Work has only just finished on a new cubicle shed on the farm of James Lynch who farms just outside of Sixmilebridge in Co Clare. The farm has built numbers slowly, with 130 cows currently. The same approach was taken to the facilities, with a new milking parlour installed 10 years ago.

“I always believed in doing it in a phased basis. Going out and putting up everything the one year is a massive capital investment so I preferred to stagger the development of the farm,” James said. “The shed was drawn up three years ago but I didn’t rush into anything. A lot of farmers are pushing numbers but, from my experience, I would try to run what you have first and run it well before you go expanding. “Work only began on the shed after Christmas so I knew it was going to be for next winter so I was in no rush to get it finished,” James said.

The shed

The new shed provides 64 cubicles and ties in with an existing shed that has 80 cubicles. The main drawback of the existing shed was that it only had 40 feed spaces. The new shed is designed so that cows can be fed on three sides which gives a much larger feeding capacity. “This means that I can buffer feed all cows together in the spring now, which is one of the main advantages,” James said.

The shed is 20.4m wide with a 2.5m overhang on either side. It is six 4.8m wide bays long, giving a total length of 28.8m. The two internal passageways that run either side of the shed are 4.4m wide, while the internal passageway running down along the centre of the shed is 2.7m wide. All three can be accessed by individual sliding doors. These will be installed with scrapers in the coming weeks.

“I didn’t want a tight shed,” James said. “If a cow goes down or anything goes wrong I can get in with a tractor. It might never happen and hopefully it won’t but it just gives me that little bit more room.”

Wind

The prevailing wind approaches the shed from the side of the suspended passageway – this is why it is closed on this side. However, there are no worries of poor ventilation, with the shed sitting on an elevated site. Outlet ventilation is provided by spaced sheeting across the entire roof, with no central ridge cap at the apex. The shed is 4.8m high at the eaves, rising to approximately 8.3m at the apex.

Cubicles

The cubicles themselves are 7ft 6in long and 46in wide to hold James’s predominantly Holstein-Friesian type cows that are on the farm.

To join the old shed to the new shed a 4ft deep slurry channel was installed, which also provides additional feeding spaces. While the new shed provides an additional 98 feed spaces, the channel between the two sheds has another 30 feed spaces. “While I had enough spaces in sheds for all of the cattle, the new shed means that I can now keep more heifers and either sell them in calf or after they calve down,” James said. The new tank and 4ft deep channel will now form part of the collecting yard for cows when they are coming in for milking. “When cows are coming in for milking they will be on slats and undercover for the entire time now whereas before they might have been on uncovered concrete. This helps to reduce the level of dirty water that is produced on the farm,” James admitted.

Slurry

A difficult spring like this has made a lot of dairy farmers reassess their current slurry storage available and the new shed has an interesting feature. Instead of just one 8ft deep tank at one end of the shed, as would be a common design, James made the decision to install two 9ft deep tanks side by side with a 500mm wide wall between the two of them which the stanchions of the shed are sitting on. While one tank is fitted with 4.4m wide slats, the other is covered with a suspended passageway.

The tanks also stretch out past the overhang on both sides of the shed to give them a total length of 27.6m. The total capacity of each tank is 286m3. There are two 4ft wide openings between the tanks to allow slurry to move between them.

“I had enough storage on paper for all of the animals in the herd, but the way the winters have gone I needed more to take the pressure off and give me more flexibility when it comes to spreading and this gives me that extra capacity,” James said.

Cost

The shed cost approximately €2,000 per cow for each space in the shed, not including the significant ground works and stone required. The new shed is about 1ft below the level of the existing shed but approximately 80 truckloads of stone were required to bring it up to this level. Also not included is the cost of the scrapers which have not yet been purchased. The plans for the shed were completed by Grasstec who surveyed the site and identified the levels for the shed.

Declan Fennell completed the entire project including all concrete work, manufacturing and erecting the shed, and all plumbing and electrical work. “Having one contractor to do the whole lot made it a lot easier,” according to James. “You are not trying to get a few different crowds to work together and to work around each other which just makes the process quicker.”

Condon Engineering supplied all internal penning, barriers and fittings for the shed, while they also supplied the 30mm thick mats that are in place on the cubicles.

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