Cattle Handling Facilities
Cattle Handling Facilities
By Sally Blaine with input from Embryo Plus
Having the right facilities to work your cattle makes any management that you need to do much easier and more pleasurable. It also allows you to work your herd using fewer staff. Appropriate facilities also allow you to load and offload animals with relative ease. A key factor in your facilities is to make sure that your cattle are familiar to them. This will result in animals that walk through the crush and clamp with little to no stress and will reduce any potential injuries and damage that can occur.
What are the minimum requirements for Ankole appropriate handling facilities?
At the most basic, it is suggested that each farm has a holding pen, a crush equipped with a vet’s gate and the ability to be able to block animals at different intervals and a clamp. Key factors to consider when you are building your facilities include:
- Keep the width of your crush no more than 75cm. This prevents adult animals from turning around once they are in the crush.
- Ankole have horns. Keep the height of your crush at an appropriate level so that they do not hit their horns on the top of the crush as they walk down it.
What is the ideal set up for handling facilities?
The ideal design recommended by Embryo Plus is illustrated below. This is ideal particularly if you are going to breed using artificial insemination or embryo transfers. These facilities will also work if you intend to tap semen from your bulls on site.
One of the factors to consider is how you will block your animals. It may be preferable to include double upright poles that you can fit wooden blocking poles through so that you can block cows from coming forward and going backwards. Wooden poles are ideal to use for blocking animals as they slip less and are easier to work with than metal poles. When choosing your poles, consider a thickness that is sufficient to stop a large bull that reverses at speed.
How many holding pens should I have?
The ideal number of holding pens is strongly influenced by your breeding and management approach. The benefit of having several holding pens is that you can use them to separate animals into different groups for specific purposes. If you have animals that are almost due to calve and you wish to feed them separately from new mums, access to pens facilitates this. The same is true of being able to sort recipients for the purposes of embryo flushing, pregnancy diagnosis and artificial insemination purposes.
What about pens for bulls?
The one thing to remember about Ankole is that they can and do jump. If you are breeding specific bulls on specific cows or need to separate your bulls into holding pens pending semen tapping, it is advisable to have pens that are higher than your holding pens for cows. A height of approximately 165cm should be sufficient to prevent bulls from jumping out of your holding pens.
What are the other features that I can include when developing my cattle handling facilities?
Other features that you can consider include:
- A scale. This is very useful when needing to treat animals and when tracking their birth and weaning weights.
- A roof. The likelihood that you will need to deal with extreme heat and rain at some point when you are working your animals is exceptionally high. It is ideal to have a roof that covers the area where the vet will be working your animals.
- Working space. If you are going to tap semen, inseminate or do embryo transfers then your vet will have equipment that he or she needs to use to work your cows. It is useful to have a surface that can be kept clean where the equipment can be laid out.
The scale and structure of your cattle handling facilities must suit your purposes. Once you have your facilities in place, it is ideal to get your Ankole to walk through the crush and clamp at least once or twice a week. This means that it is familiar territory and will drastically reduce the anxiety and stress created for them and for you when you need to handle your cattle.
