Loading Facility

I am almost finished with our new loading facility. This series of pens and a chute will make the process of loading livestock for transport much easier than it has ever been. Instead of chasing animals and trying to force them into a trailer where they quite clearly do not want to be, we can simply guide them into the "V" shaped corrals that leads to two sorting pens. The second pen has another "V" guide that takes the animal to the chute. I still have to install the various gates, but I used the system this weekend to load our Highlands/Galloway cross cow "Henny". She is off now to visit her boyfriend for awhile. The pens are just the right size for our farm. Any bigger, and I feel that I would need help to get the animals sorted and loaded. Henny is quite wild and I had her loaded in about a minute and a half! Excellent! I am a little proud of the design and the ease of use although it is nothing new and plans on-line showed me how to design the catch pens and gave me dimensions for the chute. The next thing to do besides installing hardware and gates is to design and build a slide-in chute within the chute that will make the chute usable for our smaller animals like the pigs and sheep. With a chute that is cattle-sized, the sheep and pigs will easily be able to spin around and make life difficult for us.