Description
In high humidity in areas of the south like Louisiana, facilities need to be enclosed inside shaded buildings. This building existed and the design was made to work within the existing roof columns (shown on plan). 360 total cattle can be held in the holding pens at 20 square feet per animal. This is the industry standard and allows all the cattle in the pen to lay down if necessary. The split chute is unusual, but works better than expected. A three-way sort from the squeeze chute is a good number of pens for ranch sorting. When designing this facility, three important principles were used; solid sided fences in high use areas like the curved lane and crowd pen. Cattle fear only what they can see, and blocking vision with solid fences keeps the cattle calm. Deep groove concrete floors also keep cattle calm, and give them confidence to walk through the facility The last principle is curved fences. Curved fences make cattle think they’re going back where they came from, and prevents abrupt corners or chutes that appear dead-ended, and takes advantage of their natural tendency to circle.
