Victorian bloke's brilliant self-locking gate hack inspired by simple item lying around the shed

Now this is pretty schmicko.

It’s interesting to watch from a detached point of view but for anyone who has ever been a designated gate opener, it’s revolutionary.

The team behind the Traoss Paddock Solutions Facebook page have come up with a design for a gate latch using a very simple, everyday item you’d find lying around the farm.

It’s called the Traoss Auto Locking Farm Gate Latch, and it’s bloody clever.

Ross Baum, the brains behind the invention, told 9Pickle it didn't take long to knock the thing together.

The idea came to him while he was working on a horse farm in rural Victoria and was constantly opening and closing gates. 

"It was during the development of the Push & Go gate opener that I came across a horseshoe lying next to a gate latch in my shed," he said. 

"I spent about an hour mulling things over in my head and then started to make the first auto locking gate latch.

"I thought about it for about for half-an-hour, and an hour later it was finished."

READ MORE: Dog with ‘human face’ has heaps of celebrity doppelgangers

[image via Traoss Paddock Solutions]

"The next day I fitted it to a gate on the farm, took a quick video on my phone and knocked off for the day," Baum said. 

"That night I sat on the couch with little else to do and uploaded the very basic gate latch video to Facebook."

That “very basic” video of the prototype went absolutely bonkers, clocking up a whopping nine million views in two weeks.

It was shared more than 165,000 times, spreading even further across social media as people tagged their mates in the comments section.

Not too shabby for a video of someone shutting a gate.

Baum, who runs Traoss Paddock Solutions with partner Tracey Moran, told 9Pickle he didn't think anything would come of his invention. 

"I never thought anyone would buy it," he said. 

"It just was something I made for myself."

All this comes after Baum suffered back problems, which requried several surgeries and made it very difficult for him to find work. 

WATCH MORE: Persian cat gives French bulldog relaxing back massage

Less than two weeks after the video went live, the team started producing the latches for sale.

In the past few days a relative of Baum has built a website to take orders - which you can check out here.

And it’s all thanks to a simple idea and the popularity of little Facebook video.

Good on ya, mate!