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The main issues within the existing design is the excessive collection of dirty water from all over the yard. A major contributor of this dirty water is the route that cows take through the yard when coming from pasture and the amount of time that they are standing on concrete.
This all increases the amount of soiled water that has to be collected, stored and eventually spread. There are a mixture of slatted tanks, an over-ground slurry tower and a 700,000-gallon lagoon in place on the farm, but due to the excessive level of dirty water that is collected, the farmer is always under pressure to get the slurry lagoon emptied.
If dirty water was able to be collected and stored interdependently, it would allow for it to be spread throughout the year, weather depending. However, as it gets mixed with the slurry, it is subject to a prohibited period.
The farm is moving towards milking 250 cows and current facilities are overloaded and unsuitable for the current cow numbers. This leads to increased time spent cleaning yards and sheds, with several straw-bedded sheds currently used to hold the overflow of cows. This is not sustainable moving into the future of the farm.
A relatively new 30-unit milking parlour and circular collecting yard mean that the actual milking facilities are not an issue on the farm.
For these reasons, the farmer wants to build a new cubicle shed to cope with expanding numbers. However, he also wants to make the best use of his current facilities, something which is very similar to a lot of farmers throughout the country. This new design, he hopes, will reduce the level of dirty water that he has to collect.
Grasstec came to the farm and mapped the current farmyard set-up. They then discussed with the farmer what he wanted in the new design. One of the farmer’s key wishes was to not make the yard any bigger than it already was.
This presented difficulties for the design team, with three different design options presented to the farmer for where the new cubicle shed could go to best make use of the existing yard.
Design issues
When at pasture 80% of the time, cows will enter the yard from the top, as shown, when they are going for milking, with 20% of the milking platform being located below the yard.
It is when cows enter the yard from the top that the issues arise, as they must move through the entire yard. The yard itself is not flat with a significant fall of up to 4m between one side of the yard and the other. All of these aspects had to be considered with the new design.
The collecting yard has the potential to hold approximately 300 cows
Cattle are buffer-fed in a concrete trough that runs along the back of the silage pit during certain parts of the year. This again is a major source of dirty water and slurry from the farmyard. To the rear of the silage pit is a relatively new cubicle shed that the farmer wished to keep as it was in good condition.
To the left of the silage pit and above the over-ground slurry tower was an area of concrete that was a large source of dirty water in the existing design as both cows and machinery would move through here.
This area all had to be washed down to a channel that runs under the silage pit and into the lagoon, or further down the yard into the collection tank adjacent to the collecting yard. The new design will hopefully keep cows away from this area to reduce the dirty water produced.
New design
The new design does not create a perfect yard, but that was never the goal. If such a project was done on a greenfield site, it would be a lot easier to design in such a way that it would cater for future expansion.
However, the majority of farms throughout the country will have to incorporate their existing yard into any proposed development.
Of the three designs that Grasstec designed, the chosen design saw a 144-bed cubicle shed to be placed where the existing silage pit is with the existing cubicle shed adjoining it.
While this will limit any future expansion to these sheds, it will dramatically reduce the amount of dirty water that will have to be collected from the farmyard. Now when cows come into the yard to be milked, they can go down through either of the two passages of the sheds before they move into the collecting yard.
These two passages will be fitted with scrapers, which will either scrape slurry into a tank that runs along the end of the shed or into the tank half way down the new shed which flows into the lagoon.
The new design also shows where a potential straw-bedded shed would go, replacing an existing loose shed. This will be the second phase of the project and will be used as calving pens. An existing wall of an old dung stead will be demolished to improve machinery movement around the yard.
The new design means that cows can move from the new cubicle shed to the collecting yard without standing on uncovered concrete for large periods of time. It also allows buffer feeding to occur in the shed. Cows will move through theses sheds even during the grazing periods before they enter the collecting yard.
The possibility now exists for cows to be buffer fed in the new cubicle shed. Cows will still have to be moved from the cubicle shed on the left hand side of the yard when milking.
However, this will generally be used to house later calving cows or cows that will be dried off early in the autumn, which means very little cow traffic will be moving from this shed to the parlour for the most part of the year.
In general, cow flow was not highlighted as an issue for the farmer even through cows have to make two 90° turns when they enter the yard.
However, the passages are wide, so congestion at these points has not affected cow flow so far.
In the existing design, due to the route that cows enter the collecting yard, only three-quarters of the yard can be filled. In the proposed design, if cows move down through the new cubicle shed through the passage along the left-hand side, they will now be able to enter the collecting yard in such a way that the entire collecting yard can be used to hold cows.
This may not be a major issue in the current design, as numbers mean that all cows will fit in three-quarters of the yard. However, if future expansion occurs, it will be an issue.
The collecting yard has the potential to hold approximately 300 cows.
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