A new greenfield cattle feedyard in Nebraska, being built by Blackshirt Feeders, will hold 200,000 head and process more than 500,000 tonnes of corn a year through a heavily automated feedmill run by a single employee on a front-end loader, founding partner Dr Kee Jim told the BeefEx conference on Australia's Gold Coast, Beef Central reports.

The yard, near Laird close to the Colorado border, will reach 150,000 head of capacity by Christmas and 200,000 next year, making it the largest in the United States. Most cattle are light feeders of 300 to 400 lb, mainly beef-on-dairy crosses. Jim said construction cost about US$1,250 per head of capacity, and that the only real limit to further growth would be the ability to disperse nutrients.

Blackshirt Feeders/GK Jim Farms runs 16 yards in the US and western Canada feeding about 750,000 head. It built from scratch because it could not find yards of 100,000 head or more worth buying, and because a greenfield site let it put everything in the right place from the start.

A key innovation is roller-compacted concrete (RCC) for pen floors, a material developed by the military for runways. It has no reinforcing bar, has the same strength as regular concrete and costs about a third as much, here about US$2.25 a square foot or US$300 per head space. More than a million tonnes of aggregate, about 44,000 truckloads, surfaced almost 300 hectares of pens laid at a one-degree slope.

RCC floors need no pen maintenance, and the company calculates that on Nebraska maintenance costs they pay for themselves in five or six years. The report is by Jon Condon.

Photo: Billy Hathorn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Source: Beef Central