PREDICTION OF DAIRY CATTLE HOUSING COSTS WITH DIFFERENT CLEANING SYSTEMS

摘要

This article presents a spreadsheet application that, as an aid to prediction of investment costs deriving from the construction of dairy cattle housing, calculates cost per stall and cost per unit area of usefully occupied space as a function of the number of stalls for any combination of seven common freestall bam designs with any of four different types of cleaning system (tractor scraper, automatic scraper, flush system, and slotted floor). In the range of 20 to 200 stalls, the least expensive cleaning system is always the tractor scraper, and the most expensive is almost always the slotted floor, which raises total cost by up to 40% with respect to the tractor scraper. The least expensive designs generally consisted of three or six rows of stalls, except for the design with two rows of stalls arranged tail-to-tail when the number of stalls was <58 for the automatic scraper, or the design with four rows of stalls arranged tail-to-tail when the number of stalls was <52 for the tractor scraper.