Improving Animal Welfare for Cabriejo Ranches

Cabriejo Ranches is located in Southern Missouri just outside of West Plains, USA. Trent Hendricks and his family raise cattle and sheep, with a primary focus is on Dorper Sheep. They chose a Racewell Sheep Handler with T30 Scale System and Revolution Dosing Gun for their operation to improve animal welfare and efficiency.

“As our operations have expanded it’s become more clear that we wanted to be more efficient with our time and as we evaluated the options out there we kept coming back to Te Pari. So we visited a few other producers that had used it (the Te Pari Sheep Handler) and we felt like it was going to be a viable piece of equipment for us.” 

“We are processing, receiving, and shipping lots of sheep every week, all year long and the solutions that were available to us quite frankly just didn’t check enough boxes until we found the Te Pari system.” said Trent.

“The clamp feature which kept the sheep immobilised but kept it from being restrained other than just being caught, that’s something that really appealed to us. Its’ just like manually holding a sheep but it’s head and feet are free which goes a long way to lowering the stress on the individual animal. It was obvious to us immediately that the designers understood the psychology of sheep and that was a real big plus for us.”

“It's very adaptable; we can either speed it up or slow it down based on what our needs are, we can send a variety of different animal types through it and it’s just an incredibly flexible and durable piece of machinery.”

“Depending on how many people we have and how many processes we are doing per lamb we’ve actually achieved run rates of in excess of 500 lambs per hour. We could never approach half those numbers in our handling methods prior to getting the Te Pari.”

“And the stress on animals and people was much higher before, let’s say the Te Pari has made inter family relationships improve by reducing the stress at animal working sessions.”

Trent’s children are often in the yards helping and are now able to operate the Racewell Sheep Handler and Revolution Dosing Gun safely and easily. The sheep handler takes the hard work of catching and holding sheep out of the job. The Revolution Dosing Gun works together with the T30 Scale System to make sure that the correct dose is given to each animal based on their actual weight. The dosing gun is easy to use with a simple pull of the trigger you know that the whole dose has been administered.

“We have built this operation for the children and we’ve made investments for the children and that meant investing in the right equipment, design and facilities to keep them safe.”

“The Te Pari System allows you to capture pretty much any data you want and go through any processes you want, it is portable, I love the fact that it’s well built and I’ve no doubt that it’ll give us lots and lots of years of life.”

“We’re able to group lambs much, much more consistently and when we can ship full truck loads of lambs within a 5 pound bracket we can demand a premium from our buyers.”

“I would make the argument that it is a marketing tool, because we are able to add value and demonstrate that. Before we were sorting lambs on eyeball, today we ship lambs over a 5 pound spread or less thanks to the Te Pari.”

“Implementing the functionality and the features of the Te Pari Racewell has undoubtedly made us a more professional operation which has saved us in labour and saved us in stress on animals and people that ultimately does contribute to the bottom line but in addition to that it’s allowed us to market a higher end product, both in live animals and as a meat product because we’re delivering consistency. At the end of the day it’s been my experience over several decades in this business that it is better to deliver good consistently than excellent inconsistently and a Te Pari has made us much, much more consistent.”

 

Watch the video to see more!