Who: Shawn te Velde, partner in TV Dairy along with his father, Marv.
What: TV is a 1700-cow dairy 20 miles north of Denver, CO.
Words to live by: "Take care of your cows and they take care of you."
For bedding, compost is king: Shawn has years of experience-and thoughts-on compost bedding:
"We have learned a lot on how to manage compost bedding in the past couple years. We have been using a compost barn for our fresh pen the past four years and our metritis dropped over night. We keep the cows in our fresh pen 20 days after calving and our cows get off to an excellent start. We keep the stocking density low and it is like the cows have one big mattress to lay on. They have shade in the summer and we feel our cow comfort is key to our start up milk being so high, and our herd average being 82 lbs., 3x, no rBST. Our clinical mastitis is very low, and our SCC normally runs about 180K.
We started using compost bedding in our dry lot pens about two years ago and would never change back. We have higher milk, lower cull rate, as good as repro as we ever have had, fewer lame cows, less foot rot, our sick pen has never been smaller on average, and overall excellent cow comfort. We cannot attribute all of our success to our bedding, but it is definitely making a big difference. Our dry lot compost bed pack is east/west orientation, 18"- 24" deep, 40' ft wide, and about 3/4 the length of each 200-cow pen. We use this bedding year around, and have not experienced an increase in frozen teats in the winter compared to straw bedding. Through trial and error, we have learned how to manage the compost bed pack differently during the hot summer months, cold winter season, and also when we get an occasional 4" rain."
Cost savings with compost: "Another big benefit of our compost bedding is the cost saving compared to straw bedding. We spent $55K on wood shaving for bedding last year across the entire dairy for the whole year, and in the past, we would have used ~1500 tons of straw. With straw prices skyrocketing the last couple years, we feel we are saving in excess of $100K/year just in straw cost alone. We buy our wood shaving from the compost company taking manure off our farm. Using wood as our carbon source, manure and urine from the cows, we have a lower cost bed pack. Also, we have a huge labor saving with our compost bedding. Moving to compost bedding has allowed us to have one less employee not needing to clean out bedding in the winter months, lowered our diesel cost, reduced wear and tear on our loaders and tractors, and reduced any dirt work resulting from repeated scraping of the corrals."
Diamond V and the long term: "We use Diamond V XPC yeast culture in our mineral pack across the lactation and feel it is a good product. With milk prices being low, we don't feel it is the right thing to cut things out of our ration; we want to take care of our cows for the long-term.
