 Ben's the general manager of research at the Conditon Group in Western Australia. He's an agricultural engineer and he's also the Conditon Group's research manager of farming ahead magazine, which many of you might be familiar with. And he's also a member, some of you may have seen him in the last few weeks, talking with GRDC about stored grain. He's based in Western Australia, but comes from a farming family in the New England region of northern New South Wales. Since completing his engineering studies at the University of Southern Queensland, he's worked for Conditon for at least 20 years. Ben has extensive experience in reviewing and communicating a wide range of innovations and technologies, including in the ag tech field. He's conducted a review of a wide range of commercially available sheep handlers, cattle crushes and yard design. And he'll explain the findings here today. He'll also talk about the things to consider when you're sitting up a new set of yards. So please welcome Ben. Thanks, Jody. Gee, 20 years with Conditon Group. Sounds like a long time, doesn't it, when you say it like that? Yeah, I've been fortunate to work with Conditon Group for that 20 years and we've been able to do some great stuff. So for those of you that aren't familiar with what Conditon Group is, we're a little bit like Choice Magazine, but for agriculture. So we're independent, we evaluate all sorts of machinery and livestock equipment. And we put together a report around that equipment in a magazine called Farming Head, which comes out monthly. And I can tell you, having Aussie edited for sort of seven years up until recently, that month comes around pretty bloody quickly all the time, you know, trying to put all this stuff together. A couple of the research reports that we've done over the last sort of four or five years that are relevant to you guys and relevant to the information that you're getting today is around livestock infrastructure and handling equipment, yards, sheds. Emily's going to talk a bit about sheds later on today. And I think at the end of the day we're talking about machinery or equipment that's going to help you in your farm business and hopefully make things a little bit easier and a little bit more enjoyable. And as Nathan said before, you know what excites you about your business and about livestock production in general. For me, it's some of this new technology, a new equipment that can make life a little bit easier and make the job a little bit more enjoyable. So, just a couple of the reports that we've done. And I'll focus on sheep handlers for a start, so we'll kick off with that. And then we're going to have a look at and talk about sheep yards and then we'll finish off with some cattle crushing information. So, we've done three lots of sheep handler testing. The first probably was around 2015, I reckon, so it's a few years ago now. But it's interesting, you know, Nathan was talking about the rate of change of technology. A lot of these sheep handlers haven't changed too much in that time. We have seen some gradual improvement in performance, but we've also seen the integration of a lot of other tech. So, EIDs obviously come in and created, I suppose, a value add to the handling equipment that we've got there. So, the three reports we've got there included not only your signal animal handlers, but also your bulk handlers as well, so we'll touch on those as well. So, what is it that we want in a sheep handler? What are we looking for? Who owns a sheep handler? Who's thinking about buying one? What do we want? We've got to be ergonomic, we've got to be able to work with these bits of gear. We've got to make sure that it's safe for the operator. Animal welfare, big issue these days. We're going to cart it around the place, it needs to be easy to transport. We're going to shift it from one set of yards to another. Do we need to move, you know, George meant to be before, you know, moving it within the yards needs to be maneuverable. How hard is it to do that? You've got different sized animals you're putting through it. You might need to adjust the dimensions of the catching frame to catch different sized animals through the handler. It needs to be quiet, some of them are bloody loud and it can stir up the animals and of course stress in the animals means it's never a good day in the yards for whoever's working in there if you're working with stressed animals. You need to be able to get to the bits you need to get to if you're doing some crutching or winging, whatever it is and some handlers will actually provide better access for some jobs than others. In a lot of cases we see people that have maybe a couple of handlers depending on what the job they're doing. All the basics come into play, build and quality of finish. If you're going to have it in a set of yards it's a pretty harsh environment you need to make sure it's going to last for a long time and provide you with good service life. It's not going to break or fail in the middle of a mob of sheep. You've got to be able to integrate that technology we were talking about before whether it's EID or anything else. You need to be able to get parts and probably thinking about the service and delivery aspect of things. You need some decent PD. We've tested some handlers where the pre-delivery wasn't done particularly well because the agent selling it didn't know enough about the handler or it wasn't done from the factory. If there's an element of technology integrated into that handler sometimes some training might be required as well. You're looking for all these features when you're buying a handler. Have you got power and air on site? Do you need to think about that as well if you're going to make that investment? To work for left or right handlers, how many left handlers have we got in the room? Do people cater for you? Do people cater for you very often? No. It's a bit rough, isn't it? Can the handlers be customised to suit requirements? Whether that's your yards or if you're not ambidextrous, which most of us aren't, we need to ultimately improve efficiency and workflow. That's what we're looking to do here with a handler. The big one is just reduce that physical effort. Cutting sheep around all day has got hairs on it. It's bloody hard work. If we make that a little bit easier, we're going to enjoy what we do a lot more. We've got three primary styles, that clamp in the standing position, capture and rotate, and then your bulk handlers. One thing that Nathan mentioned before and gave us a pretty good demonstration of was that lead-up rates has to work. If that doesn't work, the sheep handler is not going to work. It's a crucial part of that investment. If you're thinking about investing in a sheep handler, make sure that you've thought about how you're going to feed sheep into it. Whether that's a dual race, as we mentioned before, whether you've got something like Backup Charlie there that will feed around into it, any backing bars, all these things are important to make sure you get the most out of the investment you've made in the handler. It needs to work in your yards because in some yards, you can't fit this in, or depending on where the handler is going to go in the yards, you might need to think pretty carefully about that lead-up. That's important. Let's have a look at some of the results and some of the findings that we came up with. If you've got one of these handlers and you've got some more to add, I'd really love your feedback, so if you just pop your hand up and let us know what you think. Can you go for the ClipX? So, mate in China, this is the second time we tested these, and we did see some refinement from the first time to the second time. It's got a hot-dip frame, nylon bushes throughout, so pretty low maintenance, wears pretty well. Fold out entry ramp, and then of course you've got both a pre-catch area and a three-way draft integrated. So this is the contractor we're talking about. It's clean from tip with those lifting panels for the head and also the rear end, so you can get to where you need to get to. Air requirement, 85 psi, so 12 CFM compressor to do the job is the recommendation from ClipX. It weighs about 750 kg, so if you're going to shift it around your yards, you might need to think about either not doing that or make some plans not to do that or getting some pretty strong people. It does have some electric jacks that lift it up, but they're incredibly slow. That was how I wanted it. Whether that's improved, since we looked at these, I'm not sure, but again, it's something to just ask if you are looking at a ClipX. Can we clamp? Yep. So ultimately using the weight of the operator, say for someone like me, that's not a problem, probably going to crush a few shape, never know. And we talked about the lefties and the right-handers. The left-handers as well. It can be set up for left-handers. There's some coarse and fine adjustment there for animal size. And that foot-locking bar, the clamping bar will lock, so there's another mechanism that will hold that closed. If you need to walk away and do something else, the animal will still be retained. Trampoline springs used, so easy to get parts if they snap. And you can get a transportable version. But by and large, pretty light by comparison. So, and I think that's the key with any of these handlers is that sometimes they fit for a specific purpose. So drenching, little bung-hole crutch, no dramas at all, full crutch, more difficult. I don't know, what about the Gallagher crutching and dag? Yeah, as I said, again, fit for purpose, crutching, dagging, drenching. It's got a top clamping action and that pneumatic entry gate. You can't adjust the height of where that animal is presented. So for shorter or taller operators, that could be problematic. You might need to make some adjustment to the setup when you first put it down on the ground. Speaking of shifting, it is a two-person job to put the wheels on that and shift it. Can't be done with one person. You can use the drawbar there to leverage it up, but of course you need someone to pop the wheels back in on it. One of the things we thought was that the pneumatic tip cylinder sort of got in the road if you're moving front to rear of the animal, so you've got to walk out around it all the time. And there is an auto-way version as well. So our understanding is that there might be some refinement and a bit of an update coming for this particular unit as well. Peek Hill Handler. Anyone use one of these at all? Couple of things that we came up with. So of course this is mainly fabricated using gal sheet and 25mm sectional steel. Only requires 8CFM compressors, so pretty low air requirement. One of the things we sort of found was that there's a little bit of intrusion from the animal about to come in to the rotational area and that could be problematic. So we just needed to keep them back a little bit. In terms of shifting, retractable handles, a set of quad bike tyres go on and it's pretty easy to shift. Cradle height and clamping positions in front to rear can also be adjusted pretty easily. So a bit of adjustability there. We saw a contract crutcher in WI using one of these and I suppose it all comes down to being used to the machine but is put in through quite quickly. Again from Peek Hill, similar sort of laser cut profile gal sheet with the hex socket, head shoulder screws, upright clamping position, great for drenching, electronic eye, you can move backwards and forwards to adjust clamping position and you might need to do that because depending on how animals are feeding into this if they're going pretty quickly you might need to move the eye back so that you've got that reaction time for the machine to catch the animal but they do tend, depending on whether you've got this optional ramp or not, they do tend to run pretty quickly through it and to parry. So we're due to have another look at this later on this year. It's got a few new features, some adjustment in some of the rotary switches which replace the toggles of the old unit, remote control and integrated hot bars. So yeah, stand by for a little bit more information on that one. So as I mentioned, when we do this testing we normally try and get a panel of farmers together with ourselves. We've got a team of engineers and ag researchers and we we get, you know, we try and get some objective measurement wherever we can. Anecdotal and subjective data is always useful but if you can put some numbers around some of these things, that's always good. So what we ended up doing was putting sheep through each machine and simulated a drench and we did that three or four times just to get a bit of a feel for the sort of typical flow-through rate in this case for 20 sheep. So given this is from a couple of years ago, I reckon those prices have probably increased probably pretty dramatically. We'll talk about buying steel in a minute and of course that's all getting passed on which is great not. Rating here from the panel. So again, Jody's got copies of these reports and we're happy to share them with anyone here today. So the panel went through the build quality, maintenance of operation, adjustability and then we did this time to drench 20 sheep. Now the peak you'll handle obviously because the sheep's in the inverter position, we're not really going to drench them in that position but just to give you an idea of the, they were just maved for that run of 20 sheep just to give you an idea as to how the sheep were running through that particular handler. So if we go into the bulk handlers, we'll kick off with the pro way so available in six or 12 meter units. The 12 meter is obviously a combination of two six meter units about 840 mil wide. Six meter units can be configured as a transportable unit so you can actually shift that around and you can get an optional roof for those models as well. So again, pretty big unit, difficult to put wheels on but tend to work well. Anyone use one of these? Bulk handler. Just as an indication, so we spoke to a couple of growers who are using these and try to get a little bit of information as to what sort of numbers they're putting through. 20 to 30 full body sheep per raceful and the way this works is it lifts the sheep up about 400 mil off the deck. A little rubber skirt there stops any leg entrapment. Do what you need to do if you're drenching or whatever and then you can open the front gate from the rear once you've lowered the sheep back down on the ground. So one of the people we spoke to was this lady Cynthia Parker. She ended up with a bulk handler. She handles about 8 or 10,000 weathers a year all going to the export trade out of WA. The reason she ended up with a handler is because she was tagging some weathers at one stage and one of them in the race that is. One of them jumped up and hit her in the mouth to break her jaw. She's in hospital in Perth for weeks. 6 months to recover and decided this was a better way to go. We talked about all the desirable features of a sheep handler before and one of those was operator safety. There's some definite benefits to having a handler and Cynthia is a pretty good example of how that's the case. These are a hydraulic unit so you've got to have electricity on site we'll have a generator that will run the hydraulic power pack that will lift the animals up and down sorry and then on to the Murray. Murray another bulk handler two races sort of side by side we've got 7 meters long one of the things that we noticed with all the Murray units we went and had a look at was there was some adaptation up the front so it's a big step to get up into it so either ramps all sorts of combinations of things we used to modify it and I don't think we saw one that didn't have some welding on it and that's one of the things that I think people often do is just they might customize the unit themselves to suit their yards or suit their operation. There's two v-cradles as you mentioned so just as sheep are running into the Murray handler just as if you're getting pretty full you elevate and it's got an interesting sort of mechanism to lift everything actually uses a car tyre inflates that as that inflates it pushes out and lifts the sheep up or lifts the bees up so the bees can actually be adjusted for larger or smaller frame sheep and as I mentioned before it does have wheels on removable stub axle hubs so you can just pop those off put it down and put it around the place couple of modifications different taps release valves if you wanted to open it I wanted to lower the sheep from up the front of the race you can the other one was that we saw quite a few sheep slipping off that bottom platform so just a couple of pieces of rod welded onto that would have done wonders and again as we say the modifications to a lot of this machinery are quite common and that's one of the things this owner was going to do so look there's a stack of others there's a stack of other handlers if I haven't covered the one that you're interested in today come and have a chat to us because we've probably seen most of them so Hecton, Perkins, Dan Darigan there's a whole stack of handlers out there that people are using and every time we revisit this report we're trying to include as many as we can the other thing I want to talk about today is sheep yard design and also integrating that into what we've got with the handler we talked about the importance of getting sheep to feed into the handler and that means that the yards have got to be set up correctly there's a few things we've got to think about if we're going to invest in yard infrastructure planning, design who's going to do it, how are you going to do it think about a long term view incorporating any old infrastructure that might be there are you going to expand what are you going to use to build it with what materials have got on hand already what sort of features are you going to integrate into that design curves or diamonds what's going to make sheep flow well through your yards what sort of sheep are you going to put through it races I've seen so many different designs of races it's not funny which bits are going to be under cover all of it latches and catches it's going to be easy to use in and out if you're going to have a handler that you need power air or water on site what's got to be there you're going to concrete some areas which bits you're going to put a loading ramp in there that's going to conform with some of the new regulations that sit around loading ramps and ultimately if you're going to get someone to install it are they going to do a good job it's a big list, isn't it and you can go down a rabbit hole with every single one of those things trying to work out what you're going to do if you're going to invest money in a new set of yards so let's run through some of those planning and design one of the key things is just thinking about site and orientation are you going to have to shift some dirt you need to get a level site is there another site that you could use that you don't have to shift so much dirt earthworks are costly the yard is going to be in the right spot for the farm from a logistical perspective is there existing infrastructure there an old shed and the big question that we often get is do we try and integrate the existing shed into the new plans or do we just go that's going to compromise that design too much let's bugger that off and start again and that can be pretty tough I don't know if people get emotionally attached to yards I don't know why what's that about terrain soil type again kicking into that earthworks side of things slope and drainage you've got to have some slope there you don't want to be working in a quagmire and have ponds of water around the yards and wind and weather can be a big factor as well some of these things can be for example if you're going to put your yards under cover some of these things may not be too much of a consideration wind and weather if you're under cover that's fine you might want to think about the prevailing winds and how that might affect things even if you are under cover but in some cases whether you've got to shift some trees whatever you have to do to pick the correct site is important invest in an expansion anyone ever traded in a set of yards didn't think so you only spend the money here once so you either put them in or you're cutting them out you're not going to trade them in you might modify them a little bit but at the end of the day this is a long-term investment you're going to spend a fair bit of money on a quality set of yards you use them a fair bit and you might want to think about this just staging that build bit by bit you might want to think well you know as Chris said before we've identified where we can out of our business and get a good return on investment we're going to do that first and there's another component of that that we can do later on so think about staging the build you don't have to do it all at once but in doing that you need to think about how you're going to stage that build and how it might work think about also your future requirements whether that's integrating some technology down the track materials anyone priced there lately but steel prices are going through the roof but if you are pricing up steel make sure you're pricing quality steel there's steel and there's steel sometimes you get away with downgrades that's fine but you don't if you're paying for quality pre-gel section for example you want to make sure that it is good quality think about your thickness options your wall thicknesses and if you're buying for a set of yards through a manufacturer get a bit of an idea of what sort of grade steel you're going to use think about those galvanizing options whether it's hot dip or pre-gel and think also about the railing now the K-rail sort of style is becoming pretty popular certainly in WA we're seeing a lot of that whether the builder will rock up on site or a subcontractor to the builder will rock up on site and they'll have straps that get rolled out in particular profiles and some of those profiles are great they're nice and strong they're flexible enough to go around curves some a little bit sharp on top if you are going to climb over or you have to climb over you want to make sure that there's no potential for injury there so just have a look at some of those options with regard to the onsite rail profiles welds and joins if you're going to buy prefab yards just make sure they're good quality I was at one of the cattle crush manufacturers in Queensland the other day and we were looking at some of the prefab sections there that they had and they said all Australia made welded in Australia and the welding quality was fantastic so how do you make that economic you said well it just happens to be handed with about 35 minutes from Wakehold Jail so they just send all the steel down there and it comes back in panels 35 bucks an hour is all they pay the welders down there or it can well yeah if they had to pay a commercial rate that could be a bit of a different story curves and races bugle still king and they lead up into the race diamonds in between sets yards becoming more popular because it just gives that flexibility on where sheep are going to flow and race as race designs vary as I said before I've seen multiple different iterations and variations of races with mid-race gates that sort of flick over if you've if you don't want to fill a full race dual races side by side animals one leading the other vertical bars in the exit gate just to aid the flow undercover does create a much more pleasant work but who's got yards undercover a couple of little things sometimes you know if it's been a bit dry you might need a little bit of water in there to just settle the dust pop some sprinklers on at home let that settle a little bit of moisture if you can't afford to do it all in one here just think about again doing it in stages you might want to think about just doing the race if you're building a new shearing shed you might want to think about just at least facing it in the right direction or orientating in the right direction so that you can extend the portals out and cover the rest of the yards just to reduce the shadows and balking that can be pretty useful can be done later but you know again as I said you need to just plan for it and they still prices keep increasing in price so it's probably never going to get cheaper than when it is right now latches and catches and I've also included PA gates here you can't have too many of those notice the little dog flap saves dogs jumping over fences and and through panel sections that means it's not as tight at the end of the day and think about how many times you go in and out of a gate how many times you latch and unlatch and relatch how much time are you chewing up there so you know potentially you know some of your top mounted latches like this work well provided you haven't got animals that are going to knock them open on you and box up a couple of them on the shoot or the draft you've just done power air and water make sure you've got those on hand if you need them you know for some hand pieces and sheep handlers you might need both of these things one of the options that you've got with a handler that uses air is that you might put the compressor a fair way away and run a big pipe up to the handler big pipe acts as an air receiver and gives you a little bit more air in the system so that's an option concrete just in areas that are obviously high traffic and you need to think about if you're pouring a race you need to be generous with that pour make sure you've got plenty of space to work down the side quite often it's always six inches too short think about maybe putting a towgap in under the race here just gives that little bit of extra leverage if you're trying to reach out into the race one option you've got is a bag of concrete every three square meters dig that in if you've got solid hoppers that's friendly to that and then plate compact it good quality gravel just makes it easier to clean loading ramps there is an ALRTA guideline that should be followed they talk about access for the drivers and probably just refer you to that document if you are going to invest in a loading ramp it's worth asking the question as to whether it's compliant the big thing is installation if you're going to go and buy a set of yards make sure the installers do a good job don't ever put some of the yards that they've built previously make sure you're comfortable with how they're building the yards and that everything's done as you think it should be done it's a big investment that's it with yards let's move on to cattle crushers who's running cattle you can help me out with this bit of a quick buyers checklist so we're going to kick off with safety the vet gates and vet access areas are all tickety boo just make sure that there's no chance of no pinch points or if there are that they're well labelled we want to keep things down to a minimum from a noise perspective look for areas of potential entrapment if we're talking about particularly on the squeeze there's a couple of different squeeze designs obviously you've got your V squeeze parallel single sided parallel some of the squeezes swing up which means that when they swing back down they might trap feet from a floor perspective you don't want that to be solid and provide some grip you don't want it to be slippery that's a great way to drop animals in a crush and of course it goes without saying that you need some ability to get animals out there if they do go down in that crush just make sure that that latching mechanism is sound needs to be reliable access gates can be a bit of a personal preference as to where you've got them depending on how you like to work obviously being able to get in for vaccinations up near the neck is important so provision for that is obviously something you'd be looking for and when I'm talking about latching here I'm talking about making sure that the latches are easy to use easy to slam closed that includes side gates and also handles as well as head bail action a lot of those can be adjusted according to suit neck extended bars chin scoops as I said before those locking mechanisms for the head bail do vary but we've gone away from that sort of ratchet style that we used to have look at for the release there's the integration of shock absorbers as well that we're starting to see as well going bang and releasing a lot of designs have integrated shock absorbers into that geometry also seeing a bit some new materials integrated into the design and build so oil impregnated nylon bushes are used in a lot of cases might have brass in them back in the day and a really good quality crush and what that means is that it limits some of your maintenance requirement and also seeing in the case of I think it's a lights CIA you've got a bit of a composite design for the head bail rollers one of the things we noticed when we looked at crushes most recently is that some of the components are designed to wear so you might get some of those nylon material particularly on the squeeze might work as a shim or a skid plate that's designed to come off and be replaced in time a lot of these crushes can be ordered as air or hydraulic operated or you can do it later on or you might just want to do certain components so you might just want to do the head bail say as air or hydro at the start or do it later on make sure that you've got ability to integrate your EID and load bar provision and a combination for the scale head so this is a tapari panel that clicks in over this keeps all your electronics safe and sound and tucked away so look there is a report, it's a current edition of Farming Head, we've done a bit of a run through on cattle crushes and looked at pricing and again I'll send that to Jodi she can happily share it with you and if you're not a conventing group member and you'd like to be one, there's a little discount code there so a bit of a plug