GREEN COUNTY — UW-Extension will be sponsoring Dairy Facility Farm Tours on Monday, Oct. 30. The tours will include seven dairy farms located in Green and Lafayette Counties that have all made modernization improvements to their dairy facilities to increase productivity and animal comfort as well as reduce labor.
The tours are popular with dairy farmers as they feature an open house format in which dairy producers can visit any number of the seven farms they wish between 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. There is no central meeting place or any formal presentation for the tours. Farmers can simply select which farms they would like to visit on their own time schedule. A farm representative will be on hand at each farm to answer questions for the tour participants.
The tours will feature various sizes of dairy farms with herds ranging from 120-1,800 cows. For producers interested in upgrading their milking facilities, the tours will include robotic milking systems, swing parlors, parallel parlors, and other milking setups.
Multiple types of freestall sheds will be available at these farms including three and four rows with headlocks, mattresses, and alley scrapers. Others may include sand bedding, waterbed mattresses, and recycled sand creating various kinds of cow comfort. A tunnel ventilation barn may also be viewed.
One farm features an automatic calf feeding system utilizing milk replacer and the nursery calves receive pasteurized milk. Another farm features a calf barn with a pasteurizer and bottle cleaner.
Several manure handling systems will be included on the tours. Some of the host farms on the tour have daily scraping systems with mini manure pits for short term storage. One farm features a sand separator and utilizes polymers to keep the water clean to ensure the sand being reused is clean. One farm also uses bedding from manure solids on the mattresses made with an EYS screw press.
These tours are designed to help generate ideas for dairy producers who are considering future improvements and modernization in their own dairy facilities. Host farmers will be on hand to share their experiences in the building process and to explain what they like about their facility and what they might change if they were to do it again. Tour participants will be required to wear plastic boots that will be supplied at each of the farms.
The complete farm descriptions along with tour maps showing the farm locations, can be obtained by contacting Jackie McCarville, UW-Extension Dairy Educator at 608-328-9440 or jackie.mccarville@wisc.edu. Tour information and maps can also be downloaded from the Green County UW-Extension web site at http://green.extension.uwex.edu/.
