Compost Barn Tour Held in MN
A compost bedded Pack barn tour was held in East Central Minnesota on July 18th. I had the opportunity to travel there with North Central Wisconsin's Dairy Modernization Educator Sam Zimmerman. This was a very informative and interesting tour. The first farm was Edgewater meadows in Mayer, MN owned by Tom and Jody Luebke. They built their barn in August 2005. Their original herd of 40 Holsteins, Aryshires & Guernseys moved into the new facility in September 2005. They also purchased 40 more Holsteins at that time. The compost barn measures 40X150 ft. With an 11 foot feed alley. The barn has drive by feeding in a J bunk . Two Big Ass fans were installed in the new portion of the barn. Eight ceiling fans are used to ventilate the old portion of the barn which had a considerably lower ceiling. They then converted their old stall barn into a double four step up parlor to increase labor efficiency.
The second farm was Hoese Dairy Inc. in Watertown, MN. Scott and Eric Hoese built their barn in November 2005. They moved the original 65 Holsteins in to the facility in December to that year. In March 2005 they added 30 more cows. Their barn measures 50 by 200 ft. with an additional 14 ft feed alley. There is room for 120 cows in this barn. They have 3 Big Ass fans to assist the natural ventilation.
I have to admit I was skeptical about these barns. It seems like a strange concept to have cows lay in rotting material, and think that SSC and milk production would improve. It seems to be working well for these farms but there are a lot of things to consider before switching to this style of dairy housing. It takes management to produce the heat that kills the bacteria and the pathogens that could cause mastitis and other problems.
The first thing you notice when entering one of these barns is very content cows. Cows are clean and comfortable. The farmers that owned the barns said that they saw increased milk production, better feet and legs, and increased pregnancy rate due to better heat detection. Other advantages to the system are that the building supplies manure storage for about 80% of the manure produced by the cows. Most of this can be hauled in the fall. Both of the barns we saw were able to haul only in the fall. The other advantage in manure hauling is that it is flexible you can haul out some in the spring or all of it in the fall. If you get bad weather for hauling there is not much urgency in getting out of the barn as it is a solid substance. Being a solid manure source it is more environmentally safe than the liquid manure sources.
Some of the disadvantages are high bacteria loads, bedding availability and cost, building size, soft feet, difficulty in grouping cattle, and the need to tie up a tractor for aeration. On the issue of bacteria count we had a chance to stop at UW-RiverFalls and see the research that they are doing on composting. They are taking bacteria counts daily on their compost bedded packs. What they are finding is that when new bedding is added the bacteria counts rise significantly, because it has increased nutrition for the bacteria to feed on. They found that after about a week of being composted the bacteria count dropped off, because of the heating process in the bedding.
One thing that was a hot topic among the 150 tour participants was bedding cost and availability. The Edgewater Meadows farm used far less bedding than Hoese Dairy. In Fact the cost per cow per day at Edgewater was calculated at 36 cents while Hoese dairy had a bedding cost of 70 cents. It was mentioned that at 10 dollar milk you would need to produce 1 lb more milk per cow to pay for every 10 cents in extra bedding used in the barn. The two packs looked about the same for moisture and cleanliness. The difference between these farms is space per cow. The Edgewater farm had quite a bit more space per cow. This might be an argument for giving more space per cow in order to control the cost of bedding. Another advantage to more space per cow is that the Edgewater farm only needed to aerate the pack once a day. If you are wondering how that compares to around here the Minnesota producers said that they were paying around $900 a semi load for dry sawdust.
They also mentioned that using a skid steer for aeration is not a good option because it gets buried in the pack. When the pack is stirred you can see why. This pack is very soft and loose. They both had decided to use a small tractor to pull a spring tooth cultivator through the pack.
The other big concern is building size. The newest numbers on compost barns is that you need 85 square feet per cow when we are milking Holstein sized cows. A three row freestall requires 47 square feet per cow, while a two row barn requires 58 square feet. This means more investment in building space. However building costs are similar because you don’t have the investment in stalls or the cement over the floor of the pack in the compost barn.
One of the benefits to having a compost barn is that cows last longer, this means you should have more to sell. Cows in this system get somewhat spoiled and get soft feet so they don’t always transition well into a freestall set up.
On the Edgewater farm cows were grouped into two groups. This was done using poly wire. This has made stirring the pack less convenient. Because of the packs varying height conventional gates cannot be used to group cattle.
Basically this cow housing system has some really great advantages mostly in the area of cow comfort. However like anything else in farming good management and planning is a must.