I’d just like to take the opportunity to warn fellow farmers of the danger of slurry gasses. Like most farmers, I’ve often read of the dangers, but never experienced any issues ourselves – until this week, that is.

We were agitating a one-year-old tank in a very open lean-to.

The shed was fully open to the elements on one side, with the roof about 16ft high, yet six to eight of the weanlings started slipping around the slats and going down – the tractor driver knew immediately what was happening and ran towards the tractor to turn it off.

I thought the weanlings had gotten a fright and that one or more had slipped and were struggling to get up from under the dividing gates in the pens.

I ran towards the weanlings to help them get up and, only on my way there heard the contractor shout “gas”.

Of course I stopped then and left the cattle to fend for themselves.

We lost one that had been lying down when the agitating started – the others survived and more importantly, so did we.

Later the same day, we went agitating a second shed, one with a tank that is open on three sides including on to an outdoor feed passage.

All the cows survived

This tank had been agitated and half-emptied about a month earlier and had a lot of water in it, so it was just as we thought, a matter of giving it a quick stir.

All the cows were standing, eating through the barrier and the roof again was about 15ft high – what anyone would regard as an extremely open and airy shed. Once the agitator pipe was turned to push the slurry down the tank, 12 or 14 of the cows just dropped on the spot.

Again, the contractor ran and turned the tractor off.

All the cows survived.

We were blessed to have a vigilant contractor who was watching for the once-in-a-lifetime problem and reacted very quickly.

We have other slurry tanks that are indoors but these two could not have been more open.

We’re convinced that the roof design had no role to play – these tanks were to all intents and purposes outdoor tanks.

In future, all our cattle will be removed from the sheds before we start agitating and we’re going to be very careful about walking up and down the shed to see how far the slurry is being agitated even with our slurry gas alarms.

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