Four times a year, Peter and Connie have a big team meeting with all of their other consultants. We found that their dairy fits into a pattern that we see throughout our practice. There are six months when milking cows in the Midwest are pretty good, November through April. Then there are the transition months, May and October, and the four summer months.

Our high-producing dairy cows are truly metabolic marvels as they convert feed into milk. A by-product of all that digestion is heat.

Cows struggle to dissipate all that heat if they are also taking on heat from their environment and penmates. Heat stress relief has become more important as cows have boosted production.

Peter and Connie had attended our winter producers’ meeting, and they repeated back to me many of my own thoughts about cow comfort and the common limitations they see. As a veterinarian whose role is often teacher and adviser, this is always heartening. They had done some measurements and calculations and determined that water availability might be a limiting factor.

The background information that they were working from was: dry cows and heifers go into heat stress above 73°F, but high-producing cows start to suffer at 65’F. When in heat stress, water intake can expand by almost two-thirds. The rules for water availability are:

1. Two waterers per pen.
2. 3 to 4 inches of trough per cow.
3. No ball-type waterers.
4. All waterers in the shade.
5. Water available at the parlor exit.
6. Clean the waterers regularly.

They routinely, like most dairies, violated four of these six rules. They chose to look for ways to make a second waterer available in the fresh cow and hospital groups. We needed to find a way to double the inches of waterer space in the lactating pens.

More information you can read in the magazine «Milk and Farm» # 1 (14), February 2013