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When cattle are housed for the winter, most farmers primarily spend their time focusing on two management tasks.
The first is keeping stress to a minimum until animals are settled in the shed. The second is making sure ventilation is adequate, increasing airflow as necessary.
But once animals are settled, and airflow is adequate, the tendency is to assume animals will be fine for the winter.
As time spent in cattle sheds is mainly to feed cattle, it is easy to overlook the smaller details of housing management unless you are specifically looking for them.
While these things are easy to miss, they nonetheless have a big influence on cattle performance over winter. Outlined are five things to keep on top of when cattle are housed.
Clean drinking water is every bit as important as good-quality silage or any dosing programme.
Cattle have a huge requirement for water, with lactating suckler cows drinking between 40 and 70 litres daily, depending on liveweight. Finishing cattle on a high concentrate diet will drink similar volumes.
Dry cows can drink between 20 and 40 litres daily, as will growing cattle. Therefore, it is important to ensure cattle have access to clean water every day.
If drinking troughs become soiled with forage, or animal waste, they should be cleaned immediately. Cattle will drink less if the water is dirty, meaning they will eat less. Therefore performance will suffer.
If water is not fit for human consumption, then it is not fit for cattle to drink.
Cattle need around 12-16 hours of light every day to maximise performance. This means sheds need to have natural lighting via roofs, doorways and external panels or cladding.
As day length is shorter during winter, sheds should be fitted with good-quality internal lighting.
This will also aid animal inspection and allow for operator safety when feeding cattle.
Cows requires a feed space of 2.5ft/head with store cattle requiring 2ft/head. While there may be adequate feeding space when cattle are housed in October, as cattle grow, feeding space decreases.
This is less of an issues if animals are being fed silage and meal ad-lib. But if you are feeding stores 2kg/day of a growing ration dusted on top of silage, all animals must be able to eat at the same time.
Otherwise there will be some animals unable to get concentrates. Cattle will have to be removed from pens to reduce stocking density and increase feed space.
Therefore, when housing cattle, grouping cattle based on their expected liveweight in spring means animals have adequate feeding space throughput winter.
A similar principle applies to lying space. Cattle should spend at least 50% of their day lying. If cattle are not lying, weight gain and milk production will be affected.
On slats, cows should have a minimum of 2.5sq m of lying space, or 25sq ft. This should be doubled on straw bedding.
For weanlings under 300kg liveweight, lying space on slats should be at least 1.5sq m, increasing to 2.5sq m for animals over 300kg up to finishing weight. Again, if animals are on a straw bed, double this lying space requirement.
Silage should be fed daily to keep it fresh. While it can be more convenient to offer cattle enough silage to last two to three days.
However, the fodder fed on the last day will not be fresh, more prone to spoilage or heating, and cattle intakes will be lower.
If intake is reduced, then weight gain and milk production will suffer.
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