Invention Monday - Chute

I'm always surprised and confused when there are other people at our place and they don't know how to run the head gate. I think that everyone has one like we do because we have never had a different one for as long as I can remember! But it is another invention that my wonderful relatives came up with. 

Now, the thing that sparked this invention was the fact that all our cattle used to be horned, we started dehorning heifer calves in 2001 but all our bulls still have horns, so we needed to come up with something that would open wide enough for the horns to make it through. With the scissor head gate we can catch anything from a very large bull to a little calf.

With a simple pull on the rope the head gate opens and you can control how far you want it to open and then it is closed by yanking on the longer rope, which is long enough to move behind the animal so that it will come into the chute better.

We have three of these chutes, one in each location that we use quite regularly for processing cattle, the green one is used the most and connected to our cattle handling system out back along with being located in a shed, it also has a lever that adjusts the width of the chute, if an animal is a little bit high strung and jumps around a lot we can tighten it so she can't move so much. It also has a little man gate at the back that once they are in the head gate we can open and go behind the cow to preg test, or for semen testing on the bulls.

We have had them for many years now, and they are still in good shape and have worked wonderfully! Every once in a while an animal will get away if the person on the rope isn't fast enough but it doesn't happen very often, it's a great system that makes little noise and allows us to process any size of animal, horns or no horns!

If you have any questions, comments or what type of chute your using, I would love to hear from you!

http://www.lilybrookherefords.com/headgate.htm