Livestock question

He's referring to problems of being loaded too tightly. Keep in mind that the smaller and shorter the animal, the more floor space that is required to get the same amount of weight as you would get with larger animals.

For example, high-yielding packer bulls or really gaunt utility cows will maximize your loaded weight for the same amount of floor space because they're taller and have more muscle throughout that frame height - muscle is heavier. As your stock gets smaller and smaller, you lose that muscle weight from the additional frame height and maturity of the animals in your load, but the floor space required for the smaller ones doesn't decline at an equal rate.

Basically, you aren't using as much of your trailers volume capacity because of all the wasted space between decks when loading it with shorter-framed animals. You'll be using a lot of the floor space, you'll just have a lot of air above them. That's why they use triples for really light calves like 2-weights, and they use triples and four-decks for hogs, sheep and goats, etc. Those additional decks allow you to utilize more of your trailer's volume instead of just using floor space.

It might just involve trial-and-error on your first load. But, if you're familiar with your trailer, once you get your bottom nose loaded and take a few minutes to do the math, you'll know how many more you can load to finish out.

 

I have a couple buddies who used to haul pygmy goats from TX up to Paterson, NJ. I remember them saying they would get 700+ on the trailer. I think they pulled 53×102 sheep pots with the 3-4-3 deck setup.