Animal Management, Sheep Handling
Glenlogie Valley caught fire in February 2024, with around 23,000 hectares ablaze. In the bushfire’s path was Glenlogie Farm, where Jonathan and Sarah Keith are the 5th generation of the family to farm the land. Along with the 400 hectares of their farm that went up in smoke, they lost 20 kilometres of fencing and, sadly, a few hundred sheep.
“We were able to save the majority of our sheep but they all got boxed together in the process” explains Jonathan. “One of the first things in the recovery was to bring the sheep through the yards and start to draft them back into their mobs.” It was an unwanted but comprehensive way to test the benefits of the Te Pari Racewell HD3 Sheep Handler installed a few years previously…
It was back in 2020 when Jonathan and Sarah first started looking to replace their dilapidated sheep yards. Almost 60 years old, the yards were falling apart and adding to the complexity of stock handling rather than helping it. With just under 4000 superfine merino and a small cross-breeding operation, they needed a solution that would help take the hard work out of the handling, helping them to continue doing the roles they love for longer, as the physical demands of farm life become more pronounced.
After much research and a demonstration by Te Pari, they settled on the Racewell HD3. From the very beginning the Keith Family saw the benefits, as simply by getting an accurate weight of their sheep, they could remove the tail end of the mob to increase consistency and improve the overall appearance.
That’s really the key to the success of the Racewell HD3. The differences are apparent from its first use; when the first sheep enter and are prevented from backing away by the anti-backing hook. Then as they move forward, optical sensors trigger the catching mechanism and the air-operated clamp safely catches the sheep. For Jonathan, it’s taken “jobs like drenching from something you’d get up in the morning and dread, to something you almost look forward to.” Aside from the ease, shaving the time off drenching is important on a busy farm like Glenlogie too.
Indeed, such was the early success of the Racewell HD3 that it kickstarted a whole rebuild of the sheep yards, including adding a roof over the top. Then came an upgrade to Te Pari’s Macrostock Scale and Livestock Management System. Part of a data-driven approach to stock management, it provides farmers with easy-to-access information with built-in automation to take the guesswork (and paperwork) out of feed management, animal treatments and more. When animals enter the handling equipment, their weight is automatically recorded and they can be treated as needed, before being sorted through automatic drafting gates based on that weight or other criteria, such as gain, trait and mob.
For the Keith Family, the combination of the Racewell HD3 and Macrostock System really proved its worth following the bushfires when their mobs were all boxed together. “After the fire, one of the first things in the recovery was to bring sheep through the yards and start to draft them back in their mobs,” explains Jonathan. “That would have been an absolutely daunting task in the old yards…but it was a very easy task to run them through the handler”.
At the same time as sorting, they had to keep a running count to calculate how many sheep were lost. The Macrostock system did this, removing another task during a stressful period, and after 5 days of hard work, more than 3000 sheep had been run through the handler. As Jonathan says “it really got us back on track”.
Hopefully, few farmers will have to contend with the devastating fires the Keith family faced. That’s not to say the benefits of the system won’t be realised though. As they definitely will. For example, after the fires the Keith family purchased the Revolution Dosing Gun and integrated it with the Macrostock System. Known as the dosing gun that thinks for itself, it provides an exact dose based on the actual weight of each animal. “It’s saving us a lot of money by doing that” says Sarah, while Jonathan points to the animal health benefits: “We had a degree of worm burden and by using the combination of the equipment…we’ve completely eliminated what we perceived as a worm problem.”
Life at Glenlogie has largely returned to normal now. Except with the Te Pari solution, the new normal is easier. Both Sarah (“it makes life a lot easier”) and Jonathan (“it’s been a fantastic investment”) agree with that.
We do, too.