A couple of weeks ago we moved the herd up the road to graze some additional acres. This will give the first paddocks we grazed more time to regrow before we come back and graze them again.
This meant getting the cattle onto a trailer to drive them up the road. This is a two-person job and Ellen isn’t able to help with the cattle work these days. Fortunately our wonderful and generous friend, Chelsea, came out bright and early on a Saturday to help me load and unload the cattle!
The afternoon before we moved the cattle I set up these steel panels, called corral panels, to create a holding area and a chute. Many thanks to Jesse Straight for letting us use the panels to move our herd around! In this photo the cattle are grazing in a paddock adjacent to the loading pen.
The next morning, Chelsea drove out from DC so we could get started at 6:30 AM. We disconnected and loaded up the hoses and water trough into the truck bed. Then we used the polywire reels to herd the cattle into the loading pen.
Chelsea stood in the loading chute while I backed the truck and trailer up. We chained the panels to the truck to make sure no cattle got out as we “pushed” them onto the trailer. The trailer is 24 feet long and has two interior doors, so you can load two or three different groups. It can be tricky getting 12 or 14 large animals to all go on at once, so splitting up each load makes things less stressful for everyone. All the cattle were in the holding area together, so we used some wire and some posts to divide the group and load up 5 or 6 at a time.
Dropping the cattle off at the new property was almost as tricky as getting them loaded. When I set up the perimeter fencing at our neighbor’s place I didn’t take into account driving the 24′ x 7′ trailer through there. But as it turned out, there was just enough room to squeeze between one of the trees and one of the fence posts. I did end up breaking one of the metal posts, but it wasn’t even the one that was a tight squeeze!
It took two trips to get all 23 reunited. Then it was back to the home farm to load up the dozen or so panels into the trailer. All in all it was a little over 4 hours of work – not too bad! Thanks again to Chelsea for her excellent help and to Jesse for the use of the panels and trailer. We are so blessed to have such good friends and generous neighbors!