Cow Cooling Pays - Plan Ahead & Stay Cool Headed

One of the key considerations for summer is investing in a heat abatement plan. 75°F is the comfort zone temperature for dairy cows, while some can tolerate up to 80°F in low humidity - anything above 75°F with high humidity requires some proactive cow cooling.

The major reason for cooling cows is to maintain proper intake, reproductive efficiency and to reduce stress. Heat stress increases the levels of cortisol in cows and could result in immunocompromise, immunosuppression, lower intake, higher incidence of DA’s ketosis, lowered production and higher incidence of death in the herd.

Here are some remedies:
1. Reformulate rations with densified energy.
2. Evaporative cooling, with extra care given to fresh and dry cows.
4. Ample supply of cool water with more watering stations.
5) Providing shade in the walking alley and extra cooling in the holding pen.

Some simple cooling protocols in less humid areas:
1) Provide shade from sun radiation and ventilation for the movement of air.
2) Cooling with water-creation of evaporative cooling from fans (cools the neck but not the entire body).

For higher humidity areas:
3) Soakers and fans
4) Corral coolers. Following are some rewarding observations from corral coolers:
a) The corral cooler group has 3 pounds more dry matter intake as compared to the control group (simple cooling).
b) Production in the corral cooler group was consistent and 3 pounds more per day than the control group.
c)The most important part of this experiment was the pregnancies (not pregnancy rate) generated in the corral cooler group was 7 percentage points more than the control group.

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Posted Oct 10th

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