Retractable fabric gate is a real time saver
By Suzanne Deutsch
Mary Haugh, has made moving hogs, to clean a pen or load a truck, a one person job. The Perth County hog farmer’s new fabric gate lets producers move hogs in just a fraction of the time it took with a crowding board, a shock prod or a stick.
Haugh calls her recently patented invention the LONGARM™. It is a lightweight, portable, retractable fabric gate that enables a single handler to clear any number of hogs out of a pen or truck quickly and easily. It is extremely simple to use; just unroll the red nylon sheeting, encircle the animals, and sweep the hogs in the direction you want them to go. It can be used in a barn, in a truck, in a slaughter house, or wherever hogs need to be moved.
Like many inventions, the LONGARM™ has an interesting story behind it. Mary Haugh came up with the idea after her husband suffered two heart attacks in three days and she was faced having to move their finishing farm's three crops of 3000 pigs per year by herself. One day, Mary noticed that the pigs hesitated whenever they passed by the barn's red chase boards. Maybe, she thought, pigs do see colors. Perhaps, I could use some red fabric and make a long flexible chase board that would make them turn into that gate. Her idea worked; they turned every time.
The retractable gate can move a whole group of hogs or remove a single one by wrapping the fabric around the hog. The tension on the fabric doesn't push against the animals but rather, it creates an optical illusion of a moving red wall that makes hogs want to move away from it. The LONGARM™ is long enough to sweep up to a 50 linear foot swath of hogs at a time and only weighs approximately 30 pounds. The handle is made of stainless steel and hooks onto existing stabling when a rod is dropped between the loops in the handle and the loopholes of a gate post. The fabric is attached to a roller with a tension equivalent to 14 pounds of pressure. When finished it rolls up neatly on its' plastic spool, just like a window blind that doesn't have a stop factor.
Haugh designed the retractable gate with the help of her brother Peter Jones, a mechanical engineering technologist, and licensed millwright. It is built to withstand the conditions of a pig barn. All components can be cleaned with a 3000 psi pressure washer with a wide angle tip used to clean equipment and meets Canadian Assurance Standards for biosecurity.
In an informal trial, five participants were asked to clear the same number of hogs, in five different pens, first using a chase board, then a LONGARM™. On average the LONGARM™ cut the time required to move the hogs by 70%. In the real world it means producers will save two hours per week moving or sorting hogs. Even if a worker is only paid $10/hour, the saved labour alone will pay for a LONGARM™ in about one year.
Haugh is getting interest from producers working with other animals as well. Packing plant owners also see the device as a great way to meet the concerns of animal rights groups who are pressuring them to treat animals as humanely as possible. They seemed particularly interested in the handle adapter that will allow to hook the LONGARM™ on the side of a truck, to help unloading pigs as an alternative to using shock prods.
Poultry and sheep crowding too. Poultry producers will be pleased to learn that a retractable gate using 30 feet of bird netting is now available for poultry crowding and a trial is being conducted with four sheep gates that can be electrified for intensive sheep pasturing.
For further information: www.thelongarm.ca.
