Weds Weekly Feature Nght

tonight's feature is a request by Dick2
He wants to see or hear about equipment purchased or homemade that is used to handle livestock for example gates etc//////
We need some ideas for next week's feature night

Purchased a few years ago a model 91 Priefert head gate. (Can't get a link to work) It is automatic or manual but I have only used it manually. Works slick, wish I had bought one sooner. Previously a friend had given me a homemade chute with a homemade head gate, made from heavy steel pipe. It was designed to sit flat on the ground with the cows standing on the ground. I don't like this system, my theory is that the chute needs to have a floor in it so that the cow is enclosed and if agitated(WHEN agitated!) she will be working against her self trying to get out. Therefore I took the chute and removed the homemade gate. I welded brackets to fasten the Priefert gate to the front of the chute. I welded supports for a floor and bolted in an oak floor. Board were place crosswise to give the cows more traction and narrow strips of oak were added to the top of the floor for the same reason. When cattle get in the chute and the head gate closes, they stay in there. The gate opens to the front to let the cows out. Commercial chutes open to the side, I would appreciate comments about which escape system is best.

Chute is too wide for stocker calves and I didn't make a squeeze mechanism. To reduce width, I made boxes about 4 inches thick with a plywood skin and set them in the chute. Works fine so far. Sorry for no pics.

Other handling tricks: I posted about the bull escaping from the stockyards. Previously he had escaped and torn down some loading pen sections on the farm he was on. Man who caught him and took him to the stockyards set up corral panels making a chute, fairly long, which was the escape route from the pen. Bull and other stock was fen in the pen and when the bull was in there some made an appearance so that the bull went out the chute to escape the pen. After a few times of this the man parked the cattle trailer at the end of the chute so that when the bull went to escape he wound up in the trailer, where he agitated all the way to the stockyards.

KEH

I kinda liked this crush I saw at ths State Fair in St Paul MN........Price wasn't too bad either......Sam

I wished I had a pic of my old neighbor's stock yard. It was all wood and took up 10 acres, he owned thousands of acres and ran beef cows, many beef cows. It was quite the site for here. He owned from me all the way to the end of the road which was a few miles. He hired guys to cut every tree on the farms so the cows had more to graze. In the fall the yard was just black and red with cattle. The guy was an old bachelor, no kids, never married, the farms got sold to a millionaire engineer and his son a high up lawyer, the bluffs have trees again, all the farmable ground went to CRP, and the all wooden stock yard that covered 10 acres was bulldozed into a ditch, along with most of the buildings, only ones that lasted were a log barn and a log house.

I use corral panels as an alley leading into my chute, made my own spacers out of threaded 1-1/2 pipe welded to some flat stock on the bottom to keep the alley at the right width.

Main thing I did wrong was make them 6ft tall, and I'm 6'3"...duh..

Cows were bowing out the center of the panels where my spacers weren't, got some 2x12 oak boards and bolted them to the panels...they don't bow, but boy they're heavy.

Thinking I need to make a few more spacers for the middle of the corral panels and ditch the boards...but I'll make these 6'6" tall

Fred

I have seen places around here that used old bed springs for fencing. Not the best looking.