Planning a barn is an exciting and challenging task many people only get to experience once in their lives. It is critical to the profitability and success of your dairy as well as your personal happiness and day-to-day enjoyment in all that you do. A properly designed barn will result in productive cows, efficient workflow and a well-managed dairy.
There are many things to consider before we even start to design a facility layout. First, we need to focus on priorities, long-term goals and education. Secondly, we need to make general systems decisions, and finally, we can begin focusing on layout and planning. Remember that planning a facility takes time and starting early helps ensure you have the time to consider your options, as well as focus on the day-to-day of the current operation.
Priorities
Making good decisions for your facility will be challenging. Establishing your priorities from the beginning will help you make early decisions faster, and those tough decisions later will be much easier. Deciding in which order you prioritize cow comfort, data, lifestyle, capital costs, labor, running costs and environmental impact will help guide your decision-making.
With your priorities established, you can eliminate options quickly with very little time spent weighing the pros and cons. For instance, if you choose to prioritize capital costs over lifestyle, you are unlikely to choose systems that include a lot of automation or data. This decision will also help when comparing brands of equipment. One brand will have a higher capital cost, while the other has a higher running cost. You can refer to your priorities list and ask which one offers more data or cow comfort, or perhaps simply remind yourself that lower long-term running costs is a priority for you over capital costs. This will help you stay true to your plan and priorities without getting caught up in a good deal or a great sales pitch.
Long-term goals
Including long-term goals in your plan is important. When laying out a barn, you should create a plan for it to be two to three times the size of the current facility, or to maximize the available land base. Planning a facility larger than you need and then reducing it in size to what you need today will ensure you do not place barns, bunkers or manure pits in the way of future construction. It will also give you an expansion plan to help meet your long-term goals.
Establishing and understanding your long-term goals will help you create a plan for how to meet those goals over time. Sometimes the fastest way to achieve your long-term goals will involve some sacrifices today. As an example, if you prefer a certain milking or manure system, but you are not large enough today to justify it or can’t afford it, including it in your plan will make it much more cost-effective to add later if you put infrastructure in place for it today.
Education
Next, we need to focus on education. Education must continue through the entire barn planning process until we have a final plan. When designing a barn, it is important to consider that the barn itself is an ecosystem made of smaller subsystems that interact with each other. If we need to learn everything there is to learn about every subsystem in a barn, we will never get to even drawing a plan, let alone actually building a barn system. It is important to keep the initial education focused on which concept you would like to choose. At this point, brand should not be part of the discussion.
Understanding how your decisions will benefit the herd, as well as how it will impact building costs, capital costs, labor costs and operating costs, is important for each concept, as you want to make the best financial decision for your dairy. It is critical that you have a basic understanding of how each subsystem reacts with the overall barn ecosystem, as some concepts do not always align well with each other.
In this phase of planning, it is important to read as much as you can and visit as many farms as possible. Ask other farmers questions. Always ask what they would do differently, as well as what they see as both the biggest benefits and the biggest disadvantages of their choices. Look around their dairies and try to assess the level of management on those farms in comparison to your own. Some systems work better for some farms (and farmers) than for others, and this almost always comes down to farm management. Be honest with yourself about your management acumen and level of ambition or be prepared to make the necessary changes to achieve success. Once the concrete is poured and cows are in, the cheapest thing to change is you; however, this is often the hardest.
There are six major subsystems in a dairy that need to work well together to ensure the building ecosystem functions as one complete unit:
- Building system
- Milking system
- Manure system
- Ventilation (or cow cooling) system
- Stabling system
- Bedding system
Systems decisions
These systems all have a major effect on cow welfare, profitability and job satisfaction. Each of the above six systems also has considerations to plan around.
- Cow comfort
- Capital expense
- Service and maintenance costs
- Consumable costs
- Energy costs
- Labor costs
I would start with the bedding system – mattresses, sand, sawdust and recycled bedding are just some of the choices.
Next, I would look at which cow cooling system is appropriate for your dairy. This is very climate-specific, so you will need to educate yourself on your climate to decide which of the many strategies and cow-cooling technologies will work best. Cross-vent, tunnel, natural with circulation fans are just some of the options that need to be considered. On top of that, high-pressure fogging or feed lane soaking are important things to consider.
The next choice should be your milk system. Once you have decided on your ventilation, bedding and milking systems, you will need to understand the water usage of each system. Knowing the bedding type and the water usage of the above subsystems will give you the information required to make the appropriate manure system decisions. Lastly, you will decide on the stabling system, which is mostly related to your bedding choice. The stabling system is often quite flexible and can fit into almost any structure. However, planning around the equipment is important, as it can lower your overall building costs substantially.
Having decided on which concept you will go with for the six subsystems on the dairy will allow you to begin planning a layout. Design the building around airflow first. All too often, we find ourselves “retrofitting” ventilation systems into a barn that isn’t even built yet. This is one of the many common mistakes we see when designing a facility. Always remember: The barn is an ecosystem that is made up of many subsystems. You must understand how they interact with each other, the cows and the labor force before you can consider a design.
