Associations of soft flooring materials in free stalls with milk yield, clinical mastitis, teat lesions, and removal of dairy cows.

Is there an advantage to having soft flooring material instead of concrete? A recent Danish study investigated whether this was indeed the case; reference: L.E. Ruud, K.E. Bøe and O. Østerås. Associations of soft flooring materials in free stalls with milk yield, clinical mastitis, teat lesions, and removal of dairy cows. Journal of Dairy Science (2010) Volume 93, pages 1578-1586

Lying surfaces for dairy cows are intended to be comfortable and provide thermal protection. In addition, lying surfaces should be durable, have sufficient friction to allow cows to stand up and lie down without slipping, and should assist in keeping cows clean and healthy. Lying is an important behaviour in cows, the duration of which, amongst other factors, is influenced by housing and bedding. Studies have shown that cows prefer softer materials such as sawdust or mattresses, but whether these are important from an economical and management point of view have not been well-studied. Therefore, the objective in this investigation was to establish whether there was an association between free-stall lying surface softness and milk yield, incidence of clinical mastitis, teat lesions and culling and mortality of cows.

A total of 1923 Danish dairy farms and 31779 lactations were involved in the investigation. Bedding material was divided from hard to different degrees of soft, the categories being concrete (hard), rubber, soft mats, multilayer mats and mattresses (very soft). The results showed that milk yield between days 5 and 305 of lactation was about the same for rubber compared to concrete, was about 2.5% higher on soft mats and about 4% higher on multilayer mats and mattresses. The incidence of clinical mastitis was about the same (14%) on concrete and soft mats, but lower on rubber (12.3%), multilayer mats (11.4%) and mattresses (11.3%). Teat lesions were 1.7% on concrete and less than 0.8% on the other bedding materials, culling percentage was not significantly different between concrete, rubber, soft mats and multilayer mats, but lower on mattresses, whereas mortality was 1.1% on concrete and below 0.9% on the other bedding materials.

Bottom line: The results unequivocally showed that softer free-stall lying surfaces are associated with better milk yields, lesser incidences of clinical mastitis and teat lesions, and lower culling and mortality percentages. Softer bedding materials such as soft mats, multilayer mats and mattresses should be preferred to hard concrete floors and to a lesser extent rubber mats.