If it's summertime and you need to drench your sheep or you need to draft things, it's
physical labour.
Using a clamp means that it's slightly less tiring and nicer on the sheep as well, when
you’re moving them through.
I'm Emily Stretch, we're farming southwest of Kojonup.
We run about between 12 and 15000 sheep over the course of the year and cropping to sheep
ratio is about 60 percent sheep 40 percent crop.
So we run a fair few sheep and to help us run those sheep we decided that we would invest
in a sheep handler of some sort.
Before buying the clamp we would have been using a double drenching race which means
generally you have at least two people in the yards, quite often you'd have three and
quite often you would use say my father who is the highest valued time on the farm to
be in the yards.
So we have a Combi clamp which we got around two years ago, most of it is spring loaded
lever action and we could replace most of those parts ourselves.
The sheep will either run through a curved lead up or through the parallel lanes that
we've got which gives us the ability to do things in the race prior to them reaching
the clamps and then once they get to the clamp you use the lever action so you have a stationary
side and a side that pivots in and as you stand on a foot pedal at the bottom it brings
that pivot in and it clamps the sheep.
It's got rubber matting on one side that bows with the shape of the sheep but hold it tight
enough that they can't escape.
It doesn't take much force at all and you can adjust how much force you need to exert
in the tension of the springs.
It's really good for training unskilled labour because the sheep are held stationary so if
you're teaching someone how to drench an animal you're not trying to teach them how to hold
the animal as well as how to accurately drench.
From an occupational health and safety point of view it makes it more enjoyable for us
to work with sheep not having a sore lower back or knees that need replacing when you're
60 and it gives us more ability to say we have a nice workplace for you to work in,
come and work for us.
Dad and I never thought that we would make money by buying the clamp but we also thought
that we couldn't afford not to have one.
Without using a sheep handler, for all their labour its 70,000 dollars in 10 years.
It costs them 14 and a half thousand dollars to invest in that and when you equate that
down to a per head cost for their eleven thousand, two hundred sheep that was 63 cents per head.
When you took into account the additional benefits for the sheep handler for reduction
in animal health costs - animal health products, that cost reduces to 53 cents a head.
The clamp gives you the ability to see what every single animal's weight is which changes
your management.
The next thing we're going to be buying with the clamp will be a drench gun that's calibrated
to the weights of the animals that come through.
I love it, I would never get out of sheep because I love sheep.
I love wool but for people who don't have that intrinsic passion towards the sheep industry,
yeah it's hard but I think we'll stay in sheep.
We'll always crop some of it because diversifying your risk is a good thing to do and you can't
run as many sheep as we do without stubbles to put them on so it'll be sheep, it'll be
crop and yeah I think we'll keep doing it for a few more years to come.
The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development through its sheep industry business
innovation project, made possible by Royalties for Regions is supporting and sharing new
technologies in the sheep industry.
This is improving labour efficiency in the sector and making it easier all round to run
sheep.