Feed pad design - podcast transcription
Feed pad design
Greg: Welcome to Dairy News. I am Greg Mills and today I have with me Tony Dowman. Today we’re looking at feed pads. Tony, there’s been a lot of increased interest in feed pads across the dairy industry as people look at how they feed their cows. So what are the considerations when you’re considering putting a feed pad in?
Tony: Well the first consideration, do you really need one? With the prolonged wet weather in the north of the state and the prolonged dry weather in the south of the state, those farmers are saying "Yes I do need one because we’re doing so much hand feeding for two entirely different reasons." People in the south have run out of pastures and have to do a lot of hand feeding where the people in the north have been so wet the cows can’t get on the pastures and therefore are also doing a lot of hand feeding.
You really need some facilities to do this continual hand feeding because the areas just get destroyed either because of prolonged wet weather or they just turn into dust bowls.
Greg: What are some of the lower cost options of putting a feed pad in for starters?
Tony: Well the design criteria depends firstly on if it’s just going to be a temporary one off situation where you’re going to feed cows erratically for a couple of months then move back onto pastures. Or is this going to become part of your everyday activity? That will firstly determine how expensive and how robust these feed pads will be. The other consideration you need to think about is would I have to feed the cows more feed while the cows are still on the feed pad? In other words do I have to make available facilities so that the tractor and the mixing wagon can be on the feed pad at the same time as the cows because if you need that, then there has to be a dedicated laneway down the centre for the feed pad - on there for the mixing wagon to drive up and down without pushing all the cows off the feed pad.
Greg: So if we’re going to concentrate cows at this feed pad, does that mean we’ve got to start dealing with effluent issues as well?
Tony: Yes, it’s exactly the same as with the dairy. Any cattle congregation areas require an effluent management system. It doesn’t matter what the cows are doing in the confined area, whether it’s sleeping, eating, being milked, calving or whatever, the effluent system has to be put in place anywhere where cows are confined for any period of time.
Greg: So if I’ve decided to put a feed pad in Tony, what sort of surfaces are available?
Tony: Ultimately the best surface for feed pads is concrete because it’s there for life basically and it will withstand all the punishment that cows and tractors and mixing wagons can dish out. But that comes at an expense. Some people just use gravel and that’s okay for lower rainfall areas or feed pads which are basically temporary pads to get you through a difficult situation. The downside of feed pads with gravel on it of course is that the gravel doesn’t last. Once you’ve got a lot of cows on there and rainfall, the gravel fails, cows start getting lame, effluent becomes a problem again, they are difficult to clean. A lot of people start with gravel but soon realise that concrete really is the way to go if they’re going to use these feed pads all year round.
Greg: If we put a feed pad in Tony, does that save some feed for us? Is there more efficient feeding out on the feed pad compared to feeding in the paddock what we may have done in the past?
Tony: Well this is the area where you actually justify the feed pad to yourself and to your bank manager if you’re borrowing money. The amount of wastage you get when you feed out in the paddock on the ground, you can expect to get up to about 30% wastage and that includes using say hay rings to put feed out. They have a large amount of wastage around those as well. When you start putting feed on a feed pad your wastage drops down to about 5%. So when you start doing the sums at today’s feed prices of grain up to $400 a tonne and hay into the $300 a tonne, you can soon start to claw back the amount of capital that you’ve invested into a feed pad and within a couple of years they tend to pay for themselves.
Greg: Tony, should we cover feed pads? Is there any great advantage in having a covered feed pad?
Tony: A covered feed pad is by far the best option but it is incredibly expensive to put a roof over it. The reason why it’s the preferred option is firstly it supplies shade for the cows in summer time, so it serves as two purposes. But secondly it means that the effluent management on these feed pads is no longer a big issue because rain falling on a dirty feed pad causes a lot of effluent management problems. But if there is a roof and the rain can’t fall on the feed pad, the feed pad can remain as dirty as it likes within limits, and it does not cause any environmental concern.
Greg: Tony we’re going to have a lot of cows and a lot of feed on these pads every day, so how do we keep these feed pads clean?
Tony: Most of the feed pads are what we call dry scraped where a tractor with a blade on the back will come through maybe two or three times a week, depending on the use pattern and just scrape up all the effluent that has been deposited on the pads, pushed to one side in a bunded stock piled area and then put onto the pastures at a later date through a manure spreader.
Some of the concrete ones may be washed and you have a few options there. You can flood wash them if the design criteria for slope has been adhered to or you can use hydrant wash systems which will wash it down as well. But then you have to deal with the water that’s being generated. So we need an effluent management system designed for that and you also need a source of water to use to wash these systems down as well.
So, there’s not one single option that you use. Obviously you can’t wash down gravel feed pads. So if they are going to be washed down, they have to be concreted.
Greg: What’s the best management strategy that we can use to incorporate a feed pad into our production?
Tony: One of the problems we have with feed pads is that once you’ve spent that amount of money people tend to say "Well I’ve spent the money. I should be using it on a daily basis," and that is not the best management strategy to use for feed pads.
Feed pads really are there for supplementary feeding when the amount of feed in the pastures isn’t sufficient or the conditions are such that the pastures cannot be grazed. Either they are too wet and the cows will bog them up, or there’s no pastures growing at all because it’s too dry. It’s just so tempting for farmers to say "Well I’ve spent this amount of money on a feed pad and a mixing wagon therefore my new management strategy will be to feed every day on the feed pad and then treat the pastures as a supplement," and that is back to front to profitable pasture management.
Greg: Thank you Tony.
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