Researchers Work on Maximizing Bovine Bliss
At the University of Georgia’s $2-million state-of-the-art dairy, some cows relax on water beds, chewing their cud serenely while awaiting the next stroll to the milking machines.
Cows produce more milk when they’re content and comfortable, and Georgia’s heat and humidity often make them ornery. So researchers are trying everything to keep the animals happy.
“Cow comfort is a big issue,” said John Bernard, a dairy scientist at the university’s Coastal Plain Experiment Station. “That encompasses a lot of things, but bedding is one of the big factors.”
Unlike the undulating water beds for humans, the bovine bunks are more like pads, measuring about 4 feet wide by 7 1/2 feet long. The water beds are one of five types of bedding the researchers are testing.
“This is a long-term study to look at how well these materials hold up and to see if cow preferences change over time,” Bernard said. “We’re trying to get some long-term information for dairy producers as well as giving them an opportunity to see it firsthand.”
Bedding is important because it supports the cow’s udders, which can get laden with up to 60 pounds of milk. And clean bedding helps cows avoid a bacterial disease that ruins their milk.
“If a cow is not standing to eat or to be milked or moving from one place to another, she often is laying down,” Bernard said. “We have to have a bedding material that is comfortable to lay on and healthy.”
The research is particularly important because Georgia’s dairy industry is foundering. Nearly 1,000 dairy farmers have gone broke in the last 30 years, unable to survive urbanization and wildly fluctuating feed and milk prices.
The remaining 450 producers are counting on researchers to help them increase productivity and reduce costs.
“Each individual dairyman can’t afford to be experimenting with what works best,” said Lamar Anthony, an owner of Anthony’s Dairy in Sumter County. “There’s not enough profit for us to make mistakes.”
Clean, comfortable bedding is a basic requirement. Hay and straw, popular bedding earlier in the century, are impractical for big dairies, because they are expensive and hard to keep clean.
Besides water beds, the researchers are testing sand, a traditional bedding material that requires a lot of upkeep because it scatters easily. They’re also evaluating sand spread over mats made from recycled tire treads. The mats are designed to reduce spreading.
Also being tested is bedding of plain rubber mats and mats containing tubes filled with shredded rubber from old tires.
Cows “prefer the sand first,” Bernard said. “Then it’s pretty equal between the water bed and the mat with the tipped rubber [tire tread]. The sand is very soft. It conforms to the cow’s body. It’s cool in the summer.
“Sand is much softer than anything we could make, with the possible exception of the water mat.”
Dairy cows might appear to be lazy because they lay around much of the time, but there’s a lot of work going on inside their bodies. The cow’s udder extracts nutrients from blood to produce milk. Five hundred gallons of blood have to circulate through the udder to provide the nutrients in a gallon of milk.
The 110 Jerseys and Herefords at the Tifton dairy wear electronic collars that help scientists monitor their performance and health from birth to old age. Information on each cow is stored in a database.
