5 minute read
How Arrowquip Facilitates Easier Livestock Handling
LOTS OF GRUNT TO THE 46 JOULE ENERGIZER
Kerry and Tracy Tristram have been farming on the West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island for the last 17 years.
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Kerry and Tracey milk a herd of 220 dairy cows across a milking platform of 120 hectares. The farm had a lot of old fencing, so Kerry simplified and moved to two-wire electric. He says installing the 46 Joule Energizer was a no brainer. It charges fencing across the majority of the milking platform, but Kerry says it could go even further.
“There’s ample voltage, it has a lot of grunt.”
Kerry says the 46J Energizer and Datamars Livestock Farm App have given him the “luxury” to control voltage from anywhere on the farm. “You can be on the tractor with your phone and you just hit the app to turn the fence off.” He says this instant ability is especially handy for doing quick little jobs and frees up time.
Datamars Livestock Head of Sales, Mark Peters says that Kerry’s experience with the energizer highlights how handy it is to be able to control the energizer from your phone.
“Our energizers have been a hallmark of the farming community for decades, with the 36 Joule Energizer an iconic favourite across the country. We are delighted that our smarter, more powerful 46 Joule Energizer is living up to its predecessor and doing the hard yards in the paddock.” Kerry says that the app gets put to good use a couple of times a week and it’s been easy to operate. He says the Datamars Livestock team has been on hand for support and to answer any burning technical questions.
The 46J Energizer gets the tick of approval from Kerry and Tracy. A more connected farm has given them the freedom to get on with more important jobs and manage their dairy herd. Kerry says, “It’s the way of the future.” “Our first ‘smart’ energizer is designed to provide peace of mind and save time for farmers, while powering 460 kilometres of fence. This is the first cab off the rank in our plans to provide a connected farm to our customers and it’s great to see farmers like Kerry embracing the technology,” adds Mark.
All of Arrowquip’s products are designed, manufactured, and sold, with the purpose of making handling animals easier, quicker, and safer. We approach this a number of ways, from utilising what we know about animal psychology, to engineering our designs to make them as easy to use as possible. One product that specifically showcases this approach is our Bud Flow cattle forcing tub.
THE BUD FLOW
The Bud Flow forcing yard is a good example of how research, engineering, and design can converge to create a product that not only makes handling cattle a breeze but also makes it much safer. The Bud Flow utilises known cattle behaviour, namely the fact that cattle like to move toward the location they originated. To take advantage of that fact, the Bud Flow is designed so that cattle move into the tub, turn around inside it, and move into the race. This means that in most instances, the cattle with move through the tub and into the races smoothly without much external goading.
However, with more stubborn cattle, the Bud Flow’s crowding gate allows you to apply pressure behind the animal, moving them toward the race entry. This gate is a single rotating gate that pivots around the centre of the Bud Flow and swings towards the exit point of the tub. By operating the gate, you ‘crowd’ the cattle and move them toward the race. Cattle are large and powerful animals and can push back against the crowd gate with force, with the potential to cause injury to the handlers. Therefore, in the Arrowquip Bud Flow, we’ve also added safety features to prevent that from happening, namely the ratcheting handle, that locks against the tub as you move the gate and prevents it from being pushed back too far. These features all combine with quality manufacturing to make a product that makes cattle handling easier and safer.
Our products are made to be safe, reliable, and work well, but making livestock handling easier applies to more than just individual products. It also applies to the design and production of stockyards, as a whole. Individual components need to come together in the right ways, to make the entire yard system work seamlessly. Our Stockyard Packages Booklet is a collection of yard designs like this, that we’ve put together, which are based on science and are proven to work. The sheep stockyard packages demonstrate this approach to complete stockyard design.
SHEEP YARD DESIGN
Looking into history, there were a lot of yards which were built between the ’70-’90s which were mostly square designs with mesh fencing. These designs don’t make sheep handling easy. What we know from years of research and on-the-ground testing is that yards with bugle layout designs and that use an oval rail fence, are the best for easier, faster, and more efficient sheep handling.
To function correctly, however, the bugle layout needs to be designed correctly, and there are three design principles when designing bugles. The first principle is to make sure the sheep can see where you want them to go. It sounds very simple, but if the sheep can’t see when you are trying to move them, it is going to be hard work right from the start. The second principle is don’t make the bugle too wide. A width between 4-5 metres is ideal. This gives one person the ability to increase or decrease the flow of sheep without the need for extra men. Thirdly, the bugle yards’ capacity should be multiples of the capacity of the drenching race or the draft. This means that when you are working the sheep, the pen numbers flow into each other without having leftover sheep that can’t fit into your working area. After the drafting pens, you should always consider a laneway to remove the sheep out of the yards without interfering with the flow of sheep into the yards. This way you can keep the handling operation going while penning up and letting sheep back out to pasture.
Design principles like these are used by our team to create yard designs that are effective, efficient, and make for easier livestock handling. These yards, and the design components that make them up, have been proved to work over many years of real-world use. We use animal science and behavioural psychology to build designs that are backed by science, and we’ve proven their worth and their utility in real situations with real farmers like you.
