Cattle pusher helps take the hard work out of handling cattle

For as long as man has kept cattle he’s needed to be able to handle them, and the use of pens and gates goes way back in history.

Stockades and corrals were communal facilities on the prairies, but these days a farmer has to have his own system of handling his stock.

Farmers building such facilities benefit hugely by getting design ideas from different sources — including my own Practical Farm Ideas magazine and website.

One name stands out in this world — Temple Grandin.

She has spent her working life understanding cattle and how they can be handled efficiently, and it’s amazing that the designers of new facilities in cattle marts, in Britain at least, seem ignorant of her ideas. Her designs cost little more than any others, except in imagination.

Farmers with fewer cattle, or tighter wallets, make their own handling facilities, both permanently fixed or mobile.

Mobile ones have the cattle crush mounted on a trailer which carries gates that can be locked together to form a corral or pen.

Permanent facilities might have a circular forcing pen with two gates that revolve on a central pillar, so each bunch of cattle can be pushed down the raceway and into the crush.

But many farmers are unable to go even this far. Their handling is a crush on the tractor three-point linkage, and a motley collection of gates, plus the use of a pen or open yard.

The consequence is often hard work and slow progress getting through the job.

Gareth Morgan rents land which has some old buildings on it, and has made some low cost adaptations to these.

Using a wall made from motorway crash barriers, he made a 10 x 120 foot pen with a yard at the end.

The barriers kept the cattle in safely, but there was a lot of effort involved in chasing cattle around the space and into the crush.

As they worked through the group, the job became increasingly harder, when the last ones dodged and turned back.

There was no flow of work, and everyone got in a lather. He solved the problem by designing and making a loader-mounted cattle pusher, which provides a variable-sized pen.

Using this saves a man and speeds up cattle flow through the crush. It works so well that Gareth has built a similar pen on another block of grazing land. He goes there with the crush on the back of the tractor and the cattle pusher on the loader.

He uses the pusher as a funnel when herding cattle into the pen. The pusher is 7ft 6ins wide, and has wings which fold to meet in the middle.

The horizontal bars on the centre part make it easy to climb over and out, and also get to the tractor cab.