All things Dairy
- Thread starter Cows 'n grass
- Start date
- Location
- North Yorkshire
Led high bay lights are getting cheaper all the time. The trouble with strip lights is they waste too much light lighting up the roof. With high bays all the lumens are shining down where they are wanted
More to life
Member
- Location
- Somerset
Except your shed lights can be seen from space but your still a gobshite ?
Depends what you are trying to achieve. If you want to have 200 lux at cow eye level, high barn may not be enough. We have them in one shed and to us it looks plenty bright but if you use a light meter, it is surprising how the light level quickly tails off as you move away from directly underneath whereas HPS is much more stable (but more expensive to run)
@buffalo_soldier is that far north they must have near 24hr daylight when grazing.
Headless chicken
Member
- Location
- West Wales
booted some cows out into the sun today nice bit of set stocking to reduce the risk of them just going through the break fences
Roped some new staff members in too.
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Headless chicken
Member
- Location
- West Wales
good point!
How much for a self propelled bedder? Your cows cant be in more than 90 days.
Headless chicken
Member
- Location
- West Wales
A disgustingly large amount but it’s helped our bacto issue a lot keeping us out of the stupidly high penalty bands and means that it’s mostly just me here now other than someone milking for me 3 nights a week. If we didn’t have it I would’ve had to take someone on to replace dad and bedding by hand was a proper sh!t job taking the best part of an hour either end of the day.
edit - and there was no appetite locally for someone to come in just to do beds. We would be looking at it costing us probably about £60 a day just to get someone to turn up for split shifts. Relief milkers all have their own things on so weren’t keen to start earlier or finish later which I don’t begrudge them for. Ironically it now also means that because it’s easy to do anyone can do it so my heavily pregnant wife was out with it the other day. She would’ve never managed before.
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Princess Pooper
Member
- Location
- East Mids
Always amazes me if you look at the cows even in the middle of the night how many are eating or drinking (and yes we do have plenty of trough space). Don't think I'd want to flounder my way out of a cubicle and through a few other cows to feed and water and back to any empty cubicle in the dark. Even on a moonlit night it is dark in most of the shed because of shade from the roof. Our dry cows in loose yard have no light but they are not in cubicles.
Edit - that of course is another benefit of having lights - even if I am not checking the cows, with lights in the shed I can see as I walk by if there are any issues or things to note - a cow bulling, one not looking well etc. I've seen cows in the cubicles bulling at 1am before now when tending to a fresh calver in the next shed - but nothing seen at 9pm when they were checked properly, or next morning no sign of heat and only the smallest of peaks on silent herdsman. Plus of course the research showing higher milk production with extended decent light.
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Sounds ideal. Where did you get to on bactos?
Headless chicken
Member
- Location
- West Wales
Highs of 180’s normal days between110-160 dropped back to 70 (not for second suggesting that’s all the bedder but god knows what it was) still can’t find the final answer to bring it down again though. Will be extremely interested to see what turning them out will do.
Grassman247
Member
Do you get penalised for being around 70? We get penalised for over 30 and are fighting through the winter to keep it below, we aren’t doing any teat prep though so may have to give in and put an extra man in the parlour
- Location
- M6 Hard shoulder
Would the cost benefit outweigh the penalty by doing that ?
Grassman247
Member
It would cost us more than the penalty. Last month we were only over by 5, slightly infuriating
jimmer
Member
- Location
- East Devon
After some of these milking controllers of any one knows of any
- Location
- M6 Hard shoulder
Vic brown in North Staffordshire
Have gopollen calves and there temprament for everyone is unreal quite seems there is huge variation in the breed for all traits probably because its not a pure breed but a mix if red breeds
Headless chicken
Member
- Location
- West Wales
Over 50 we’re into penalties but over 100 your getting f**ked and it was frankly demoralising to the extent that I really dreaded waking up every morning. We tried literally everything. Pulled the parlour to bits swabbed it constantly, no prep, full prep, cluster flush off, cluster flush on, different Chems the list goes on not one thing touched it. It’s still too high yes but atleast I almost feel it’s within reach. If we could settle it at 60 I’d be content enough considering we’re overstocked and have no roof on half of the cubicles.