Hooves and Health: Interview with Ag Engineer, John Tyson

Jim Lawhead interviews Penn State Ag. Engineer John Tyson about the impact of facilities on cattle health, primarily hoof health.

Transcript

Jim Lawhead 0:10

Welcome to Bovine Banter. I'm Jim Lawhead, Dairy Extension Program Specialist at Penn State. Today we're joined by John Tyson, Ag Engineer for Penn State Extension. Good morning, John. Thanks for joining us.

John Tyson 0:23

Good morning, Jim. Thanks for the invite.

Jim Lawhead 0:26

Well, we'd like to explore the relationship between housing and cow health, primarily foot health. Dairy cows are spending a lot of time on concrete, so we'd like to protect them in any way we can. What are your current thoughts on proper grooving of concrete?

John Tyson 0:42

Well, Jim, I guess I go back to an old adage I've used for a long time that we're looking for a surface that's smooth yet rough. So, you know, I know that that doesn't make any sense at all, but we're looking for something that's rough enough, has enough texture to provide that traction for the cow not to be slipping and falling, but at the same time have to be cautious to not have a surface that's too rough where we're going to wear the cow's foot faster than it grows or cause damage to any of those biological parts of the cow. And so it's a balance between enough attraction but not too much wear.

Calm Handling Reduces Slips

Jim Lawhead 1:18

Well, how even with proper grooving, how do we keep cows from slipping?

John Tyson 1:22

Well, that's where the human part comes into it from a good animal workmanship handling. We're moving cows calmly, trying to, you know, we're moving typically large groups of cows from the freestall barn to the parlor or from the housing to the parlor, moving those cows calmly, allowing them to do it at their own pace, depending on their body condition, their health scores, all those things, and not pushing animals. If we if we do good animal handling procedures, we tend to see less pushing, shoving, and those things, and that leads us to a calmer cow in the parlor ultimately, and less cow slipping. So hurried movement of cows usually leads us to issues. This is maybe one of those times where we have to slow down to speed up. If we slow down a little bit in our animal handling, we can maybe speed up the whole procedure.

Concrete Wear And Maintenance Cycles

Jim Lawhead 2:12

I love that theory. Well, with having to handle manure and frequent scrapings every day, what's the life expectancy of concrete before some resurfacing is necessary?

Resurfacing Options: Mechanical Vs Chemical

John Tyson 2:25

Uh, it somewhat depends exactly on what type of manure scraping equipment we're using, but I would probably put a number of say five to ten years is a good number to have in the back of your mind that we're going to have to do something to the concrete. If we put down new concrete in five to ten years, we're probably going to have to come back to address some minor issues. Concrete, yes, it's hard and it's very resilient, but it does wear out. We're going to wear that surface off continuously, and when it starts to wear out and get smooth, we have to do something to bring some traction and texture back. We don't need to replace all the concrete by any means, but we may have to address some issues on top. That constant scraping is just very slowly wearing off that traction layer on top. So, you know, much like tires on your car can run for thousands of miles, but eventually they're going to wear out. Concrete is eventually going to wear out on the surface as it relates to the cow's traction.

John Tyson 3:27

So, what are the options for resurfacing or making improvements? Most of them are mechanical. I mean, we can resaw grooves in at a different angle. There are some micro traction, micro grooving options, scabbling. Some people call it scabbling or scarfying, where we're basically just trying to retexture the top, maybe eighth inch of concrete to bring back some small texture to get that little bit of grip back. Resawing is a little more aggressive where we're going to recut another pattern of grooves, you know, that same half inch by half inch groove that we put in there originally. We're going to put another one of those in. Maybe it oftentimes you see a 45-degree angle to the grooves that are already there, but that's a mechanical system. Other ways to do it in small areas, we've seen uh success using an acid bath, muriatic acid, which is used to clean masonry bricks and those type things when we're laying brick or block. It is pure form, muriatic acid can etch into concrete. It's used to clean concrete prior to you know epoxy or treating over top of it or doing something in small areas, you know, uh a parlor platform or the end of a parlor that where cows spin that's very slick. So we're dealing with a four by four area, something like that. Acid etching can can help. That is much less aggressive or makes gives you some texture, but won't last as long as some of the mechanical systems that are actually chewing the concrete a little bit. So those are the primary two that I know. One is in one of a chemical system and then other mechanical grinding or surfacing. There are companies throughout the U.S. and throughout the US, the East Coast here that do the mechanical systems, whether it's saw or microgroove.

Jim Lawhead 5:20

Well, there's farms that use rubber in their walkways, holding areas. Can you discuss the benefits and drawbacks of using that type of surface?

John Tyson 5:30

Yeah, I mean, it you can't argue that cows like rubber in installations where I've seen, you know, part of an alleyway, say a four-foot section of rubber over a 10-foot alley. It's not very hard to figure out that cows like walking on rubber. They will find it and they will use it. There's, to my knowledge, never been any university studies or studies in general that have found any productive or benefits to it other than cows like it. So, you know, we I tend to recommend it with caution. I mean, it is it can be expensive, but cows do like rubber. The places that I think rubber can benefit us is are those high use areas like the holding area you mentioned. Putting rubber in a holding area, that's a place where we're gonna, you know, force cows to stand for an hour at a time, three times a day. And that can reduce the load on their joints. And so we're kind of forcing them to stand in a holding area, it's maybe a good place to give them a break or in the parlor itself. In the barn u sually we only ever look at the feed alley where cows are standing to feed, you know, if we're gonna put down rubber just in that feed alley and maybe even there, only half of it. But that's where I've never seen any studies that have said, you know, with rubber, without rubber is another pound of dry matter. I think there are other things that drive that bus more than the surface. And the caution I give with rubber is it it can be very can get slick when it's wet, and with temperature changes, you know, if it's three degrees like it was this morning, rubber is very hard and slick. If it's 85 degrees in the afternoon, it's very soft and cows sink into it. A lot of the traction, some of the traction that rubber provides is the fact that cows sink into it a little bit. It it gives, and that giving kind of helps cradle their foot and give them some traction. Along with that is whatever texture. We tend to see some grooves in concrete rubber mine building. Other building has little pimples on it. There has to be something there to give some traction, and once again, that's gonna wear away over time, so still it's it's not a a lifetime product.

Picking Rubber By Use Case

Jim Lawhead 7:40

Well, are there particular product types that are available or recommended?

John Tyson 7:45

I think you gotta pick a type that fits what you want it to do. The characteristics of of all these products are a little different. Some of the beltings tend to be a little harder, they're more resilient, built to last longer, made to last longer, but they don't, they're not gonna give as much. So the traction is a little less than other products which are much softer, and the cow actually sinks down in a little bit more. But those softer products, of course, are gonna wear a little faster and not last quite as long. So if I'm looking for something for an alleyway, I might use that rubber that's more resilient because I'm harder, because I'm gonna be scraping it. If I'm looking for something for a cow platform or holding area, maybe I'm looking at these softer mats because I want to provide a little more cushion, and at the same time, I'm not gonna be cleaning it with a skid steer but fire hosing it off, so I'm not gonna tear it up quite as much. So you you gotta pick a product that fits the the characteristics of the product that fit the area you want to put it.

unknown 8:44

Okay.

Jim Lawhead 8:45

Well, it is rubber. What what kind of life expectancy can you see with these products?

John Tyson 8:51

Uh I've seen some of them last, you know, 15, 20 years, uh, others five or ten years. I I think once again it it gets back to the how we're treating it, you know, to clean it. Um are we running equipment over top of it, fire hose, or are we just washing off with a fire hose? Is it minimal amount of cow traffic running over it or is it constant cow traffic? Um so longevity, you know, once again, we're maybe 10 years on average, and it a lot of it sometimes is failure of being connected to the floor. Those those connectors will have a life expectancy of breaking off in probably 10 years. At the same time, I've seen building down on barns 20 years after it was put there, and it's still there.

Jim Lawhead 9:40

Well, do you see anything different with sand-bedded barns? Is there any particular benefits or drawbacks as far as lameness issues in sand-bedded barns?

John Tyson 9:49

Uh how it revolves around lameness, I'm not sure, but I uh from a traction standpoint, I mean sand barns basically another benefit of sand, which there seems to be a multitude of them, is that we're putting barn grit, for nothing better to call it, all over the barn constantly. So, you know, we're the cows are scattering it around, they're pulling it out of the stall, it's stuck to their foot. There's definitely more traction in a free-stall barn bedded with sand than one bedded with other beddings, just simply because we're putting that traction compound constantly throughout the barn. And we really never notice it until we either stop using sand or for some reason we hose off the floors and clean the barn out, and until that sand comes back, now we're in a slick environment. But underneath, it actually sand is increasing the wear on the concrete floor. Um, you know, barns that farms that I've worked with that have been had sand for five or years or so and then decided to go some other direction. As soon as they quit using sand, they're very quick to admit they have to regroove the floor or retexture the floor because they've spent five years just wet polishing, wet sanding to get that nice smooth finish. Um, the university farms are an example that I know if you go in and if you wash a section of that floor, you will find out it's like a skating rink underneath there because you know we're 30 years into polishing that floor with sand. But on a day-to-day basis, it has one of the best tractions I've been around because it's constantly there.

Slatted Floors: Dryness Vs Support

Jim Lawhead 11:24

Very good. Well, are there any benefits or drawbacks to a slatted barn?

John Tyson 11:29

Sort of the same things there, at least the thought process we think about is that they're perhaps with slots, because the slots are large enough for manure to go through, maybe we've taken away a little bit of the square inches of cow of foot support. So maybe that's a little higher, you know, load bearing on the cow's foot because when she stands on a slot, you know, that slot's not holding anything, and now more is bearing on the solid part. But the other side of that is slotted floor slotted barns tend to be much drier than scraped barns. The the liquid, at least portion of the manure, is going very quickly. Cow's feet are very dry and can be cleaner. So I think there's a you know a bay or a balance between bearing, foot load bearing and foot condition. To me, I don't think there's a winner clear one way or the other. It's just two different systems. I think they're both of equal, they equal out in the end.

Swollen Hocks: Bedding First

Jim Lawhead 12:31

Okay. Well, swollen hocks are are a possibility with any barn type, but uh, do you have any specific recommendations for stall barn herds?

John Tyson 12:40

Usually when I see swollen hocks, it it's I re my answer goes more back to bedding and stall beds than it does to flooring. So I start to see swollen hocks, I start to encourage more bedding. If you're using one scoop of one scoop per stall, try a scoop and a half per day or you know, more bedding to keep that cow put something between her hock and the bedding surface or the the mattress surface. So I I relate swollen hocks more to bedding than I do to floor type. But if you're starting to see where cows are, if they're swollen hocks because they're slipping and falling, then we have to look at texture of the floor to make sure we don't have those cows that are falling and injuring themselves to injure their hocks or knees.

Jim Lawhead 13:27

Well, is there a relationship between heat stress and lameness?

John Tyson 13:31

Well, I I'm a huge believer that yes, there is. It's perhaps not direct, but it's usually a cause and effect. I I think that when we see heat stress, one of the first things that cows do to alleviate their own heat stress is they stand more. So lying times during during hot weather tend to be less than they are during cooler cool weather. The more time the cow spends standing, or the less time she spends lying down, means the more time she stands, she's standing, and that's gonna put more stress on that foot. So it becomes what is she standing on? Is she standing on a soft stall surface or is she standing on a hard concrete floor? But inevitably we're adding more stress time to the foot, leading us to issues down the road. Um, you know, it's kind of become a common thing that I've seen. If we have a very hot summer, you know, we have a lot of July, early August, hot weather rolls around into September, early October, we start to see some foot issues. And I think that is a direct, it's a cause and effect, maybe not a direct thing, but the the damage done to that foot, the reason her feet are sore in September is she spent an extra two or three hours a day standing on hard concrete back in July. And it just takes time for that to come through the foot and its growth system.

Sprinklers, Wet Floors, And Drainage

Jim Lawhead 14:57

Well, related to that question, lots of barns are using sprinklers to minimize the heat stress. Does this added water contribute to lameness issues?

John Tyson 15:07

I don't know if it does, but it's definitely something we have to think about. So for when we put in sprinklers, I often look at the barn and evaluate how can I deal with that extra water? Does it mean I need to scrape the barn an extra time per day to keep the floor cleaner and drier? Um, or has the barn got slope away, or is it a slatted, you know, another great example of slatted floor barns, if we add water, that water is not going to be an issue because it's gonna simply drain away through the slotted system very quickly. Even with automatic alley scrapers, you know, we're if we're constantly scraping the barn, I don't think that added water becomes a big issue. Now, if it's a barn that because we're running sprinklers, now cows are gonna be trudging around in an extra three inches of slop, you know. Now I guess we do have the potential. I'm by no means a foot expert from the biology side, but my simple understanding is that wet feet lead to bad things with cows. So we do have the potential to have wetter feet because of the sprinkler. I think that just becomes we got to do something about that to dry the barn back out again.

Slippery Biofilm: Clean And Design

Jim Lawhead 16:18

Okay. Well, another summertime problem. I see holding areas and walkways that get a slippery film. Do you have any suggestions for preventing that or fixing it if it's there?

John Tyson 16:31

I I don't know if I have anything to say how to prevent it, other than you know, maybe more frequent cleaning if that is what's going on, if it's a something growing on the floor. In a few instances, I've seen this in certain areas of the barn. I think with the right sunlight and the right moisture, we get you know algae growing or some biological entity growing there. And I guess we just have to figure out how we can clean it off. You know, does that mean using some type of chemical to kill that biology and then clean it away? Uh maybe I tend to see it on some crossovers more than anywhere else, and I've seen where we've put on a product to kill that and then scrape it off. I've actually seen some alleyways where it's we've used a power broom to try to mechanically remove that because we can't just scrape it off because it just tends to slime over. But yeah, I I know it's an issue and I I don't know exactly how to address it, other than you know, we try to get rid of what's growing there. I think sometimes in crossovers, maybe we don't clean them as well as we should. If they're raised, they have to be hand scraped. And so maybe in new construction, we think about if we don't have to raise some of those crossovers, we can make it easier to scrape with a skid steer. If it's cleaner, less water around, maybe it would grow less. But other than killing it with some type of cleaning product and then scraping it away, I I've never really known how to tackle that one.

Better Footbath Design And Length

Jim Lawhead 18:00

Thanks. Well, I see a lot of foot baths that are like three foot by eight foot in size. Are there any improvements that can be made in that design?

New Concrete: Cure, Neutralize, Deburr

John Tyson 18:09

Well, I think many years ago there were recommendations from the Midwest, particularly from Wisconsin University of Wisconsin, looking at making foot baths narrow and longer, uh, you know, maybe two foot wide, just wide enough to keep the cow's feet in it, and then going longer in length so we can wind up with the same amount of solution uh in a long, narrow bath that we did in those short, wide baths. So we're not adding product, but the goal being to get cows to step multiple times if possible, and at least long enough that cows don't have don't be tempted into trying to jump over it, that they're walking through the solution and and getting their feet in a solution. So I think what I tend to see now in a lot of footbeds that are built footbaths anyway, are you know they're two feet to 30 inches wide and anywhere from eight to ten, some even maybe twelve foot long, trying to get the cow to walk through the solution, make multiple steps in that solution to get better contact and not just a simple one dunk and out. And even in some instances on those short baths, sometimes we can only we only get three of the four feet to contact. The cows are getting tricky enough to avoid them that they if they don't want to, they can find their way around them. That makes perfect sense.

Jim Lawhead 19:26

Well, I've heard over the years that new concrete is risky to cows. Are there any special considerations in newly constructed barns?

Contacts, Wrap‑Up, And Listener Email

John Tyson 19:36

I think in new construction, we just have to be to understand a little bit of the chemistry. New concrete as it cured, when it's cured out, tends to be a little alkaline. So the t basicness of that new concrete can burn the bottom of cow's feet. So having the proper cure time can help that. The other thing is maybe go in and use something to neutralize that, clean the floors prior to introducing cows. The other part of new concrete, and this gets back to how we go about grooving it in the days gone by where we used to do a lot of wet grooving, form the grooves in, we tended to wind up with a little, you know, some small wickers of concrete, Portland here and there, and and those became they were very sharp. So to pre-wear that concrete a little bit, where we use a loader with a steel bucket or drag a large concrete block or do something to kind of wear off those sharp edges prior to the cows being introduced. And then ultimately, I I think it's worth time to wash that concrete somehow. Well, maybe if we're not going to at least hose it off with a large volume hose to get rid of the the grit and the grime that's on there from construction and and that wear, because that's that also leads to that alkalinity and burning the cow's feet. So to clean that off, um, you know, some producers have done something to neutralize that. There are products out there you could put on it to to neutralize that out, get us back down to basic. There are some sealers and other things that can be used on new concrete that may be beneficial to the concrete, or something as simple as just putting manure, bringing some manure in from another barn and and rubbing it around on the floor, introducing some young heifers, bred heifers into a new cow barn to let them, you know, manure on the floor a few times. I think some of this gets back to, you know, if it smells like a if it has a little bit of a smell like the barn I just came from, the cows are gonna be a little easier and less stressful moving around. And then the other part just gets back to that whole handling thing of letting cows have time in a new barn to explore and find out and figure things out. They're not going to use that barn perfectly, maybe the first day. It's gonna take a few days for them to get used to their new surroundings and the new noises and the new smells. But yeah, to me, new concrete. Has some has some potential issues that are simple enough to get around. If we take our time prior to moving cows in and rub that concrete a little bit to get rid of those rough spots and maybe even put down some either sealer or something as simple as bring a bring some manure in and scatter it around and rub it around so it smells like a barn.

Speaker 1 22:20

Well, John, thank you very much. We covered a lot of topics today, and I really appreciate your insights. If our listeners have other questions, how can they get hold of you?

Speaker 22:30

They can get a hold of me by contacting me at the Mifflin Extension Office. That's where I'm housed at, or shoot me an email. My all my contact information is on the Penn State website, the Penn State Dairy Team website.

Speaker 1 22:43

Excellent. John, thanks again for joining us. Thank you, Jim. If you have any questions about today's episode or suggestions for future episodes, please email me at jbl5606@psu.edu. And be sure to join us next week for the next episode of Bovine Banter.