MANY yard manufacturers report a surge in demand for their products as livestock producers seek to reinvest some of their higher sheep, lamb and wool returns.
Among these is Atlex Stockyards at Dubbo, in New South Wales and Hamilton, Victoria, with strong demand for its on-property design service in the past 18 months. It has visited properties in South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia.
Atlex owner Ian Crafter said there had been an increase in farmers looking for complete sets of yards rather than replacing small components of yards.
"Farmers nowadays can't rely on other people to help them, so they have to have good facilities which can be used by one person," he said.
The 27-year-old company has sophisticated surveying equipment which can draw all the existing structures, such as the sheds, existing fences, trees and dips, position yards in the optimum position.
The key aim of the on-property design service is to allow the sheep to flow naturally or instinctively so that it requires only one person and an average dog to draft or drench faster, easier and safer.
Mr Crafter said that in the past two weeks, his company had completed designs from the Eyre Peninsula to Broken Hill and many throughout the South East.
His workshop capacity has been increased to handle the four or five sheep and cattleyards manufactured weekly.
They were also manufacturing more 6-metre-long permanent sheep-loading ramps to improve safety for truck drivers and staff loading the stock.
"Truck drivers are now bypassing those properties with poor facilities," Mr Crafter said.
The ramps are wide, like saleyard ramps, to allow two or three sheep abreast to walk up, with an external walkway, two safety hand-rails and kick-rail. They are lifted with a geared winch, the same as used on augers, with a safety rack to hold the weight of the ramp when loading.
Ben Stark, Naracoorte, became an Atlex client after buying an adjustable, tapered drafting race for new sheepyards a decade ago near the shearing shed.
It had enabled him to run a lot of sheep through the 3.3-metre-long drafting race without much effort because the sheep remain in single file. The width can be adjusted from 600 millimetres down to 200mm to cater for shorn lambs or woolly ewes.
"The angles work really well," he said. "We are able to put 2000 ewes with their lambs through the draft in an hour."
Mr Stark and his late father Roger went back to the company in December, 2009, when they were looking for an automatic sheep handler to take the guesswork out of marketing their Merino, first-cross and second-cross lambs. They chose the Atlex AT3RO sheep handler.
In the past, they had visually selected their sale lambs, which are sold over hooks at export weights, but the sheep handler fitted with Ruddweigh scales enables them to draft three ways in different weight ranges.
It requires just one operator and is fitted with two sensors to efficiently catch the sheep and lambs and prevent another sheep moving onto the weighbridge at the same time.
"In the last lot we did 1400 lambs in an afternoon," Mr Stark said
