The facility carries out comfort from the pens all the way to the parlor, with fans and sprinklers in the holding pen. Hardly a sound is heard, as only the dry cow pens have headlocks. Pens are walked twice each hour, and cows are moved to an individual box stall at the first signs of calving. These groups share an alleyway to keep pen movements simple. Of the six barns, one is dedicated to dry and close-up dry cows. Long-day lighting with high-bay LED lights and polycarbonate panel side walls keep the barns bright and pleasant. Cows comfortably lay on reclaimed sand in 16-foot head-to-head stalls, and a flush system washes the alleyways every four hours. The air speed from the fans deters pests, and there are only four overhead doors to enter the barns, and each barn also has bird screens along curtain air inlets.Ĭows are grouped to maximize their potential, with several groups for first-lactation cows, a fresh pen, high pens and a late-lactation pen. “We have zero bunching, zero flies and zero birds,” he says. With the barn design and ventilation system, three of the biggest challenges Peters faced while managing dairies in Kansas are nonissues in Ohio. Likewise, he operates the on-demand soaker system with a control panel accessible through his cell phone to create evaporative cooling cycles that adjust in duration based on the conditions. The nearly 400 fans throughout the facility never fully shut down however, automated controllers adjust air speed in relation to temperature and humidity. “There are 30 fans over the beds of the cows in each of the six barns, pushing air and cooling cows, and then 26 exhaust fans at the end of each barn for air exchange,” Peters says. The six-row, head-to-head pen layout concentrates a 5- to 7-mile-per-hour air speed right over the cows, which is exactly where Peters wants it to be in order to mitigate heat stress and provide a consistent barn environment. “Essentially, the feed wagon can go up to one end of the barn, drop feed, and turn around to the other side of the barn, and go back up the other side and drop feed.” Peters is pleased with the perimeter feeding design. “What’s novel about an inverted six-row barn is feeding everything on the outside, and cows are head-to-head in the middle,” McCarty explains.
While the concept of an inverted six-row barn was new, it’s one they have come to embrace.
Joe Harner, they settled on a layout that effectively optimized the footprint for a 4,400-cow setup: a series of six identical hybrid-ventilated, six-row barns with inverted feed lanes, leading up to a milking center with an 80-stall rotary parlor. With the advising of Kansas State University’s Dr.