Many calf housing options exist, but important system fundamentals need to be incorporated into the design related to ventilation, calf comfort, labor efficiency, cost effectiveness, and group versus individual housing strategies, for the system to be successful.

Using technology allows you to automate, monitor and manage your barn environment from the palm of your hand.  It minimizes human error and allows for focus on other tasks around the dairy instead of trying to control the barn.

The six freedoms of a cow outlined by a dairy farming training organization are space, rest, water, air, light and feed. These freedoms have aligned benchmarking goals to help producers realize higher returns on current and future farm investments.

When discussing calf barn ventilation, invariably the topic of using four air exchanges per hour for cold-weather ventilation will come up. After all, we wouldn’t want “too much” of that cold air in the barn. Or would we?