Outdoor cubicles and cold weather

Saw a clip on FB from Ballyhaise college and they are calving down cows on the outwintering pad.
Said they were very comfortable.

Here you go.
New principal has turned the place on its head, fair play to him, no messing straight to business sort of guy.


https://www.facebook.com/TeagascBallyhaiseCollege/videos/965211816971147/

I now have topless cubicles too after a bay of a shed collapsed under a snow drift. Nothing hurt thankfully. I won't be replacing the roof until the summer when I have time. It makes little differ as I have loads of capacity in the tanks after getting them emptied last week.

whelan2 wrote: »

Just after reading the Greenfield update on farmers journal website. They got it bad. Serious work they went through

I read that article. To be honest I'm not in favour of outdoor cubicles. There was a pic on the IFJ of indoor cubicles that were covered with drifting snow and the cows didn't seem to use them. One wonders how cows fared in uncovered cubicles with the East wind/snow.
IMO if we Irish farmers have to subject our livestock to NZ type systems to make a living then its a sad state of affairs for animal husbandry :mad:

My indoor cubicles are like a quagmire after the snow even though I have them sealed from the elements. It will take a few days to get them dry and clean, just imagine a department official calling this weather, he'd want to be some cnut.

mahoney_j wrote: »

Cool the jets it was a freak event ,not ideal for cows could be 30 years before we see it’s like again ,easy for keyboard warriors to comment .greenfield parlour and cubicles/oad totally exposed but they still kept cows fed and got cows milked .huge praise should go to the team there for there efforts

I get the impression that animal welfare wouldn't be high on your priorities the you reacted to that NZ comment. Learn from it.

memorystick wrote: »

I get the impression that animal welfare wouldn't be high on your priorities the you reacted to that NZ comment. Learn from it.

So you could have a nz system in ireland with the cows well fed and in good condition farmers happy and cows are happy, but you could have a neighbour down the road with an indoor system with cows fading away, cows not performing farmer stressed aswell but hey he has a big shed to hide that from view and also hell be known as the great lad to spend money etc and the low cost farmer is seen as the bad farmer.
The best farmer i ever worked for was an irish farmer doing his best to run a new zealand system, there were farmers in the area with there pedigree cows, sheds and feeding cows concentrates year round etc and there fertility figures werent close to where we were when i left for nz. Then the farmer i was with in NZ was running a system similar to most irish farmers just with no sheds the cows were not in as good condition as back home and again the fertility wasnt as good either despite using artificial aids for breeding.

All i heard when working on the farm back home was "must be rough on stock there" must be up to there knees in sh#t" "cows must be starved" i said lads its plain in simple if there was stock suffering i wouldnt work there whether its an indoor or outdoor unit.
It just sickens me that in this day and age any young farmer making a go for himself and trying something different, is belittled and begrudged by farmers of his own generation and generations beforw him who are mostly just farming the system and a few cattle run around the farm for a few months just so they can draw down the payments

wrangler wrote: »

What's the difference in cost for roofing per cow, a neighbour pricing a shed 65 by 50 at 10000, would it hold 65 cows at 150/cow extra, what's outdoor cubicles costing per cow.
As with sheep, sheds are for the farmer not the animals, but this has been a rotten year for animal outdoors.
Farmers should be shown the bad days before they commit, it said last night on journal that cows hadn't been milked since thursday morning until last night in greenfields.
There was a farm walk on an outdoor march lambing farm in Februrary, They're about a week into lambing now!!!!! wonder how many went home from that farm walk thinking they were going outdoor lambing, a lot of young farmers at that farm walk

The dairy farming gig is hugly focused on return if investment, that's how they pay such high rental prices to armchair farmers😎

mahoney_j wrote: »

An insulting ignorant comment ,of u only knew the hours and effort put in over last few days to keep things going and keep stock fed watered and content

Their eye is on the windfall at the end causing them to keep investment to an absolute minimum. I think they've gone too extreme.
Treat it as an investment maybe but it's animals not goods they're dealing with.
Big difference

alps wrote: »

The dairy farming gig is hugly focused on return if investment, that's how they pay such high rental prices to armchair farmers😎

If a cow gross output €2500+/yr, I don't think €300 is high rental to facilitate that,

Base price wrote: »

I read that article. To be honest I'm not in favour of outdoor cubicles. There was a pic on the IFJ of indoor cubicles that were covered with drifting snow and the cows didn't seem to use them. One wonders how cows fared in uncovered cubicles with the East wind/snow.
IMO if we Irish farmers have to subject our livestock to NZ type systems to make a living then its a sad state of affairs for animal husbandry :mad:

Exactly. With climate change high on the global agenda and our already extremly high animal welfare standards being examined more we can't just bury our heads in the sand. Pictures which have being circulating on social media and that article in the journal about cows huddled together outdoors to stay warm unable to be mlked and with cubicles buried in snow is not what I want to see in Irish ag and does us a great disservice. Imo, cows need shelter from these conditions no matter how rare they occur. If u can't justify the cost of having a roof over your cows and an enclosed milking parlour that can be used in these conditions what's the point of it all? By the way the article didn't mention where the calves were taken to be warm?