Your bed. It’s where you spend about one-third of your life, and a good night’s sleep is important to help us feel our best. Don’t we all search out the best, most comfortable bed for an amazing night’s sleep? And your cows spend even more time in their beds, so shouldn’t we make sure that we are giving them the most comfortable bed we can find?
Bed options
There are many things to consider when you start evaluating what kind of beds and bedding you will use in your stalls, and everyone has a different opinion about what is the best option. The main choices include:
- Mattresses
- Waterbeds
- Deep-bedded sand
- Deep-bedded manure solids
See Table 1 for the pros and cons of each of these options.
Do you need to add bedding?
Regardless of your choice of bed, it is best to regularly bed stalls. As there are many options for the type of bed, there are also many options for the types of bedding, including manure solids, sand, sawdust and organic matter. Table 1 also includes a short list of bedding options with pros and cons.
It is important that you make the best decision for your farm based on your needs.
What are the key benefits of high-quality bedding? Regularly using high-quality bedding has many benefits for your cows, your stalls and, ultimately, your profitability. Good bedding and clean stalls help maintain lower somatic cell counts. And of course, happy, comfortable cows have higher milk production. Another benefit of clean stalls is better feet and legs, leading to more longevity of the herd. These soft benefits all drive to increasing your bottom line.
How do you bed your stalls?
Many people use a skid loader to bed stalls once or twice a week while the cows are in the parlor. There can be a high time investment in driving through the barns with bedding, and cows can get mixed up in groups as gates are being opened and closed.
Not to mention, this is often a chore that should be done more frequently, but because it is not a convenient job, it happens less often than it should. The result? You slug bedding into the stalls, which the cows then kick out and waste. The stalls have a nice stack of bedding the first day, but by the time you bed again, they are quite empty. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a daily, consistent spreading of bedding? Not to mention saving on gas and time spent spreading bedding with a skid loader.
Introducing the bedding robot
With a bedding robot, a trolley drives above the cows and spreads bedding into each stall. You can also program these robots to bed multiple times a day and run different routes more or less often than others. Spreading a small amount of bedding multiple times a day allows you to keep clean, fresh stalls without disrupting the cows.
A bedding robot can be a great tool for bedded packs and conventional freestall barns, and they are an ideal solution for an automated milking barn. One key to successful automated milking is to prevent disrupting the herd as much as possible. Each time you disrupt the normal cow routine, you risk missing out on robot visits and production.
Photo illustration by Philip Warren.
