By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent
 
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A dairyman from Arenac County has won the Michigan Farm Bureau’s (MFB) Farmer Idea Exchange Award for an invention that helps him care for livestock.

“To have my peers pat me on the back, it’s a pretty good feeling,” Victor Daniels said last week, between policy meetings at the Farm Bureau’s 89th annual meeting in Grand Rapids, where he is also working as a delegate.

The invention, which he calls the hip lift swivel, is used with devices such as the Vink Cow Lift to lift downed cows up safely.

Cows fall for all kinds of reasons, Daniels said. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a bull to fall down when it attempts to mate with a cow, for the cow to fall down or both. It’s distressing for the animal not to be able to get up, he said, just as when it happens to a person.

The hip lift swivel is used to attach a cow hip lift to a skid steer loader. The hip lift slides over the skid steer loader’s pallet forks and the built-in swivel action allows a cow to rotate as it is lifted, without bumping into the skid steer.

“We tried it using a skid steer loader without the hip lift swivel, and it just wasn’t safe,” the award winner said. “The cow can twist around on a skid steer. The first thing a cow wants to do once it’s lifted up is to turn around.”

Daniels, who has 115 milking cows on his farm and 200 head total, uses artificial insemination at his operation, so he doesn’t have any bulls around, but cows fall down for other reasons, including just slipping and falling.

“You need to have the equipment on hand and ready to use,” he said. “On our dairy farm, we have used it seven times. Five times it was successful.”

What he means is that five times out of seven the
animal recuperated from its fall or from a condition that made it fall, but the cow lift and hip lift swivel worked every time as designed. Daniels has about four downed cows a year.

He is always working on things and does welding as part of his farm work. The device didn’t require many parts and it only took him a few hours to weld and paint it. Although Daniels said he could get a patent on the device, he isn’t particularly interested in selling it, although he is interested in sharing it with other farmers.

The MFB made a video of the device in action. People who are interested in learning more about it can call the Farm Bureau’s Lansing headquarters at 800-292-2680.