Adjusting Dairy Housing in Hot Climates to Meet Animal Welfare Requirements
Small dairy farms in hot climates are encountering several problems caused by the design flaws of the implemented housing designs. Consequently, heat stress increase and milk yield dramatically decreases, which leads to economic deficiency of the farm. One key issue is to develop simple means to rectify the design flaws with minimum costs. In order to develop feasible means, design flaws were detected on-site in 14 small dairy farms in Egypt to exemplify the flaws of housing designs in arid and semi-arid zones. A package of interconnected solutions is suggested to rectify the design flaws. Subsequently, the maximum temperature, dry-bulb temperature, black-globe temperature, dew point, relative humidity, shaded area, and air velocity were measured inside the rectified vs. non-rectified cowsheds and compared after conducting the statistical analysis. On the other hand, the Temperature-Humidity Index (THI) and Black Globe Humidity Index (BGHI) were calculated to find out the level of heat stress affecting the dairy cows. Furthermore, the milk yield, respiration rate, skin temperature, feed intake were recorded and compared. Moreover, the costs of the developed means were calculated and a feasibility study was carried out. The results show that the developed means are effective and feasible, where the heat stress decreased (THI decreased from 94.6 to 83.7; dry-bulb temperature decreased from 42.7 to 33.6 oC) and the average milk production increased from 18 to 26 kg/day.cow. Consequently, the costs were minimized and the revenues were maximized, which achieve economic efficiency for the farm where the profit increased by about 427 $/cow.year. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Assistant Professor, Agricultural Engineering Department, Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University, Gammaa Street, 12613 Giza, Egypt * Corresponding Author, Email: samer@cu.edu.eg Please Cite This Article As : M. Samer. 2010. Adjusting Dairy Housing in Hot Climates to Meet Animal Welfare Requirements. J. Exp. Sci. 1(3): 14-18.
Enhancing the efficiency of evaporative cooling pads for livestock barns and greenhouses by moisture adsorption
High levels of relative humidity negatively affect the efficiency of the evaporative cooling pads installed in livestock barns and greenhouses. Consequently, the productivity decreases causing economic losses. Therefore, this project aims at prototyping innovative dehumidifying/desiccant segments to be installed on the conventional cooling pads enabling them to provide suitable microclimate conditions, especially temperature and relative humidity, for animals and plants. The hypothesis is that desiccant segments adsorb air moisture before introducing the air into the pads; consequently, the treated air is then able to absorb more moisture from the cooling pads, i.e. the cooling pads evaporate more water in the treated air, where water evaporation requires heat energy which is absorbed from the treated air which results in decreasing the treated air temperature. Theoretical and experimental investigations were conducted, where 211 laboratory experiments were performed for testing this hypothesis. The theoretical investigations (calculations and designs) were conducted using the results of the lab experiments. This study presents a methodology for testing desiccant materials and assessing their suitability as filling for the desiccant segments. The water adsorption capacity was 125, 158, 257, 132, 142 g H2O/kg desiccant, and the water adsorption rate was 17, 22, 36, 18, 20 g H2O/(kg desiccant h) for ARTSorbTM, PROSorbTM, Silica Gel, Silica Gel Macro-porous, and the mixture of all 4 desiccants, respectively. Model calculations showed that the required amount of desiccant per unit area of pads is 70 kg/m2. The thickness of the desiccant segments is 10 cm, with a total pressure drop of 0.6 kPa under the toughest conditions of air velocity of 2.5 m/s and 2 mm bead size. The desiccant segments require 0.18 kW extra energy per m2 of pads to overcome the extra pressure drop, i.e. 63.5 kWh/m2 and month which is the energy required by the extractor fans and costs 12.7 € / m2 month approximately. The results show potential for developing a desiccant system to improving the efficiency of cooling pads for livestock barns and greenhouses.
FUZZY SET-BASED ANALYTICAL TOOLS FOR DAIRY HERD IMPROVEMENT
Dairy producers receive large amounts of data from Dairy Herd Improvement agencies on a monthly basis, 
not only for the purpose of supplying summary statistics, but also as an aid in the detection of management weaknesses. 
The latter task can be carried out more efficiently by producers and their advisors if aided by decision-support systems, 
the role of which is to do preliminary data processing. Two software programs were developed to carry out such 
pre-processing for individual cows in terms of milk yield and persistency. Specifically, these programs analyze both traits 
as a function of parity, stage of lactation, and herd average production level, and are based on fuzzy sets, which furnish 
qualitative assessments of the deviations from standard values. This approach has proved to work well, and may be 
extended to other factors such as peak yield, body condition score and somatic cell count.