http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm5Vd5Jxg6YThe shed was attended to three times a week by a contractor, and the straw he was using was miscanthus or elephant grass.
Water troughs must be outside the shed to stop bedding getting wet and trampled, so cows need access to the outside.
DairyCo advise that cows should have from 7.5 square metres (m2)/cow to 10m2/cow on the bedded area. Depending on how many cows are being wintered that can result in a substantial pile of rotting straw which will have to be stored through the winter and likely through till the autumn.
Like silage it will have to be stored on an impermeable surface and will require effluent management to cope with any leakage.
One farm in Ireland was using straw bed housing successfully.
Inside the shed cows were sectioned off in large pens rather than having free roam of the whole bedding area. This put them in smaller social groups and made for easier management.
The concrete floor of the shed had a 450mm fall towards the outdoor feeding lanes but comment was made that if there was any flow of effluent there wasn’t enough straw on the beds.
On this farm cows housed in the shed were milked at the end of the season but this required the straw to be cleaned out every three weeks to limit any somatic cell count (SCC) problems rather than every five weeks when they were dry.
The farmers also estimated they could get an extra 1-1.5 lactations out of cows in a loose housed straw bed system compared with their cubicle system.
Availability and cost of straw will be a factor in choosing a straw bed housing system. This farm used 2t of straw/day to top up beds.
The metal shed had solid walls to stop straw being blown out into the feeding area and getting into the slurry system.
A concrete feeding and loafing area is a must for a straw shed with at least 3m2/cow, according to DairyCo.
