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Western Nebraska | The situation that you are describing is probably the best, or easiest use for this system. If you look at the last picture, you can see there are a couple of gates on your right. The farthest gate on the right is the one where we generally hold the group that we need to sort. We will bring out a group of 10 or so head and put them nearest to them camera in the right hand alley. Halfway down the alley is a gate between the two lanes. There is also a gate that we can close off the back end of the lane as well as gates that open into another pen on the right and to the left hand alley and a bigger pen on the left. We would typically close the gate in the alley and then sort the cows into one alley and the calves into the other pen. The alleys are 12 ft wide so it works real nice to step into them and get them to move past. It is also narrow enough that just taking a step one way or the other will get the animals to move or stop. We would sort cows until there are more calves than cows, then close the gate in the alley the cows are going into and open the gate for the pen for the calves and start sorting calves past. We just keep doing that until the entire group is sorted. Having two alleys side by side also makes loading trailers much quicker because we can have five groups sorted and ready to load before the trailer is even there. Being in the alley instead of the pen makes it easier to push each group to the Bud box and load.
The thing that I stress every time I post about these systems is that you absolutely have to learn to work cattle before you can get the systems to work. It is definitely faster to work them through this sort of a system, if you know how to work cattle. If you typically think of a working facility as something that you can use to force cattle to do exactly what you want to do, then this system, including the Bud Box is not for you. It will be nothing but a headache and you are liable to get yourself hurt. If you work cattle with very little noise, and no sticks or clubs or hotshots, and truly practice the "slower is faster" idea then this type of system will work. The reason I get on my soapbox about this is because I had to completely relearn how to work cattle when I made the decision to go with these lower stress systems. I made about every mistake I think you could make before I finally learned how to read cattle better and how to position myself more effectively in order to get cattle to do what I wanted them to do. I am not a Bud disciple but I think the average guy can learn a lot more useful handling techniques from him than they will ever be able to learn from Temple.
Most people should be able to learn how to use this system, even I eventually figured it out. You just can't cowboy the cattle.
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Double Sorting Alley
