Youngstock housing design
Abstract
The design of livestock systems needs to address the requirements of the animals to be housed, as well as those for labour, safety, and sustainability, including finance. Youngstock housing is no different, except that the industry appears to have forgotten the first part, and insists on placing youngstock in general purpose buildings, or buildings that were originally designed for another purpose. The output data on calf health and performance is an indictment of the lack of the well-designed youngstock housing. The following is intended to promote further development of calf systems by addressing the basic design requirements for youngstock.
The basic requirements for space, bedding, ventilation, feed and water are all freely available in Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) publications (AHDB 2018a, 2018b).
The link between hygiene and infection is indirect and the literature has no clear descriptions of and associations between measured variables in the calf environment. The evolution of poultry and pig production systems has come out very clearly in support of ‘all-in, all-out’ (AIAO) systems, with the quality of the animal-free stage of the system being dictated by the effectiveness of appropriate hygiene. This has clear implications for the design of sustainable calf systems. The UK has more than 80% of dairy herds on an all-year-round calving pattern, which means that calf housing systems will have a constant trickle of young calves entering the built environment. Herd sizes have increased from 75 to 148 milking cows from 1996 to 2018 (AHDB, 2019) and has led to an inevitable increase in the number of calves going through systems. There must be an increase in the epidemiological pressures. System designs have adapted, but with limited success.
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