Walking when too much is not a good thing

At Clover Hill Dairies we milk 500 cows three times daily on two farms.

Milking three times a day is not the norm but we do it for a multitude of reasons which are good for people, cows and the planet.

Milking three times a day means lots and lots of health benefits for our cows but those health benefits rely on good time management.

Good time management is essential because cows need at least 12 hours a day to sleep. ( If you want to read the heavy science you can find it here.)

So as our cows walk backwards and forwards to the dairy three times daily we need to make sure they do that with as much cow comfort as we can provide so they can do it as quickly and efficiently as they can.

Cows travel super highways at Clover Hill  (special thanks to Penny Scott who took this gorgeous photo)

To help them do this we have created a series of “supermoo highways” on our farms.

Like this and this –  Cars and people like them too. We get lots of the “keep fit” crowd walking up this road

50% of our farm is rainforest and part of our role as land stewards is to make sure our farming practices do not impact on the native vegetation or the wildlife.

So we have supermoo highways through our rainforest as well .

Here is a great example of development of one through the rainforest

This one was fine like this when we milked twice daily but it looked like this when we got a lot of rain and the cows started using it three times daily

So what did we do. We got some advice from rainforest experts and some cow comfort experts and we did this

Picasso Corner

Firstly we separated the cows and the rainforest with a fence.

Then we poured concrete on the laneway.  We had happy cows and a happy farm team who found the cows liked the new comfortable road and were very keen to come back to the dairy for milking.

Then we needed to spend some time nurturing the rainforest. So we found some more experts to give us the right advice like Erin and the team at Landcare Illawarra

Erin with Tony Hepworth and Mike Swanson from South East Landcare 

The troops came in and did their bush regeneration thing and achieved some great outcomes like this

 

What about those cows getting their 40 winks!!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday I went for a walk and it gave me great pleasure when I came across the cows in the paddock at the end of the laneway we call Picasso Corner (another story) and saw this paddock full of very happy cows RESTING

Great outcomes all round me thinks