New Haylage Feeder For Sows In Stalls

New Haylage Feeder For Sows In Stalls New from Prairie Mfg Austin Minn is an electrically-powered cart that automatically feeds preset amounts of haylage to individual sows in gestation stalls The 1500 lb capacity cart travels over the top of sows penned head to head “We designed it for use with our Prairie line of sow stalls which are built extra heavy to carry a two ton hopper full of feed over the top ” explains Bill Bulter engineer “The haylage cart and track it runs on could be adapted to other brand stalls provided they’re built heavy enough to carry the load ” Operating on 110 volt electricity the cart travels at 8 ft per min and can be preset to feed each sow a given amount of haylage or to bypass her completely if desired The amount of feed each sow receives can be easily adjusted by changing width of a tab located at the rear of each sow’s stall An optional medicator can be added to the haylage hopper to meter set amounts of material to individual sows Prairie Mfg also makes a similar electric-powered cart designed for feeding grain to sows in gestation stalls Like the haylage cart it travels on a track located over two rows of sows metering a pre-selected amount of feed to each sow “Overhead feeding eliminates the need for a feed alley allowing two rows of sows to be placed head to head This placement reduces building space and costs For example in an 80-sow system the savings could exceed the investment in a Prairie automatic grain or haylage cart ” explains Butler Both types of carts move quietly and only a few sows are aware that it is feeding time Sow noise in the building is greatly reduced When the cart reaches the end of the line a limit switch reverses the cart and shuts down the feed system The cart returns to the fill auger ready to be filled for the next day’s run No supervision is required while the cart is operating A fail safe system automatically stops the cart and shuts off the feed augers if a feed auger remains activated for more than a selected time If for example a stall gate is left on the track and stops the cart with an auger switch on a tab the cart will shut itself off until the problem is corrected Butler points out For more details contact: FARM SHOW Followup Prairie Mfg Rt 1 Box 221 Austin Minn 55912 ph 507 583-4479

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