ecology.
  • (C): "Whatever I do to them from a microbiome standpoint gets passed on to their dams. Those dams stick around until the next year." [23:49]
• Changes made in a cow/calf herd can have cascading effects on herd health and future generations.

Memorable Quotes

• "As a society, we've really bought into the concept of germ theory... For some diseases, that's largely accurate, but not for all diseases." – Todd [15:31]
• "We have to think about how the changes we make to the microbiome... affect not only that group, but the groups in contact with them. And then every group that comes for every year after that." – Todd [24:17]
• "Absolutely. We've still got a lot to learn about the microbiome." – Brad [24:30]

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3. Graduate Student Research Update—Teaser

[24:33]

• A preview that a future episode will feature Liliana’s research on factors leading to liver abscesses in cattle.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "Gets up when needed... He is well trained. He will get up when I come pestering." (On dog Google reviews) – Bob [01:55]
• “A bag of mineral at the bottom of the palate is going to be just as effective. [sarcastic]” – Todd [11:18]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Mineral source definitions and absorption explained: [04:05 – 06:02]
• Bioavailability and practical feeding strategy: [06:02 – 14:18]
• Microbiome—what it is and why it matters: [15:05 – 17:14]
• Complexity and implications of altering the microbiome: [17:37 – 24:30]

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Summary & Takeaways

• Mineral supplementation is nuanced—source matters because bioavailability varies and must be considered alongside regional forage content and cattle needs.
• Ingredient labels and feeding strategies are key—monitor intake/disappearance and match mineral packs to at least 50% of NRC needs, supplementing with appropriate forms.
• The microbiome is a complex, essential ecosystem in cattle: not all microorganisms are harmful; many are crucial for digestion and metabolic health.
• Management strategies and interventions can have lasting impacts on microbial communities, especially in cow-calf herds compared to feedyards.
• Research is ongoing: The field is in early days, but the implications for cattle health, productivity, and systems management are significant.

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For access to BCI mineral spreadsheets and more, visit the Beef Cattle Institute website under the "Spreadsheets" tab.

Questions or ideas for future episodes? Email [e-mail] or contact BCI on social media.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, welcome to BCI Cattle Chat. I'm Brad White. Happy to have you with us and happy to have our crew here in the studio. Morning, Bob.

[B]

Good morning, Todd.

[C]

Good morning, Phillip.

[D]

Hello, guys.

[A]

So we're happy to have you guys here because we've got a couple good listener questions we'll dive into a little bit about the source of mineral and does that matter what. We're also going to talk a little bit about a follow up on some of our graduate student research that we talked about earlier this spring that Philip has been leading. And we're going to touch on the microbiome. What is it and what does it mean? Before we get into those questions, I wanted to remind you if you have a listener question for us, you can send us an email at bcisu. Edu or reach out to us on social media. Just look for us under Beef Cattle Institute on Facebook or Instagram and you can submit a question there. Speaking of submitting questions, guys, I wondered a lot of times people send Google reviews now, very common or they'll ask for a Google review. I rarely send one of those in. But what I was wondering is if you had a close family member or even one of the pets in your house, send a Google review in on you, what would the. And Bob, I'm looking at you. What would your dog's Google review of you say?

[B]

I am his walking, but he picks on me instead of my wife because he knows that I'll get up particularly early in the morning. He and I are both early risers and if I sleep in just five minutes, he is there and I get up. And so I don't know whether he's trained me really well or so.

[A]

His review would be good.

[B]

His review would be good.

[A]

Gets up when needed.

[B]

He is well trained. He will get up when I come pestering.

[A]

Yeah. Four stars.

[C]

Todd, are we talking about the lab or the corgis?

[A]

Would they be different?

[C]

Yes, very different.

[A]

Or you may have to say both.

[C]

Then I'd rather not talk about the corgis review. The lab's review of me would be five stars. Will scratch me every time I walk by him. Lets me lay on his lap all the time. Never lets me go too long without going outside. All I gotta do is come up to his side of the bed and grunt a little bit and he'll wake me and he'll get right up and let me outside. That's the labs review.

[A]

I think that would be lab review of almost everyone. Right.

[B]

And the court would be. Will not obey me when I want him to obey me.

[C]

Very suspicious individual. Do not trust one at all.

[B]

I'm interested in Phillips.

[D]

I don't have any pets, so go

[B]

back to your childhood.

[D]

Oh, man, I don't know. We had a pair of Border Collies when that was the main dogs that we had when I was growing up. And I don't know. They were good dogs. I know they, the, the one dog was really smart.

[B]

Good owner.

[D]

Yeah, I think so. They, I mean, we played with them all the time. We had this old, this old rubber football that they had torn up and that became the fetch toy. And we used to chuck that thing all over the yard. So I, I think the. Cody was the male dog's name would probably give me. He'd probably give me a good review.

[A]

Yeah, see, there you go. It's nice if they give you a good review. And then. And it's nice. Sometimes they seem to forget and come back and be like, hey, let's go.

[D]

That's a great thing.

[A]

That's a great thing. I wanted to jump in and Todd, you actually got a question from Dr. Tony Parsons relative to mineral source and does it matter? And we wanted to address that a little bit. And Philip, I'm going to turn to you for first and maybe have you define what does that mean, mineral source.

[D]

So when we're talking about minerals, you know, they are elements or generally most of them are metals. But on the periodic table and the way we deliver those in a mineral package or mineral supplement is they are ionically bound with some other molecule, so like copper sulfate, for example. So the copper is what we're interested in, but it's bound to a sulfate molecule through a ionic interaction. Positive and negative things attract there. And so that's the way we are delivering that in the mineral. So there's sulfate forms, there's chloride forms, there's oxide forms, and then there's the chelated minerals. And then that's when a mineral is bound to like an amino acid or a protein or some other type of organic molecule that is then delivered in the mineral supplement.

[A]

And so does that help the absorption? Does it hinder the absorption? What are the, what are the impacts there on how well the cattle can

[D]

use those minerals, it alters the absorption. So before the.

[A]

That's a good, good way of not answering the question. Yeah.

[D]

So the sources are different in their bioavailability because it alters their dissociation in the GI tract. And the mineral has to dissociate from that other molecule before it can be absorbed across the gastrointestinal tract. And so usually that happens, sometimes that can happen in the rumen, but then it can also happen in the acidic environment in the abomasum and then those minerals absorbed in the small intestine.

[A]

And Bob, you've, you've done some looking into this too. What are your thoughts?

[B]

Well, it is important to, there's several things that are really important to recognize. One is minerals because the, the, the most of the minerals that your cattle are going to consume for the most part are going to come from the, from the forage that they're eating from the diet. And that is associated with the soil that is grown on. And so there's vast differences in different parts of the country. And so I'm really hesitant to make blanket recommendations based on, you know, what, what is best for central Kansas because that's going to be very different in the sandhills of Nebraska or the plains of Texas or something like that. So first caveat is, you know, most of the minerals that, that the cattle are going to consume are coming from the forages and, or there are other supplements. And we are trying to supplement in a mineral pack what is necessary to kind of, to make sure that they have enough. So it's kind of like taking your multivitamin in the morning. Your base diet is what's most important. If you want to take a multivitamin, that's probably good. So set that as a background of different. And the reason that's important to emphasize is let's use sulfates are kind of the base, maybe component in many mineral. And we're talking some of the trace minerals such as, you know, copper, zinc, selenium, manganese, not so much selenium, copper, zinc, manganese, sulfates are, let's, they're a good baseline. And then for copper, maybe the most important one is copper oxide is just not very available to cattle. And so if you see a supplement, copper oxide, it really doesn't have any copper in it. That being said, zinc oxide is relatively available. It's not as available as zinc sulfate, but it's, it's not too bad. So there's, there's different. You can't just make blanket statements. You have to be really careful about blanket statements. And, and then you go into some of the key lights, proteonates, you know, other ways of, you know, getting the mineral that we want bound. They tend to be a little bit more bioavailable, but they tend to be more expensive. And so it, so I'm coming back to my main point. Is if you're in an area where the soil levels of these different minerals are pretty well, you know, they're not deficient. There's not an antagonist in the soil, in the plants you can, you can get by with, let's just say with our base sulfate type of a mineral situation. If you're in another situation where you know, you have some antagonists such as molybdenum or something like that, then you need to kind of readjust and have a different mineral pack and maybe something more bioavailable, something that doesn't react with the antagonist so much, you know. So that kind of a long rambling answer, but I'm going to turn back to Philip and Todd kind of their practical use of mineral advice with the guys you work with.

[C]

Well, as long as it's in a lick tub, Bob, you'll be 100% alright.

[B]

You're killing me.

[C]

I'm being sarcastic. Yeah, it does depend a lot upon the area you're in. I practiced in an area that was extremely high in sulfur and iron and there was also some libdumen in, in the, in the soil as well. And so those operations had a devil of a time getting mineral into cows and keeping their mineral levels up. And you know, they relied heavily on injectable minerals like multi min or other other products similar to that. And that's a whole other conversation in and of itself. You know how effective those are. But it does really depend upon what your soil conditions are, what your forage is. And I think it would be valuable to know what minerals are in your forage. And sometimes we get forage from different sources, sometimes we import it and that can, that can greatly influence the level of mineral that you need. From a practical standpoint. I think ideally cattle should have access to trace mineral, salt, loose, fresh, fresh loose mineral as often as they can. In practice that, that can be a lot of work.

[B]

Some intake is not very good and

[C]

sometimes intake is very good.

[B]

We didn't even talk about that. Maybe the most important thing is, is to at least monitor disappearance. Now disappearances includes intake as well as wind lost, rain lost, those kinds of things.

[C]

Right.

[B]

But at least monitor if the cattle are possibly potentially, probably consuming, you know, the two to four ounces a day that they're intended to consume.

[C]

Well, yeah, I mean that's. And that's just. It is, it's not when you put those mineral packages out there, it's not just the mineral, it's also the vitamins that go in the, into those mineral mixes. The Vitamins themselves, they don't stick around very long at all. Like they are extremely susceptible to UV radiation. They will disappear, break down very quickly. So it's not like you can go out and buy your whole year's supply of mineral and put it into the shed and then trust that.

[B]

Right.

[C]

A bag of mineral at the bottom of the palate is going to be just as effective.

[B]

Well, at the top, that's another place where the sulfates tend to be a little worse at oxidizing. You know, vitamin A, vitamin E. And so you're starting to see some basic chlorides and some other forms that one of their advantages, it's not so much that they are so much more bioavailable than the SO sulfates, but they don't degrade the vitamins in the package as much. And so basically what we're saying is there's some complexity.

[D]

And so I think one of the things. Pay attention to the tag, not just the amount of the minerals that are listed on tag, but what's the source. Read the ingredients. So just for example, you brought up copper oxide. You know, if copper sulfate is the baseline for bioavailability, copper oxide is only like 5% of copper sulfate.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And so it's really bad. So the, paying attention to what sources are in there. Copper chloride, there's, there's, there's other ones. Copper chloride is about the same as copper sulfate. They're, they're pretty close. And there's some other chloride versions too. But, but pay attention to that. And you know, a cheap mineral might be cheap because they're using sources that are cheap and it's not very bioavailable. So be paying attention to that. But I'm not saying go out and buy the most expensive mineral because it's the best, but just pay attention to what you're actually paying for one thing,

[B]

that, because this question is common and there's a lot of different mineral packages that one can buy, look at the feed tag. And that's easy to say. But one of the things that we developed here at the BCI was a spreadsheet where you could put in the. It's not every mineral source, but the most common mineral sources in this little spreadsheet. And you can identify, well, we've got copper sulfate or copper oxide or zinc sulfate or whatever in this mineral at what level. And it will calculate what percent of the nrc, the National Research Councils, they set the standards. You know, we need so much to meet 100% of NRC. In general, my recommendation is for the mineral pack to the mineral. The dry mineral that we're offering should provide about half of the nrc. And then I'm counting on the forages to do the other half. That's my baseline. Again, thinking about special situations where I need to have 100% or so of NRC, that happens too. But by using this spreadsheet, I can say, well, this mineral package does what I want it to do, which is at least 50% of copper, zinc, selenium, those minerals. And I think that's useful because just because it's offered for sale, sometimes I put those tags in, it's like 10% of NRC. And in many situations that wouldn't be sufficient.

[A]

So if you're interested in that spreadsheet, you can go to our BCI website and you can find that under the spreadsheets tab. And I think that's a good point, Bob, is making sure your mineral provides half. The other issue is that you guys brought up is it varies by region of the country and what those different specifics are. So great discussion there. I did want to transition because some of the things we read a lot of papers as a group, a lot of scientific manuscripts that come through in the last few years, we've seen a lot of things on microbiome. First, I want to just briefly define that and figure out, is that telling us something useful and important, or do we know yet? Todd, I'm going to ask you to just tell us what. When somebody says microbiome, what are they talking about?

[C]

Well, they're talking about the microorganisms that live within and on other living organisms. We like to think of the body as being this sterile environment on the inside. And nothing could be further from the truth, especially in the gastrointestinal tract. Most of the processes that go on in our body rely upon complex signals between our cells and the cells of microorganisms that are living within our gut lining, live in our skin, and sometimes even that we may not appreciate our presence in other parts of our body. And for the last hundred, 150 years as a society, we've really bought into the concept of germ theory, which is that germs are bad, that germs are bad disease is the result of coming into contact with germs. And for some diseases, that's largely accurate, but not for all diseases. And so when we talk about microbiome, that is an important concept that often gets lost in this whole conversation because your microbiome is actually really important for your health and for Your animals health, they have to have it. And especially in ruminants, because ruminants have a very complex and very critical microbiome, especially in their rumen, which is the fermentation vat of their digestive system and what allows them to take very coarse feed that we can't digest because of cellulose. We don't have the enzymes as mammals to break down cellulose. But microorganisms within the gut can break down cellulose and produce lactic acid and butyric acid and propionic acid, which can be converted and the bovine liver into glucose, which is really the fuel that drives cell metabolism. So the microbiome is, I mean it can encompass a lot, but at the end of the day it's really about that ecosystem, the microscopic ecosystem that exists within all living things. And that sometimes gets overlooked in our discussions about what causes disease.

[A]

Well, and harder data to evaluate because if you're looking at just is a pathogen present or not, I can say, okay, well that looks like it's associated with disease. Whereas now you're talking about describing the entirety of that population. So is this a useful tool? And Bob and Philip, where have you guys seen that? Where there may be some utility?

[B]

Well, in, in exactly the way Todd described it. Yeah, yeah, I think there's some utility. The problem is the complexity because the populations are so diverse. There's lots of different bacteria. So one of the ways, I agree, I think we've fallen into the trap that germs are bad. And in reality some germs are very, very good. A lot of germs are neutral from the cattle or humans perspective and a few are bad. And so we need to be more specific. And then one of the other problems is some of our. There's two ways to look at this. Some of our tools, such as antibiotics and antiseptics and those kinds of things, they don't kill just the bad bacteria, they kill anybody that they're susceptible to. So sometimes we're killing neutral microbes, bacteria, sometimes we're killing beneficial bacteria. And so we need to rethink some of that. The other thing is we think that some of the things, you know, so diet transitions probably change the microbiome in the intestines and rumen stress might change the microbiome in the upper respiratory tract. The problem is we're at the beginning stages of trying to figure out, first of all, there's differences. Even animals that are treated exactly the same, they're on the same diet, they don't necessarily have exactly the same microbiome that's animal to animal differences. We don't fully understand that. We don't understand how important that is. And then these changes that we might do as managers of cattle, we're probably changing the microbiome and we don't know if that's probably, a lot of times it's neutral, but sometimes it's probably bad, maybe it's even possibly beneficial. And I think we're at the pretty early stages as researchers trying to get any kind of a handle on this.

[D]

So, yeah, I would agree. So think back, you know, we can go back, you know, 50, 80 years from nutrition standpoint and start to understand the rumen microbiome and how diet affected that and how it changed the end products from fermentation and stuff like that. And, but now when we thought that was, that was isolated, you know, it was just in the rumen and that that or just in the GI tract and that influenced, was influenced based on diet and things like that. But we're learning that individual animals have their own kind of niche and there's a, there's a, actually a little bit of a genetic component to the rumen microbiome. And then we're learning that. And I think a lot of this work specifically human related and is kind of starting to translate to livestock production, but that the gut microbiome influences the metabolism of the rest of the body. So like associations between gut, certain gut microbiome microbes and obesity or diabetes and other things like that in humans. I just saw a paper the other day where it was kind of a review paper, but talking about the gut microbiome and the association with muscle metabolism and marbling development and some other things like that. So we're starting to learn that there's more to this microbiome than just digesting feed in the GI tract.

[A]

Well, and one of the key distinctions, when we look at how we manage animals at different life stages, they're grouped with in varying density. You look at the feed yard phase and some of the work there that has shown that the nasopharyngeal microbiome, when they arrive, they match where their source came from. You look at it two, four, six weeks later, they've kind of come together and they, and they have a lot more similarity among individual animals. What role does that play in that? Now we're not just talking about a population on an individual animal, but a population on a group of cattle.

[D]

Yeah, and I don't know, I mean that they start, they start to be more similar with each other. And how does that impact their performance, their susceptibility to disease, because they change from what they grew up with. Things like that. I don't know that I've seen any work from a GI perspective that there's some transfer between like mother and offspring and things like that that start to influence that. But from a. From a weaned animal perspective, when you start to put them together, I don't know if the GI microbiome starts to be more similar among a group than it was to begin with when you co. Mingle.

[C]

So here's an interesting thought experiment on that very topic, because this is a question that came up while I was in practice and I didn't. It took me a while to really grapple with it because I just. It felt wrong. But when you think of it in terms of the microbiome, it makes a lot more sense why it felt wrong. So if I take a bunch of steers that are going into a feedlot and I give them all an antibiotic on arrival as a part of a metaphylactic program, and assuming that the pathogens that I'm affecting with that microbiome, excuse me, with that antibiotic, are just within the animals and they don't stay in the environment, at the end of that feeding period, that pen of steers is going to the slaughterhouse and whatever changes occurred in that mini population are essentially erased. And I start over again with the next batch of steers. Right. Well, I had clients in practice who wanted to start giving antibiotic to the calves at birth because they were seeing a lot of disease in early calf hood and they thought, well, if it works for the feedlot, why can't I do it? Why can't I give these calves a shot at birth and try and decrease the amount of disease I'm seeing in them? The difference, and here's the big difference to your point, Philip, is those calves, whatever I do to them from a microbiome standpoint gets passed on to their dams. Those dams stick around until the next year. So any changes I make to the microbiome of those calves live on in those cows, and then they then pass that back on to next year's calf crop. So there's some feedback in the system there. And it's not necessarily an innocuous thing that I'm doing. I'm not saying it's innocuous when we treat feedlot steers with an antibiotic. What I am saying is that in a cow calf herd, because we have to think about how the changes we make to the microbiome in this set of animals affect not only that group, but the groups in contact with them. And then every group that comes for every year after that. That has much, far more far reaching implications in a cow calf operation than it does in a feed yard situation.

[A]

Absolutely. We've still got a lot to learn about the microbiome.

[C]

What I talked about was largely speculative there, but just from a conceptual standpoint,

[A]

I think, I think it's an important area. And as we've talked about, that's why there's such vibrant research. There is. People are learning a lot. And I like the way you described it, Todd, in that we've talked a lot about germ theory. There's one bad pathogen out there to get us, we come in contact. Whereas this describes a more holistic approach in kind of that systems management. Philip we didn't get a chance to get an update on Liliana's research, so she had done some research looking at, looking to try to figure out what's leading to some of our liver abscesses. So next time we'll get into that and get an update on that. But I appreciate you joining us today. If you have a question or topic you'd like us to discuss, you can send us an email at bcisu.eduardo.