Day 6 Wagga Wagga

The day started off by visiting the local Wagga Wagga Livestock Marketing Centre (LMC). Here we watched the Monday morning cattle sale. If we were to have come on Thursday we would've been able to see about 3,000 lambs run through the sale ring. It was an experience for sure! They way things ran over here are just way different than the methods back in the states. They split the ring up into 2 pens so the buyer can see the cattle before they actually sell. They also have most of their sorting gates run off of air powered cylinders. Then out gate was the thing that really amused me, it was a splitter gate that was ran off of air again and they had a little funnel gate that was also worked off of a press of a button. Our second stop was where the cattle go after they get sold, the packing house. We visited another packing house except it was a little more Americanized. Cargill had around 4 conveyer belts to cut and trim the meat. Their production line was a lot faster than the last one we went to. We were told that by the time a calf leaves the house it is about 4 days. After we saw the packing house we went to the feedlot for the grain fed cattle. This was also owned by Cargill, and was a decent sized feedlot. It has a license to hold 30,000 head of cattle but currently only has around 15,000 head. All the cattle there are implanted with an implant that is close to our Revlor S. The steers enter the feedlot for 100 days and then are sent to packing at the plant in Wagga Wagga. He tries to keep the yard free of heifers simply because the steers tend to do better. Their ration consists of ground hay, roasted flaked wheat, cotton seed, and cotton seed hulls. After 15 days at the yard the steers will go onto a finishing ration, which eliminates the roughage in it.My favorite part of the day was the feed lot because I work at one and I thought it was neat to compare how we do things in the states and how they do it here.Catcha all later..... Schaake