Straw yards and slurry storage

[Cows 'n grass]

We are spring calving and currently just have a milking parlour in the middle of an ex arable farm but have plans going in for housing 300 cows next to the milking parlour.

I don't intend to keep cows housed for more than 70-90 days and they will be calving in these sheds so we're just sticking to loose housing with a 15 foot feed/scrape passage at the front.

We're also putting in a silage clamp and slurry storage at the same time and the one bit I'm struggling to design is the slurry storage. With splash plates likely to be banned in a few years I need a system that separates out straw/silage from the slurry so that it can go through a trailing shoe. The slurry store will also take all the slurry from the collecting and feed yard .

Does anyone still use a weeping wall system?

Any advice welcome

Cheers

 

[Bald Rick]

With ever tightening regs, whilst there is nothing wrong with a weeping wall system, you need to design the store (certainly the liquid faction) with enough capacity for - as a minimum - the closed NVZ period and it would probably be better to go for 6 months. Remember to allow for freeboard on the liquid store. It also seems that "rain events" are heavier nowadays over a shorter time so I would allow for 2-3 per month plus say another 18 days/mth during the winter period of likely rainfall (light to moderate) in you calculations
You can never have enough capacity

 

[Agrispeed]

If its covered I wouldn't worry too much as it should be stackable. I scrape out the front feed area of my straw sheds every day and spread or heap it in a field. If it is truly wet its advisable to pull the front off the bed where the cows first walk on anyway so this can all be mixed in.

Otherwise I would build a slurry pit with a decent ramp into it and a smaller weeping wall type arrangement to suck out from ideally across from where it'll be pushed in.

 

[deleted user 837354]

300 cows loose housed- surely the saving on straw alone will near pay for cubicles instead?

Erect a cubicle shed and install automatic scrapers. Used ground straw to keep the tops of mattresses dry. You will get this kind of slurry through an umbilical system if you use a strainer box thing and the remaining solids can be put on maize ground etc once a year.

300 cows worth of solid FYM that has to be cleaned out regularly is a herculean amount of work.

 

[Cookie]

300 cows loose housed- surely the saving on straw alone will near pay for cubicles instead?

Erect a cubicle shed and install automatic scrapers. Used ground straw to keep the tops of mattresses dry. You will get this kind of slurry through an umbilical system if you use a strainer box thing and the remaining solids can be put on maize ground etc once a year.

300 cows worth of solid FYM that has to be cleaned out regularly is a herculean amount of work.

Where’s he going to calve them if the shed is full of cubicles?

 

[S J H]

Do you follow archway group on Facebook? I don't know if their designs would work, we had a weeping wall and home and it never weeped, would have been better off with a separator.

 

[Princess Pooper]

We use a weeping wall which works well, it's one of the above ground slatted concrete stores with a collection channel around the outside which drains into settlement tanks and then into the slurry lagoon. We get contractors to empty the lagoon and it is either injected or trailing shoe. At present it is not covered and there is an area of concrete that drains into it as well so it is very dilute. It is likely under future Clean Air Act legislation that the lagoon at least will have to have a floating cover to reduce ammonia loss so that would reduce rainwater getting into it.

The muck within the weeping wall, once drained over the summer, is 'stackable' and we empty it with a loader tractor and muck spreader. We have 6 months storage, the only downside is that the solid stuff has to be dry enough before it is safe to take the panels out to empty it and we obviously can't start putting more fresh stuff in at the start of the winter until it has been emptied. We sometimes get a 'gusher' through the wall where liquid forces its way out under pressure between the solidified gunk in the slots and this sends the liquid out beyond the collection channel. Can make a bit of a mess as we don't go round there very often in summer!

 

[celtis man]

You could scrape your lying area daily and cart it out.
And simply rebed them, we do it and it seems to work.

 

[Beef farmer]

My loose housed cows, if you bed them before scraping, enough straw dust falls on the scrape way to make the slurry into dung.

 

[S J H]

Can you leave some of the bedding that has been taken out on a concrete pad, then mix the scrapings in? Then take the lot out to spread?

 

[TomB]

My loose housed cows, if you bed them before scraping, enough straw dust falls on the scrape way to make the slurry into dung.

This is about what we do for the loose yards, the scrapings have enough straw in them to stack on a concrete pad which we move maybe once a fortnight, that does need to drain into a small lagoon as will the silage effluent.

 

[Dead Rabbits]

Is a green water flush system an option?

 

[pine_guy]

Is a green water flush system an option?

The smell ??? but like the idea.

 

[Bill the Bass]

300 cows loose housed- surely the saving on straw alone will near pay for cubicles instead?

Erect a cubicle shed and install automatic scrapers. Used ground straw to keep the tops of mattresses dry. You will get this kind of slurry through an umbilical system if you use a strainer box thing and the remaining solids can be put on maize ground etc once a year.

300 cows worth of solid FYM that has to be cleaned out regularly is a herculean amount of work.

If I had the choice of 300 cows worth of fym to put on my land or 300 cows worth of slurry I know which I (and the worms) would prefer.

 

[early riser]

I faced a similar dilemma a few years back. Cows on straw yards, but large outdoor feeding area and collecting yard generating lots of slurry. Considered a weeping wall, but wanted to future-proof the system for sand bed cubicles so put in a large shuttered concrete pit with access ramp. Would do the same again, really flexible.

Everything goes into it - scrapings off yards, any bits of straw dragged out of sheds, silage dragged out of feeders, wash water etc etc. Mix the lot up with a lagoon mixer and can splash plate tanker the whole lot out without a single blockage.

Trailing shoe is the big unknown though - we are looking at going down that route too, and tanker reps have advised me that macerator should be able to deal with the fibrous material as long as it isn't ridiculously long and there isn't ridiculous amounts of straw going into lagoon - not convinced yet myself and reluctant to spend £30k + on a trailing shoe equipped tanker only to find it does nothing but block up. My plan is to get a contractor here with a trailing shoe in next few weeks and have a go with our slurry and see what happens........ I shall report back the results........

Can't you just have a strainer box type setup in one corner of pit where you scrape strawy stuff, with a ramp down into it, then scrape everything else into main pit?

 

[jondear]

We have two indoor dung store areas at the end of each bedded shed .we scrape passages twice a day pulling some straw with it.Then once a week clean out a bay or so of lying area and tip into scrapings and mix up until it will stack after a while there will be liquid run out which comes to the front the floor is on a slope so direct liquid to one side where a 6 inch pipe runs to the corner where a simple pump takes it out .You would not believe the amount of liquid that comes out from a relatively solid looking heap !

 

[dinderleat]

Two big lagoons one for anything scrapable, one for liquid run off parlour washings etc then you can always add the liquid back to your slurry in order to get it to pump easily or even take some water from somewhere?

 

[traineefarmer]

300 cows worth of solid FYM that has to be cleaned out regularly is a herculean amount of work.

Is it? We run close to that number as housed grain-fed beef and we clean out every 4 weeks. Takes about 4/5 hours per day over 3 days and that in old sheds that were not purpose designed. But we do get approx 1600 tons of lovely low N FYM to plough in each year. Got to be worth a bit of effort!

 

[More to life]

These will be mainly dry cows ? They should crap like Elephants anyway so definitely stackable.

 

[Ducati899]

Two big lagoons one for anything scrapable, one for liquid run off parlour washings etc then you can always add the liquid back to your slurry in order to get it to pump easily or even take some water from somewhere?

I heard some out you’re way blow chopped straw in the passages before scraping up? Adds a bit of fibre