TEMPLE Grandin thought Texas was big. Now she's seen something bigger. The international livestock handling expert was blown away by the vastness of Western Queensland's grazing country when she guest starred at a cattle handling field day near Muttaburra on Monday.

"Texas is tiny," Dr Grandin said, still surprised by the fact after more than 24 hours in the outback. But her statement was music to the ears of the 350 producers who travelled from across the State and as far as South Australia to attend the event.

"There's only one thing that you can do out here and that's raise livestock."

The Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University and world leader in the design of livestock handling facilities drew a large crowd to the field day, which was organised by ProWay Prattley Livestock Equipment and hosted by the Seccombe family at the state-of-the-art cattle yards on John and Pam Seccombe's property, Kenya.

Dr Grandin shared her theories on modern methods of livestock handling that improve animal welfare and productivity and discussed her designs for curved chute and race systems that are used in cattle handling facilities worldwide. She took the audience through several examples of curved yard layouts, designed to manipulate natural stock flow principles and facilitate low stress handling, along with common problems and incorrect design applications that lead to ineffectual handling facilities.

Dr Grandin has also developed an objective scoring system for assessing livestock handling at processing plants to improve animal welfare, which she uses when auditing animal handling systems and facilities of some of the largest processing plants in the US, Europe and Australia, including McDonalds. With principle breakthroughs in livestock handling and yard design now widely practiced, she said the next area of development would be in these systems of handling scoring.

The field day provided the opportunity for producers to see Dr Grandin's livestock handling principles in practice during a working demonstration of the Seccombes' impressive cattle yards. Prattley's Queensland designer, Damien Halloway, who designed the yards to meet Mr Seccombe's specifications, walked the crowd through the facility's design features. Construction of the yards was completed in May 2008 and Prattley consider it the flagship of their yard designs in Queensland.