The sight of dairy cows eating feed or lounging in a massive shed instead of green pastures might seem off-kilter, but it is becoming more common in Australia.
Dairy Australia reports that about 20 per cent of the country’s cow’s milk now comes from intensive or housed systems and expects it could reach 40 per cent within the next 20 years.
Instead of grazing paddocks, the cows stay in large sheds or feed pads and are fed a high-nutrition ration of grain and hay.
A massive shed used for milk production at the Jolliffe dairy farm in southern NSW. (Supplied: Central Steel Build)
Dairy farmer Neil Jolliffe has invested $2.7 million in a large open shed to house his 300 milking cows at Euberta near Wagga Wagga in southern New South Wales.
“It’s really hard to expand, with the cost of land, to run more cows,” Mr Jolliffe said.
“With this shed, we designed it for 400 cows, I’ve got a 16,000-litre vat and basically my plan is to go as close to filling that as possible every day in the future.”
The massive shed, two-thirds the size of a rugby league football ground, allows the cows to move freely around on a bedding of compost.
The 150m x 38m shed houses hundreds of milking cows. (ABC News: Emily Doak)
“It’s really about welfare for the cows,” Mr Jolliffe said.
“They’re not out exposed to the wet winters and extreme hot summers and it’s a nice environment to be in.
“They can go for a feed, behind them is a water trough and then go in onto the pack, lie down, sit and ruminate.”
Boosting production
Mr Jolliffe said the pastures that were once grazed by the milking herd will now be used to grow high-quality fodder or to grow out younger heifers.
“The biggest issue when we were grazing is you’d have a great feed that’s absolutely perfect for the cows and then the season would turn or get hot, cold, or muddy,” he said.
“They were wasting a lot of it, the quality would go off, and the cow’s [condition] was constantly going up and down.”
Neil Jolliffe says production has increased significantly since housing the cows in the shed. (ABC News: Emily Doak)
Nine months after moving into the shed, Mr Jolliffe said production of milk solids, which is what the farmer is paid for, has increased by 25 per cent per cow.
Industry-wide trend
Dairy Australia’s Alicia Richters heads up a program giving farmers resources to adapt production and said the move to housed systems has accelerated in the past decade.
“Particularly in inland systems, where water availability in response to climate is the key driver where farmers are trying to grow higher value crops with less water,” she said.
“We’re definitely seeing it across coastal areas where people are battling with heat stress as well.”
Ms Richters said despite the trend towards housed cows, she expected grazing pastures to continue being the main form of dairy production.
“While these systems are really good for some people, some farmers just may never want to move into this system,” she said.
“In a lot of the dairy regions in Australia, growing grass can be really quite productive, and those systems may not easily convert to a higher value crop.”
Senior scientific officer at RSPCA Australia Natalie Roadknight said that ideally cows should be given access to pasture and not kept solely indoors.
“Cows are motivated to spend at least some of their day at pasture when the weather is not extreme, so not having that could potentially impact negatively on their welfare,” she said.
Natalie Roadknight says cows should be able to choose to go outdoors to graze pasture. (Supplied: RSPCA Australia)
Dr Roadknight said other management challenges in housed systems could lead to poorer outcomes.
“Higher rates of mastitis and lameness in indoor systems compared to pasture-based systems, and these are really painful conditions of dairy cows,” she said.
“Higher stocking densities means that there’s a higher risk of interactions between the cows that might be aggressive, and there might be more competition for food, water and comfortable lying areas.”
Dr Roadknight said there were voluntary guidelines for intensive dairy production but she wanted legislation introduced to ban some practices used in housed systems overseas, such as tying cows up to stalls.
