5 Reasons to use a Battery Electric Sheep Shearing Clipper?
When I first started shearing sheep professionally, more than 30 years ago Battery-powered clippers were not even invented. You could buy an electric shearing clipper, but the thought of using a cord-free, portable shearing machine was foreign to every farmer and shearer alike. The first battery-powered clipper I heard of was the handy piece. This was a mechanical handpiece that was connected to a battery pack you attached to your belt. This was an incredible invention. The battery clipper has revolutionized small mob shearing and commercial farmers alike. Here are 5 reasons to use a battery-powered electric clipper;
Justin removes the wool from the maggot-infested backside of a sheep in his sheep yards. The beauty of a battery sheep shearing clipper is you don’t have to be near mains power to treat an animal like this.
Remote Farm Use
It doesn’t matter if you have 10 acres or 10,000 acres; getting sheep in to check them for flies or to crutch a dirty backside can take many hours. We can all relate to an occasion when it took longer than we thought to bring a mob of sheep into the yard to deal with just a few sheep.
Modern technology has helped modern farmer’s time efficiency to no end. When checking on a mob of sheep in the paddock, a farmer can quickly identify a sheep to be treated from his ute (pick-up), quad bike, or side-by-side buggy. The sheep can be caught in the paddock, and the shearing, crutching, or dagging can be performed with a battery-powered electric clipper on an isolated part of the farm without having to get the whole mob back to the main yards to treat just a few sheep.
2. Professional Shearers
As a professional shearer myself, I carry around a battery sheep shearing clipper in my shearing bag to help me out on many small farm jobs that I do throughout the year.
If I go to a farm that has 1 to 5 sheep to shear, I will quickly whip out my battery clipper and shear the sheep without having to set up an electric clipper or my more cumbersome overhead equipment. I can have these small mobs done by the time I get the other equipment set up and ready to go.
The battery life on the clipper can last between 2 and 4 hours of running time. So I can shear these few sheep well before the battery runs out of charge.
3. Dagging Up the Race
As a professional shearer, I do other contract sheep husbandry jobs for farmers throughout the year. If I have a mob of sheep lined up to drench or vaccinate, I can quickly identify the sheep with dirty backsides to be dagged. With a portable battery-powered electric clipper, I can quickly remove the dags from the sheep up the race before they are let go back to the paddock after they have been treated.
I know many farmers who have a battery clipper with them all the time in the sheep yards to take the dags off the tail of the sheep. This becomes very handy when a farmer has a load of lambs to be sold and a few lambs have dags on their tails. The farmer can grab the battery clipper and quickly remove the dags up the race before they go on the truck to market. This practice makes the lambs present very well on sale day, which in turn often brings a higher dollar amount for the lambs at the livestock sales. Many abattoirs require the lambs to be dag-free before they are slaughtered for sanitary reasons.
4. Vet Usage
A battery-powered electric clipper comes in handy for vets visiting farms that need any type of large farm animal shaved for a specific on-farm operation. One that comes to mind immediately is a Cezarian. A quick shear with a portable battery clipper wherever the animal is on the farm and the vet can commence the cezarian operation. Any operation a vet needs to perform where the hair or the wool from an animal has to be removed to clear an area that has to be worked on, so the vet can see what they are doing and to avoid bacteria contamination of the site. Then a battery-powered electric clipper would do the job perfectly. It is especially advantageous when you are not near mains power to use a 240-volt clipper.
5. Wool Sampling
Many farmers who grow Merino sheep for wool use a battery-powered electric sheep shearing clipper to shear a tiny bit of wool from the side of the sheep to get the wool analyzed prior to shearing so the sheep wool can be analyzed to give data on the wool to give a close estimate of what the sheep wool would be worth. This small tuft of wool clipped from the sheep using a battery clipper can be done up a race or in a sheep handler in the yards. Many wool farmers are now adopting this practice to identify the best wool traits in their flocks of sheep. This has become a quick and easy job because of the portability of the battery clipper.
How Powerful is a battery clipper?
The battery-powered electric sheep shearing clippers vary in power. Ranging from 150 watts to 380 watts. In my experience as a professional sheep shearer, it is not the power in the motor, it is how well the clipper is made. Generally speaking, the more expensive the battery clipper, the more powerful the clipper will be and it will be able to cut through all types of wool and dags. Click here and go to my article on the different types of battery-powered electric handpieces on the market and I will review each one of them.
