Cattle facilities have four parts: a corral or holding pen, a crowding tub, an alley, and a chute with a headgate. The small operator really needs only these four basic components. Even if you have just a couple of steers for the summer, you’ll still need some sort of pen and a chute to load them onto the truck at the end of the year. Make sure to locate your facilities where they will allow easy access for a truck and trailer.
The pen or corral holds the cattle until you’re ready to work them. A few at a time are herded into the crowding tub, which is a small, circular pen with a swing gate that pushes them into the alley. The alley is narrow, so cattle don’t have room to turn and must go single file. At the end of the alley, a grate is raised to let a single animal at a time into the chute, where the cow or steer’s neck is caught in the headgate. This holds the cattle in one place so you can safely administer shots, put on ear tags, or do whatever else may need to be done. Once the vaccinating, breeding, or castrating is done, the headgate is released, and the animal moves back out to pasture. The headgate is then reset for the next patient.
When planning your handling facilities, follow these few basic principles. First, unless it never rains in your area, put your facility inside a building or on cement, or both. It’s no fun working in the mud. Old dairy barns can be easily converted for working beef cattle, as can nearly any sort of shed. Our facility is on a cement pad outside the old barn.
Second, plan for curves, good footing, and good lighting. A slippery surface will make cattle nervous, and they will balk if they see a barrier ahead. They will, however, follow a curve around to its end. They also will move more readily toward a well-lit area than a dark one.
Finally, if you’re building with raw materials rather than buying manufactured components, follow the recommended dimensions exactly. The recommended alley width for your breed of cattle may seem incredibly narrow, but anything wider and you’ll have cattle trying to turn around, which can result in injuries. Never force a heavily pregnant cow into the alley or chute—it might get stuck.
With a little creativity, it’s possible to build a fine facility at a reasonable cost in a fairly small area. Ours is built on a 75 × 50-foot concrete pad next to the old dairy barn. We also use the area for moving tractors and equipment in and out of a shed. We hung a lot of gates that we usually leave open for mechanical traffic but close when handling cattle in order to subdivide the area into three separate pens that wrap around to feed into each other and then into the crowding tub. I bought a manufactured tub, alleyway, and headgate, all of which we bolted to heavy-duty wooden posts that we cemented in so the cows couldn’t push things out of alignment. The result may not be aesthetically beautiful, but for working cattle, it functions wonderfully. The water tank and grain feeders are also situated on the concrete inside the holding pens so the cattle go in there to eat and drink and are very familiar with the setup, which makes for calm and easy handling.
Handling Beef Cattle
Large cattle operations have always known that handling cattle effectively on a regular basis requires a properly equipped facility. Even a small operation with a handful of cattle can build a scaled-down version of a good facility for a reasonable cost, and the right handling methods can make a bare-bones facility work smoothly.
There’s been significant rethinking of traditional cattle-handling methods, thanks to the work of such pioneers as University of Colorado professor Temple Grandin and cattle-handling and marketing consultant Bud Williams, as well as many others. Their work has focused on understanding the natural instincts and behaviors of cattle and using that knowledge to design systems and handling methods that keep cattle calm and tractable. Temple Grandin’s cattle-handling layouts and techniques have been adopted by many major US processing facilities and innumerable small farms and ranches. Bud Williams’s herding methods have set the gold standard for moving and holding cattle in the open, particularly in rangeland grazing.
Cattle Handling Fundamentals
The most important concepts to understand when handling cattle are flight zone and pressure points. Flight zone refers to an imaginary circle around the animal that, when you cross into it, causes the animal to move away. By working on the edge of an animal’s flight zone, you can gently move it in the direction you want. Because the flight zone varies by the tameness of the herd in general and by each individual animal, and can even be affected by weather conditions, it takes a little finessing to find it. Approach slowly until the cattle begin to move away from you. That’s the edge of the flight zone. Go farther, and they’ll move faster. Back off, and they’ll stop.
Pressure points are specific spots along the edge of the flight zone where, if you stand, you can turn cattle in a different direction. The most important pressure point is at the shoulder. If you’re in front of the shoulder on the edge of the flight zone, the cow will turn back. If you’re behind it, it will move ahead. If you’re to the side and slightly behind the rear of the animal—a second pressure point—it will move ahead. If you’re directly behind it, where it can’t see you, it’ll turn around to look at you. If you take a very visible stick, such as a white step-in fencepost or something with a small flag on the end, and you hold it out to the side, you’ll look three times as wide to the cattle and they’ll turn even more easily.
This is critical information to understand and use when you’re trying to move cattle. After you’ve spent some time in the pasture with these concepts, you can get good enough to sort calves from cows for weaning in a holding pen without having to run them through a chute. You may be able to cut out a pair of cows from the herd when you need to get one in the chute. It’s important to note that you should never cut out and isolate a single cow. Cattle are herd animals, and they get panicky if made to go off by themselves; a cow may run over you to get back to her friends. Always work with at least pairs, if not triplets, and you’ll have much calmer animals.
| Did You Know? You can avoid getting kicked when working around the back ends of cattle by “tailing” them. Raise the tail straight in the air with one hand, grab it around the base with the other, and keep it pulled toward the head. This keeps the animal’s hooves on the ground because kicking with the tail in this position hurts the animal’s back. Don’t be tentative about tailing; if you don’t have a good grip at the base, you can still get kicked. |
Establishing a Routine
Cattle love it when the same thing happens at the same time every day. Use this to your advantage by establishing a routine that makes your cattle familiar and comfortable with your handling facility. For example, if you’re feeding grain, you could feed it in the holding pen at about seven o’clock every morning. One side of our holding pen is lined with bunker feeders, so our cows like being in the pen. In fact, they’re usually waiting there for me at feeding time. When you feed, wear the same cap, carry the same grain bucket, and call with the same call. For the first week or so of establishing a routine, you may need to walk out in the pasture with a grain bucket to where the cattle can see you and then call to them. With new animals, I’ve even done a Hansel-and-Gretel routine, leaving a trail of little piles of grain leading back to the pen, where the big feed happens. Cattle catch on to the call and the grain bucket very quickly.
You could put the water tank in the holding pen, preferably on a nice cement pad to eliminate the mud. Leave the gate open so cattle can wander in anytime they’re thirsty. Once in a while, after they’ve had their grain or come up together for a drink, shut the gate behind the herd and make them stand in the pen for an hour or so. The more the cattle are accustomed to being in the pen, the easier it will be to put them there and keep them calmly waiting when you need to work with them. Even if you have only a couple steers for the summer, take the time to train them to be penned.
If you’re rotationally grazing and switching paddocks regularly, that’s another opportunity to teach the cattle to come when