I built our head gate for a simple reason: I needed a way to put NoFence collars on the cattle. We don't have a proper chute, so this gate is how we get a cow to hold still when it's time to fit a collar.
The best proof is the video. It's a short clip of the gate in use, with a cow standing in it and her head through, doing the job it was built for. It wasn't bad for $200 worth of steel. Watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5fpIVj2FQM
We built the gate from plans in Joel Salatin's book, Polyface Designs. It is one of the most useful things we've built on the farm, and it gave us a functional head gate for only a little money and a little building time.
A little sweet feed helps. It's just a small treat, not part of their normal diet, more like candy for us, and it gets their heads through the gate so we can work on the collars. Those collars let us graze more land and move cattle sooner.
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