Sheep handler means time efficiencies for 18,000 head commercial operation

The Kelly family have a flock of Roseville Park-blood Merinos near Bathurst. Stuart Kelly said he purchased a Clip-Ex drafter about five years ago.

"They were probably a bit more user friendly for me, a bit shorter in the whole length of the machine," he said.

He used a Tru-Test XR5000 indicator and wand and there were no issues with compatibility, he said.

He said they first set up the handler at an older set of yards with a temporary race. Bars to stop the sheep backing out made a big difference, as well as setting it up in such a way that those coming through could see the mob at the front to keep moving forward.

"We've had this set up in numerous sets of yards and it's just trying to find the right fit for each place," he said.

"You don't need a flash setup to make it work with sheep - you just need to have the sheep wanting to flow through."

Mr Kelly said the handler proved especially useful when the operation hosted the MerinoLink sire evaluation, with the sheep weighed up to 10 times throughout the trial.

He said his handler drafted three ways, but it was possible to split the mob further provided there were people available to operate draft gates. With the sire evaluation sheep, he initially set up a second, manual draft at the front of the handler to give more options. This was later replaced by an air-operated draft box.

The operation had began rolling out electronic identification tags over the last couple of years, he said.

The wool information, including micron, comfort factor and coefficient of variation, were all attached to the individual tag. Having data was important as visual assessments alone were not always accurate.

"Obviously with the micron, it might look 18 but it could be 21," he said.

"Sometimes you have ones that really blow out. We can weed out those ones out by testing for that."

His two daughters, Gabby and Claudia, were very involved in the operation. A few years ago, aged 13 and 11, the pair ran 90kg ewes through without any help. The time saved was one of the main bonuses, he said.

"We weighed all the ewes through here that we sold last week and I think we put 1350 through in less than three hours," he said.

The drafting settings could also be re-calibrated after the physical draft had taken place, he said.

"Last week we had 900 over our weight but we wanted to get two B doubles, so we just did a 'recalculate draft' on the indicator and that told us how many were in that next weight range of 47 to 50kg," he said.

"Then we just brought those light ones back through and redrafted, so we were able to get two full loads."

It worked well for rams and ewes and was suitable for drenching, injecting Regulin, and took the heavy lifting out of weighing, he said.

The machine was loud, which could baulk the sheep, and if it wasn't adjusted correctly it was possible to only weigh the front or back legs.

"But that's just changing things to do it well - you've just got to work out which way to set it," he said.