The New Cattle Yards

It's been a long wait, but finally, the truck arrived with our new portable panel cattle yards.  As I posted previously, the old yards were well past their used by date and although it was sad to see them go, commonsense has to prevail.  They were dangerous.

It was a little bit touch and go as to whether the truck would make it up our long and steep gravel driveway as we had just enough rain to make it slippery.  Lucky for us the truck driver was very experienced!

We had borrowed a friends tractor to unload the 100 odd panels, calf cradle, loading ramp and gates.  Philip would have used our little Kubota tractor but it doesn't have forks so it was useless for this job.

The day after the yards arrived Philip had organised for two of our local lads, Zach and James, to give him a hand to build the yards.

Does anybody remember Meccano from their younger days? Well, building these yards was just like building a giant Meccano!  All the panels are joined to each other with large pins and there is movement in the yards but this is remedied by using extra panels as 'stays".  The yards can't fall over but they can be moved sideways if you have a bad tempered beast in the yard. It all came together quite easily and the men were finished building the yards before the sun went down.  

Completed.

Today we had to needle our cows for Vibrio and Pestivirus and I'm pleased to report that the yards worked very well.  We wondered at how the cattle would react to the bright galvanised steel and all the clanging us they passed through the race but they were all very well behaved.