Farmer Focus: Sawdust means £9,500 saved over sand bedding

We are more than a month into bedding on sawdust and mattresses, and I can say with a degree of confidence we made the best decision for the cows and the system.

Touch wood, I haven’t had a mastitis case to deal with and, since trimming the tails, cows are staying clean, with only about 5% dirty cows, according to the Arla scoring system.

There is, of course, room for improvement, the priority being keeping the passageways cleaner than what can be achieved from twice-a-day tractor scraping.

See also: How a 540-cow dairy benefited from recycled bedding

About the author

Tom Hildreth

Livestock Farmer Focus writer Tom Hildreth and family grow grass and maize for the 130-cow herd of genomically tested 11,000-litre Holsteins near York supplying Arla. The Hildreths run a café, ice cream business and milk vending machine on the farm.

Read more articles by Tom Hildreth

The solution may come next year, depending on how good a winter we have: a robotic slurry collector from Lely.

That should keep the muck to a minimum and help us maintain our low mastitis rate and antibiotics use.

The sawdust is considerably cheaper, coming in at £14 a day to bed 130 cubicles, compared with £40 a day on sand. That’s a £9,500 saving a year.

Since making the switch, I have had a few jobs to do for (hopefully) the last time. The major one was digging the sand out of the lagoon, the other emptying about 3t of sand out of the tanker.

Both jobs I will be happy not to do again.

I am a bit late to the party, but I have entered a new (to me) world of precision farming this summer.

I traded in our six-year-old Valtra N134 active for an ex-demonstrator N175 Versu equipped with many bells and whistles, including Trimble autosteer.

This has been a game changer for me in several ways. Obviously, the accuracy is far better than I could ever hope to achieve by eye.

And showing on screen where I have driven makes fertiliser and slurry spreading so much easier.

Heavy land work has also become so much easier and quicker without overlaps, and since I don’t have to concentrate on steering, I am not tired after a long day, so home life improves too.

I would encourage anyone who is considering any sort of autosteer system to go for it. It is a substantial outlay, but I firmly believe it is worth every penny.