Planning calf accommodation to future proof your farm

Some recent features on calf housing have encouraged many farmers who are looking to build their own new calf houses reach out.

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to calf housing, and it will very much depend on requirements, space and budget.

Before constructing a calf house, there are several things to take in to account when it comes to planning and designing such.

Location

Think about where is the best place to locate your calf house in terms of ease of transporting newborn calves, transport of whole milk from the parlour, and its proximity to other buildings which may affect the shelter/ventilation of a new building.

Calf sheds should be located in close proximity to calving sheds for ease of movement of calves.

Where there is not a suitable site close to the calving shed, then transporting of calves using a basket or similar on a front loader will be required, which adds some additional labour.

Having a calf shed close to the milking parlour is also of benefit when it comes to transporting transition or whole milk from the parlour to calves.

Even where milk replacer is the primary feed for calves, the initial first days of life of all calves will entail transition milk being fed, with beef calves often receiving whole milk for the entirety of their time on dairy farms.

Future proofing

For any farms with herds of 80+ cows with plans to build a new calf shed, the shed design should always be flexible to allow for automatic calf feeders either at the time of build or in the future.

Skilled labour is becoming scarcer and scarcer, and calf feeders are one of the best technologies to help reduce labour input.

Most feeders will see individual feed stations accommodate 30 calves, so base your pen size around this. At 1.7m² per calf, this means a pen space of 51m² minimum. For a standard 4.8m bay, pen depth would have to be 10.6m to accommodate all 30 calves.

Where there is a limit on how wide the shed can go, this can be reduced to 5.3m (a 15-calf pen) by removing the dividing gate between two pens, giving both access to a feed station. However, doing this may prevent you creating separate wet and dry areas.

Where there is no immediate plan to install a calf feeder, the appropriate drainage should be installed, along with two lines of ducting for power and water to the proposed station locations.

It’s also worth considering alternative uses for the calf house. Calf sheds will generally be used from February to early May at most for spring-calving herds, meaning that for the remainder of the year, they will lie idle. Having sliding rather than fixed posts, and penning that can be dismantled easily, can allow for alternative uses at other times of the year, such as storage of machinery, fertiliser, feed or bedding.

Wet and dry areas

Wet areas are a no-brainer for nearly any calf house, as it is just too difficult to keep the feed area at the front of the pen clean and dry. Taking the above example of the 10.6m deep pen, should we wish for there to be access for scraping the wet area with a tractor/telehandler, then 3-3.6m needs to be left as the wet area, leaving a lie back area of 7-7.6m. A narrower wet area (2.4m) can be placed, but will require hand scraping. Effluent channels should be incorporated into the wet area where slats aren’t used.

Each area should then be accessible either through a sliding or roller door for ease of access for cleaning out. Ease of access with machinery will often dictate how often a pen is to be cleaned out. To further encourage regular cleaning out, penning should be set up in such a way that calves can be locked in to either the wet or dry area. Taking the above example of a 3.6m-wide wet area, the gate for this should fold back on to a post which sits on the kerb between the wet and dry areas, and should therefore measure approximately 3.4m long.

If we want to shut the calves in to the wet area to clean out the dry area, then a similar length gate (3.4m) is required in the dry area, also latching in to this post on the kerb. A second gate (approximately 4m long) in the dry area can be fixed to the wall, with the two gates latching together without a centre post, with this wall-mounted gate folding back against the wall for cleaning out.

Ventilation/shelter

If we are to pretend that our shed is a clock, the worst of the weather – be it wind, rain or snow – will approach from approximately one o’clock to eight o’clock on our clock face, or from the southwest up to the northeast, meaning these sides of the shed should be relatively well protected. This doesn’t mean that it is OK to have an open front area on the more sheltered side though.

At a minimum, there should be a wind-break barrier on these more sheltered sides, and Yorkshire boarding or vented sheeting on the exposed sides. Yorkshire boarding is where there is a staggered line of timbers either side of the purlin, as opposed to space boarding, which is a single line of timbers. Yorkshire boarding will give protection against wind-driven rain and snow, and will control the air inlet in to the shed, whereas space boarding won’t. Vented sheeting should only be used where there is appropriate void spacing in it, circa 15%.