Cattle Handling Systems

[grassfarmer]

Hey Woodland thanks for that!- we have the same system and had the same issue - about 4 animals badly cut and we could never figure out where they were getting cut - we were always looking further forward in the system for the offending part. Will do something to remedy that.

Don't know if you saw this earlier post of mine highlighting another problem wit that system?
[URL="https://www.agriville.com/threads/31999-crowding-tub-hazard"]http://https://www.agriville.com/threads/31999-crowding-tub-hazard[/URL]

As an aside what type head catcher do you use? the scissor one? I use the straight bar neck extenders and find they are little use when doing head work on an animal.

[perfecho]

Have the straight bar neck extenders as well.....not really much of a benefit....

[woodland]

Thanks for pointing that out grassfarmer as ours is the same design. Ours has the scissor in front of the head gate and it works great. It's adjustable vertically and the only picture I've got of it is with a cow and it's set too low. When we brisket tag bred heifers we could 30 an hour with haltering each one. Now we do 45 an hour without a halter.

[grassfarmer]

I should have gone with that neck option but I just thought it looked so clumsy and the handle is something you'd be tripping over. When we go to tattoo yearlings or big calves they just drop to their knees and the head goes right to the ground even underneath the neck extender bars. So with the neck held in this scissor deal what happens if they fall to their knees or do you use a sternum bar?

[woodland]

Occasionally the heifers will go down after catching their head. Sometimes you can still tag them if their hide is loose or else you release the head and sides and they should stand up. Had the same problem with haltering anyways. We had a sternum bar in our stampede hydraulic squeeze and sometimes they would get legs on the wrong side of it so we removed it. I've got to think it's pretty hard on the animals to put weight on it when they do go down. Also can't run small calves through it with the bar installed.

[woodland]

Our bud box at the end of our squeeze is 14 x 20 and is built with hi-hog panels and a hi-hog overhead gate. We hung plywood on the covered areas using 2" U clamps, so it is quiet.
Our box for the loading chute is really more of a long narrow pen at the end of the chute. It can hold up 100 calves if we pack it. It is roughly 14' x 40'. We have other pens that lead into it that we can pre-sort into. For example, if we are loading a split load of calves/cows, we would put calves into the box and have cows pre-sorted into groups before the box. We sometimes overfill and then step in to cut off the flow. The only issue we have with it is that our ground loading chute would be better if it were just a bit shorter (the chute, not the box).

Thanks Sean for that. Things got busy here and I forgot to reply. Everyone has a different way to achieve the same goal. Interesting to see some of the different ways it is done.