My topic of discussion today is often a controversial one. All of the views I will discuss are my opinion and my family’s decisions to do the best for our cows. In today’s world confinement barns on farms have a bad rap. In reality, farmers chose to use the barns to give our cows the best environment possible.
I know I’ve told you this before, but I will repeat it many times to come. A cow’s favorite three things in this world are consistency, consistency and more consistency! That’s a little exaggerated but this is one of the keys to keeping our cows happy. They like consistency in their schedule, the milking parlor, their feed and everything else. We work hard to make sure we give them everything they need.
In today’s dairy industry and agricultural industry barns have become an excellent resource to provide consistency for the animals. When I talk about a barn that animals live in, I’m guessing you think of a dark, dreary place with lots of animals in a small smelly barn. Would you imagine they look like this?
These were the first group of animals to be welcomed into the new barn in June 2008.
Today’s dairy barns are built to be airy, light and comfortable, just like ours. My family’s barn has light permeable curtain that is rolled down during the winter. It’s meant to let light in but keep the brutal winter winds and snow out. During the summer the curtains will be rolled up completely and the cows can see outside just like the walls aren’t there.
During the winter we deal with the brutal winds and the snow but during the summer we battle the heat and humidity. One of the ways we keep cows cool is by using fans. In our barn we have massive fans that hang over where the cows lay. By keeping the air moving over the cows we are able to keep the cows cool. Honestly, it’s not strange to find me in the barn laying in the stalls with the cows because it’s usually cooler in the barn than in our house!
Now, onto where the cows lay. Our barn is something called a free stall barn. Basically, we made stalls that are sized perfectly to our cows and they can pick whichever one they want to lay in. The stalls are open in the front so the cows can get up and down easily without anything in their face.
These are the open front of our free stall barns. Cows have the freedom to lay where they want.
The last important key to the stalls is what we bed the stalls with. There are a lot of mediums we can bed a stall with such as sawdust and wheat straw. But the industry gold standard is actually sand. Yup, cows get to lay on the beach every day! A typical adult cow weighs about 1,200 pounds, which means they can crush a lot of things like human toes without realizing it. They can also crush a mattress like the one you sleep on and most other things we try to bed cows with. Sand feels soft to the cows, but it’s also supportive enough not to crush it as soon as they stand on it. Sand also isn’t an organic substance, meaning it doesn’t carry germs and bacteria that cause udder infections and other illnesses. These bacteria are often found on other organic bedding sources used on farms.
Sand is the gold standard for cow bedding. It's soft but also doesn't compress under their massive weight.
In the barn, there are 4 pens that hold up to 50 cows. Each pen has feed in front of it all hours of the day. We leave the buffet out for them because cows like to nibble all day long, rather than eating large meals 3 times a day like us. In each pen there are two large waterers that cows have access to all day long as well. Cows drink about a bathtub of water daily, which means water is extremely important to their health.
I hope you enjoyed the tour of my family’s barn and that you learned something. We work hard to take the best care of our animals and we are proud of the job we do. Barns are a tool that allow us to take better care of our animals.
As the good man, Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs, has said….It takes one bad word to ruin it for others. I think that is where the major misconception comes from. You did a great job explaining why dairy farmers do what they do when it comes to house and general welfare!
As you stated in a reply, field trips are a great way of showing instead of talking about how barns operate. Keep up the good work!
Thank you so much for the great comment. I really appreciate it and I appreciate your read. I love sharing the story of my farm and I hope it continues to make a difference in a consumers mind.
Beautiful post. I think that most of the people that complain about farms and the conditions that farm animals live, in have never really spent anytime on a farm, and certainly not on one that is well run.
Your place looks like cow paradise!
Thank you so much Jess! I’m glad you enjoyed the post. I agree that most of the people fighting farms have never been on one and I have no idea what one is really like. Often, they change their minds after a trip to a real farm and talk to a farmer.
Love this post! Probably sounds funny but having never been to a dairy farm, I don’t know what the barns look like inside. Have seen a few from the road, but seeing the pics & getting an explanation is really cool!
That’s exactly the reason why I wanted to do this post. I wanted to show what a modern confinement barn is like and that they are a good place for cows to be in.