Self mustering cuts labour and lifts cattle recovery in extensive beef country

Why conventional mustering was holding producers back#

The paper opens with a plain problem statement: in much of extensively managed northern and central Australia, cattle control limits how well herds can be managed. Conventional search-and-drive mustering is expensive, stressful for stock, and often inefficient. Because the whole herd cannot reliably be gathered, many useful husbandry practices, from parasite control to pasture management, become only partly successful or financially unworkable.

Cheffins and Hirst trace the alternative back to the old one-way cattle trap, a device long used elsewhere to draw game animals to a water source through a gate that only opens inward. The innovation described in this paper is the addition of a one-way exit gate as well, turning a trap into a mustering system that cattle can be trained to use freely, entering and leaving a watering enclosure until the exit gates are closed to hold them in for collection.

The authors frame this as a direct response to rising mustering costs and poor recovery rates, developed by what they describe as innovative cattlemen rather than by a formal research program. Their paper reports on the state of that development as of 1990, summarising both the mustering system itself and a set of accessory devices built around it. This summary draws on that account, held in the ASAP Conference Proceedings collection alongside other work from the same era of Australian animal production research.

How the self mustering system works at the water point#

The basic self mustering arrangement relies on a watering point enclosed by one-way spear gates, which allow cattle to walk in but not simply walk back out the way they came. Under normal conditions the exit, or 'out', spears are also one-way and left operating, so cattle become used to entering and leaving the yard around the water source over a short training period.

To muster the herd, managers close off the exit spears. Cattle keep coming in to drink as usual but can no longer leave, so the mob accumulates inside the enclosure. The paper notes that more developed versions of the system include a small, spelled holding paddock attached to the water yard, where gathered cattle can graze and rest while the rest of the herd trickles in, a process the authors say can take two to six days for all animals to present at water.

Producers can add portable yards and other working facilities at the site, which the paper says increases convenience and further cuts both stress and the cost of working cattle. The method depends on surface water being controllable, since cattle are drawn to the system by their regular need to drink; the paper is explicit that it suits areas where surface water can be managed, rather than country with abundant uncontrolled water.

Spear gate design and the move to steel#

Because the spear gates in a self mustering system are used constantly, the long wooden spears common in conventional one-way traps proved too fragile and maintenance-heavy for the job. The paper describes a shift to steel pipe or rectangular hollow section, and to a shorter, off-set hinge design that roughly halved the amount of steel needed compared with earlier long-spear versions.

Cheffins and Hirst credit the short, off-set hinge design to two or three cattlemen working independently in Queensland's far north-west and on a Western Australian property, during the early part of the 1980s, with the authors themselves first promoting the design in 1985. Since then, the paper says, the design has been refined further by cattlemen, manufacturers and the Queensland Department of Primary Industries, producing what became known as the Hirst spear, referenced in the paper to a 1987 note in the Queensland Agricultural Journal.

By the time of writing, the paper reports that many thousands of these units had been built on properties or sold by engineering works, making the short spear design something close to a standard fitting for self mustering yards. This section of the paper is really about the hardware that makes repeated, low-maintenance cattle passage through the gates practical at all.

Keeping cattle coming back: lures and water control#

Self mustering depends on cattle having a reliable reason to return to the enclosure, and the paper treats water as the primary lure, describing it as close to a daily requirement for the animals. Where surface water across a property is too widespread to control, that incentive weakens, and the paper reports attempts to find other attractants.

Flavoured water additives were tried but, according to the paper's citation of Hasker, Standfast and Barnett (1988), failed to draw cattle in strongly enough to keep them visiting the controlled water yard once alternative surface water became available. Molasses dribblers, referenced to Webber (1987), and phosphorus supplements, referenced to Murphy (1987), are both described by the paper as having worked in some circumstances to keep animals coming back to a managed trough or point.

The authors flag two open research needs rather than solved problems: finding more effective cattle attractants for situations where surface water is plentiful or only temporarily available, and developing cheap, biodegradable, environmentally safe substances that could be added to nuisance water sources to make them temporarily unpalatable. Neither is presented as resolved in this paper, which is a useful reminder that self mustering's reliability is tied closely to how well surface water can actually be controlled on a given property.

Automatic parasite treatment through the spear gate#

Because cattle using self mustering pass repeatedly through a tightly defined space at the spear gates, the paper describes this as an opportunity to attach accessory equipment that carries out husbandry tasks automatically. Several prototype chemical applicators were developed, and the most efficient, according to the authors, was a backline roller system that delivers medicament in proportion to the length of the animal's back.

The device is fitted onto one of the short, off-set hinge gates already used in the system. As the animal pushes through, it lifts the roller with its head, and the roller turns as the animal moves forward and the roller travels along its back. That turning motion drives a small pump which meters pour-on medicament onto the animal through a spray nozzle, a mechanism the paper attributes to Hirst (1989).

The stated goal, once fully developed, is automatic treatment of cattle with any pour-on medicament used for internal or external parasite control, applied without yarding, without stress, and at low cost. The paper presents this as a practical extension of the spear gate concept rather than a separate invention, built on the same passage of cattle through a fixed point that makes self mustering itself work.

Separating calves and weighing cattle automatically#

The paper also describes attempts to automate weaning and sorting. Several prototype electronically driven drafting gates were built as an aid to weaning, but none performed satisfactorily under field testing. The authors note that behavioural studies show cattle can readily learn to operate mechanical devices themselves, but are markedly more fearful of devices that appear to move on their own, such as electric motor driven gates.

That finding led to the animal operated cow/calf separator, designed to be installed permanently in place of either the inlet or exit spear gate of a self mustering water enclosure, so cattle become familiar with it through ordinary use. The separator has one inlet and two exits, working on what the paper calls the principle of preferred clear vision passage: mature animals choose the gate they can see over, while calves and weaners use the gate they can see under, so calves are drafted into a separate yard automatically.

For weaning, this is reported to remove the need to hold and manually draft the whole mob; only the calves need handling, with larger calves able to be trucked for weaning and training while smaller ones return to their mothers. The paper also raises creep feeding calves through the same system as an idea not yet fully evaluated in extensive conditions. Separately, prototype automatic weighing and drafting devices were tested in Australia and overseas, but the paper reports that none were yet suitable for commercial or experimental use, with electronic animal identification for grazing cattle described as a future rather than current option.

Uptake on properties and the economic case made#

On adoption, the paper reports that implementation was initially slow despite strong interest, which the authors put down to the system's apparent simplicity making producers doubt it would work on their own country, combined with the upfront cost of building a self mustering complex. They describe demonstration as the main driver of change, with progressive adopters allowing neighbours to see the system working.

The paper states that at least 80% of properties in the Alice Springs district in the Northern Territory were using some form of self mustering by the time of writing, a pattern traced back to one property trialling the system in the late seventies. In Queensland, adoption was being supported through producer demonstration sites under an AMLRDC project, with free producer access to sites in eleven districts across central, northern and western Queensland. Readers comparing progress claims across the wider proceedings collection might also look at a separate paper on a beef information nucleus portfolio, which reports on uptake of a different beef industry initiative, or at a paper on commercialisation of DNA marker technology, both of which likewise describe staged industry adoption, though neither is connected to this self mustering work beyond that shared theme of tracking progress on a farm technology.

On the economic side, the paper cites estimates from Hirst (1989) and Wicksteed (1989) that, for a representative northern cattle enterprise, installing self mustering and its accessory equipment, combined with basic management improvements such as strategic weaning and disease control, would lift gross margins by 25%. Wicksteed's wider estimate, also reported in the paper, put the industry-wide gain for northern Australian beef producers at $46 million each year once adoption reached 25%, following a build-up period of fifteen years. These figures come from the cited reports rather than from controlled trial data presented in this paper itself, and we would treat them as indicative industry projections rather than measured results, since the paper does not set out the underlying trial design behind them. This paper is held within the broader Australian Society of Animal Production community section of this index, alongside other proceedings from the same conference series.

Sources and further reading#

• Australian Association of Animal Sciences: successor to ASAP
• Trove library search: find a library that holds the paper
• Meat & Livestock Australia: red meat industry research and marketing body

Questions#

— The Livestock Library team