Glacier FarmMedia – A loading chute attached to a trailer makes cattle movement more efficient, especially in remote locations.
Doug Green saw the problem regularly when he was hauling cattle. He’d pull up to a pasture location and find no chute for unloading.
A call to the farmer would reveal that they would be there soon with a chute, or that the hired hand had forgotten to move it. Then Green and the truckload of animals would sit and wait.
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Green fixed the problem himself, by inventing CowGo, a chute that moves with the truck, is assembled in minutes and the farmer and trucker can load and unload where needed.
“There was other things on the market. But they hung out the back of the trailer and interfered with where you could load,” he said. He spent many hours in the truck thinking about a solution.
Green says he’s also been in situations where multiple trucks pull up to unload and there’s a waiting period for the chute. If each of those trucks had their own chutes, they could unload and go.
“What we’re finding is the guys that are living in the southern part of the province of Alberta are buying cheap land, grassland, in the north. It’s working great for them.”
Having the chute on the back of a truck also means there’s no need to buy a loading chute for a pasture, and no one is going to steal a chute from the pasture.
The CowGo chute, which has been engineered, was installed on the back of a trailer at the Ag In Motion outdoor farm show in Saskatchewan recently and Green was showing farmers and ranchers how it works.
The ramp is stored in a nine-foot false floor just inside the door of the trailer. Green says cattle have no trouble with the elevated area as they walk onto it directly from the ramp. The raised area fits seamlessly with the ramp to the second level of the trailer.
The chute arms cross over along the back of the trailer. One is swung open, and then comes down to fit onto the ramp, and the second arm is easily swung over and down in a controlled fashion and then clips into the ramp.
Green has it set up in a couple of minutes.
“It’s designed so that you can back up to any existing dock and you don’t have to take it off,” says Green. He was part of the Livestock AgTech happy hour event each day at the show, which highlighted new equipment in the livestock sector.
Green put the first one together in 2017, but didn’t really get going until 2021. He had someone call and want one for a tandem trailer. Then more beef farmers called looking for them, so they had to hustle and get three made in five weeks.
Each chute is custom installed, as trailers are different depending on the model and manufacturer and there’s usually some custom fitting to be done. Age of the trailer is also a factor as newer trailers are built lighter, says Green, and can need reinforcement to hold the chute off the back.
Green manufactures the chutes in a small welding shop north of Stettler, Alta. for his company Opend Range. He’s working on partnering with other businesses that can install the chutes. He’s also working on fulfilling the enquiries he’s had from the United States.
