Often referred to as the “gold standard” for bedding, sand has proven itself to be an ideal and profitable bedding option. Especially for the humid conditions in the Midwest through the eastern part of the country, the pros – including cow comfort, traction in the barns and milk quality – outweigh the cons – wear and tear on equipment and the process of separation from the manure stream.
Josh Waddell of Apple Shamrock Dairy puts it simply: “I can weld machinery back together. I can replace pump housings and unplug lines. But when I get a really sick cow, I can’t always fix her. So we’ve erred on the side of we can fix the mechanical things, but if we’re getting sick or down cows with the slippery floors, a lot of times we can’t fix her.”
Apple Shamrock Dairy
Located in Townville, Pennsylvania, Apple Shamrock Dairy is home to a milking herd of 1100. Cows are milked 3x in a double 20 parallel parlor, and all the barns from six-month heifers through milking cows are deep bed, reclaimed sand.
Over the years, Waddell says they’ve tried a little bit of everything in terms of bedding. “Compared to the initial investment in mattresses, we penciled it out that you could buy sand for several years for the cost of the mattresses. When we put the deep sand in, cow longevity just exploded – it was an exponential gain.”
Waddell can confidently attribute eight pounds per cow to the transition from mattresses topped with sand to deep sand bedding. It was proven throughout their pen-by-pen transition process: switching 400 stalls, which was half a pen or 50 cows at a time.
“Every time we got a pen done, we came up about eight pounds of milk for that pen,” Waddell says. “We always focus on high production, so when you start looking at how to maximize the facility, you only have so many stalls. Well – let’s get as much milk out of every stall as we can, and sand really fits in for us.”
Yet, like any other change, it has taken time to work out the challenges that come with sand bedding. “There are just so many good things about sand,” Waddell says. “And then it enters the manure stream. I really emphasize removing it from the manure stream.”
After implementing a sand lane and dewaterer, Waddell started to see his equipment lasting longer, too. Now that they’re able to remove 80 percent of the sand from the manure stream, some of their equipment is lasting up to six times longer.
“We used to be able to pump a million gallons through a manure spreader pump, and now we’re getting six million,” Waddell says. “But the bigger thing is we lightened our transports on the road, increasing productivity by about 25 percent, because with the sand removed, we can haul 25 percent more per day.”
Ultimately, Waddell emphasizes three things to make sand work: get it out of the manure stream, pair your sand lane with a dewatering screen, and do it all at once.
“We did this all in very small steps,” he says. “In hindsight, the cost of the dewatering screen and pulling the sand out, that was minimal, and the savings more than covered it.”
Rosedale Farms
Rosedale Farms spans two different sites in north central Ohio. Between the two sites, there are approximately 1500 milking cows, both with deep sand flush barns and parallel parlors.
With slight variations between his two sites, Paul Keener has a unique perspective on maximizing the benefits of the sand. “The Ashland farm is a true closed-loop system with a slope screen separator, and Jeromesville is a hybrid system with the slope screen with a roll, so we’re handling the dry product,” he says.
“It comes off the separator, dumps back into a two-million-gallon pond, and then we’re filling the flush tank off of that,” Keener adds.
Using a coarse sand, Rosedale Farms is able to reclaim an average of 95 percent between the two farm sites. “I can do either one, but the coarser drains a little better than finer sand,” Keener says. “I don’t see it causing hoof problems on our farm, either.”
Keener says the finer sand will stay suspended in the flush water through the sand lanes, carry itself into the pond, into the lagoon, whereas the coarser sand will drop out faster in the sand lanes.
Having toured dairies across the country, Keener notes the benefits of other bedding options for other less humid regions and farms with digesters. But for their location, Keener says sand is the best option. “It provides forgiveness for the cows in the stall, conforms to her body, provides good traction in the alleyways, and in our area it’s readily available.”
Drawbacks of wear and tear on equipment are minimal compared to the benefits for the cows. Any added tasks and maintenance are all in a day’s work, in the interest of cow health and longevity.
“It has its problems with sand quality, you fight flush water quality, and there’s definitely wintertime – sand freezes pretty hard when you’re trying to get sand lanes,” Keener says. “But at the end of the day, you want to do what’s best for your cow. Cows are what pay the bills, so you’ve got to take care of them.”
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