Heat Stress In Your Cattle Herd

Whether your cattle are just for your family or part of a larger business, you want to do everything possible to ensure their health and comfort.

Doing so will provide higher quality milk, greater quantities, and overall better experiences with your cows. However, any heat stress dairy cows experience can put a real damper on your plans and your farm’s profitability. It is essential that you learn how to deal with it early on!

What Heat Stress In Cattle Feels Like

Just as the heat of summer can feel oppressive to humans, cows, and other animals can experience side effects from the changing seasons. While wintertime has problems of its own, the heat stress dairy cows experience during the summer is a concerning event that should not be taken lightly.

This condition occurs when the animal is no longer able to cool its body on its own. Four separate factors contribute to the comfort of your animals, including the temperature of the air.

It is important to recognize that three additional factors are involved, so even if the temperatures are moderate, your cattle could still be at risk for heat stress.

Heat Stress Management Tools Can Be Used

Now If you are in tune with your cattle herd, you are very aware of the fact that you want nothing to do with having any heat stress problems with any of your cows. So how do you manage these conditions?

The best way to do that today is to use some scientific handheld weather meter tools that will through sensors you have set up, help you to know weather conditions that aren’t good for your cattle.

A great example of one of these tools would be my suggestion of purchasing a Kestrel Data Logger to Monitor Heat Stress in Your Cows.

This is a weather meter that is called the Kestrel Drop. This unit is highly successful with monitoring cattle herds properly for you. The alerts you can set up alert you to temperature changes, humidity changes and you also will know what little air movement there is in the area of your sensor locations.

To continue on with all of the signs that you need to be aware of to do your best with the cattle heat stress situation with your cows.

If the Humidity Is Bad

The second influencing factor is humidity. As it increases, so do the risk factors for your cows. If you notice that your cows are panting, you are seeing signs of heat stress already. To help alleviate this discomfort, take advantage of the third factor: air movement.

If the animals are stuck inside a barn, the still air can contribute to their ill reactions to heat. Lastly, solar radiation due to poor sheltering options during the day can exacerbate their symptoms and health.

The heat stress dairy cows experience can result in lower milk production. Some animals make a gallon less per day when experiencing prolonged heat stress. This loss in production could be very bad, if not crippling to most dairy farmers.

The lengthening of lactations also contributes to decreasing infertility. This isn’t very appealing either, since you will be wanting to breed the cow to keep the calving program growing for your farm. These factors can wreak havoc on your plans!

How Very Important Managing the Heat Is

You must manage the heat in order to protect your cattle from these troubling problems.  To start with you need to increase higher quality forages during heat stress events.

These are more digestible, which can help animals already experiencing greater stress. however, you need to make sure that you still supply a sufficient amount of fiber fermentation for optimal health.

You will need to learn more about how your breed responds best to the local climate changes and employ those ratios. Holsteins respond differently than Jerseys, and Guernsey’s are different again.

Water Plays a Vital Part in Good Management

Always make sure that your animals have sufficient water. The water has a dual purpose. First, it helps to prevent dehydration; secondly, it acts as an internal cooling agent.

Make sure that each head has at least 25 gallons per day. You should provide water immediately after milking to improve production and health.

You can also use water sprinklers and industrial fans to help keep the animals cool down. As the water evaporates from their skin, it will help to cool the external temperature and provide them some relief from the blistering heat.

Since cows cannot sweat, this process helps to simulate the act for them.
In conjunction with other relief efforts, you should be able to keep your cattle healthy and happy during the stressful months of summer.

Cramped Quarters Don’t Help Anyone

Don’t forget about providing enough room for your cattle to move freely. Your pens should have enough room that the animals can move and that gentle breezes will waft between them.

Provide a barn or other shelter that the animals can enter when the heat of the sun bearing down becomes too great. Again, make sure that enough room exists for every animal to comfortably fit.

Another way to reduce the stress associated with the summer is to care for the animals early in the morning. When you have to move, dehorn and vaccinate your animals, make your plans before the sun.

By tending to the care and management needs of your cattle when the weather is the coolest, you will reduce the amount of stress they experience during these essential activities.

No matter what the size of your herd, taking good care of your dairy cows will improve the quality and quantity of milk that your animals produce each day.

By keeping these suggestions in mind you should be able to stave off the worst of the heat and keep your animals cool!

George

Weather Enthusiast’s Journey

From an early age, I discovered the profound impact weather has on our lives.

A stormy day can disrupt your plans, while perfect weather feels like a precious gift meant to be savored to its fullest.

Through this site, I’m passionate about sharing my expertise on weather instruments and their practical applications for enhancing your daily life.

I’ll show you how a personal weather station can transform your home experience, giving you valuable insights about conditions on your specific property.

Explore my discoveries and gain the knowledge to truly understand the weather patterns in your area.

Welcome to a community where weather isn’t just small talk—it’s a fascinating science that connects us all.

How The Summer Weather Affects Dairy Cattle

Current climate conditions do affect animals as well as people. As a dairy farmer, it is very important for you to have a plan for your dairy cattle stress management.

How and when you have a plan, the sooner you can address the symptoms and as well the sooner your cattle can get comfortable and get back to producing milk properly.

Livestock heat stress can cause serious health issues in your valuable livestock as well as reduced dairy and herd productivity.

Dairy Cattle Stress Management Suggestions

To make sure you are doing your best, offer them fresh water at all times and make sure they have extra during the summer when their body fluids are leaving them quicker. Using a stress management tool such as a Kestrel Data Logger can help you in knowing when you have condition changes that will be a problem for you.

Say, for example, the water’s temperature throughout the day has increased in tandem with the outside temperatures and is too warm for the cow’s body. This will affect the cow’s milk production, so you don’t want that happening.

An alert setup on the Kestrel data logger will alert you to these changes.

How About a Sprinkler System

Setting up sprinkler systems over the feeding areas can also help reduce heat stress in your cows. If you have a large operation, you will need to address this issue and install them so that the entire population of cattle can receive relief from the sprinklers.

Watch how the cattle react to high temperatures. The alerts from the data logger will alert you to climbing danger situations.

Install Barn Fans

You may want to install barn fans so that air will move consistently through the open sides of the building. Some barns are made of concrete so opening the lower level of the barn is not possible. In these cases add the fans above the cattle and this will help resolve the matter.

Special Sheet Metal Structure Suggestions

For barns with sheet metal walls, remove the sides of the metal and install netting in place of the metal. This netting can be lifted to improve airflow during the summer and you can easily lower it during the winter.

Another option is to add or increase the ventilation in the roof. When cattle are outside, be sure that they have ample places to shade themselves.

Here’s Some Information on the Kestrel Drop

Use a Kestrel Data Logger to Monitor Heat Stress in Your Cows

Kestrel manufactures a small monitor device (the Kestrel Drop) which works very well for giving you many different weather-related readings that are very useful in managing the heat stress in your cows.

This monitor is a data logger that measures traditional weather parameters of ambient temperature, relative humidity, heat stress index, dew point temperature, as well as Temperature-Humidity Index (THI), a livestock-specific heat stress calculation. 

The Kestrel DROP allows users to customize logging rates, connections, and alerts. 

Check Out This Amazing Feature

Another great feature is that it is dust and waterproof which is absolutely necessary to be able to continually work in harsh farming conditions.

You will be informed of heat conditions in the barn, during transport, or anywhere livestock is housed. This is also well used in heat stress feedlot cattle management.

Large beef cattle farms today will be using large fenced-in acreage to just feed the cattle each day.

The problem today is that the cattle are kept for days during the nice weather season in these feedlot conditions, so without a heat stress monitor, you wouldn’t know when to move the cattle to a cooler spot.

Managing Heat Stress Levels in Cows with Diet

Kestrel 5400AG Cattle Heat Stress TrackerOther methods for increasing the nutrients the cows get to improve their condition include feeding them more grain, fats, and high-quality forage.

Do not forget that when they perspire and pant they lose a lot of water. While drinking water helps replenish moisture, it cannot replace essential minerals.

These can be dealt with by increasing potassium levels in the dry food. You will want to increase sodium and magnesium levels slightly.

Cows may experience a decline in rumination when their forage is of high quality. As long as you add buffers, this should correct the problem.

To an agricultural person, this is what is meant by buffers. Buffers are compounds which in aqueous(a water) solution help resist changes in rumen pH when high grain, low forage

proper buffers will maintain pH balance and better, more consistent milk production.

The latest developments are focusing on making use of genetics to breed cows that are more resistant to heat.

Already some cattle are more capable of experiencing less heat stress. Genetic studies could make breeding the cows with better tolerance with other cows more common, resulting in animals that are naturally resistant to heat stress.

Weather Readings Affect Feeding Rates

When the weather is hot and humid, always increase the number of feedings. Try feeding them early in the morning or later on at night so that they can eat when temperatures are likely to be more comfortable and will lead to less feed heating which causes spoilage. This also keeps flies to a minimum.

Keep observing the cows as needed to adjust feedings and make any changes to the barn to facilitate cooling. For specialized help, consult with your feed consultant but following the above tips should help your dairy cattle stress management.

As you can see the heat stress in cows can be made a controllable situation using the proper plan. The plan would include dietary planning and heat management plans for watching and changing where your cattle are currently residing.

If it is in a barn situation have one plan. If it is a heat stress feedlot cattle situation have a plan for that.

Move them to a shaded pasture area possible, but don’t just keep them in an open feedlot. The heat stress in the cow feedlot must be maintained, to ensure normal steady milk production from your cows.

So use the tools that are available to help you out. Continue your farming activities but still be alerted to the changes that are happening from minute to minute and hour to hour.

George

Weather Enthusiast’s Journey

From an early age, I discovered the profound impact weather has on our lives.

A stormy day can disrupt your plans, while perfect weather feels like a precious gift meant to be savored to its fullest.

Through this site, I’m passionate about sharing my expertise on weather instruments and their practical applications for enhancing your daily life.

I’ll show you how a personal weather station can transform your home experience, giving you valuable insights about conditions on your specific property.

Explore my discoveries and gain the knowledge to truly understand the weather patterns in your area.

Welcome to a community where weather isn’t just small talk—it’s a fascinating science that connects us all.

Weather Stations Can Be Used For Better Gardens

When one thinks of a garden, they see a fresh, green-filled garden with many different types of vegetables, growing and flourishing.

You are looking at and savoring the great fresh vegetable taste, you will be experiencing. The expectation is to harvest some of the vegetables and eat them.

But the mystery is how to get to that point with your garden. It isn’t good luck that successful growers possess, it is know-how and work.

You can use the instrument metrics from your weather station to help you get there.

You can look forward to mouth-watering vegetables that you picked from your own garden. You will also be saving much money on your food budget.

How Do You Use Weather Measurements?

To determine how to best use weather readings, you probably should first determine which readings will be important to you. This will be important in helping you to produce a garden full of wonderful fresh produce ready to be consumed by you and your family.

So the best instrument readings for this will be, temperature readings, rainfall amounts, barometric pressure, wind direction & speed, as well as relative humidity. There are other readings that may be gathered and used from instruments such as moisture content, wind chill factor, and dew point.

The instruments used to gather these readings are a thermometer, anemometer, barometer, and pyranometer. A pyranometer is one of the instruments that aren’t ordinarily found on regular consumer-purchased weather stations.

It is usually only available on advanced scientific climate instrument stations. These advanced stations are exceedingly more expensive than the standard weather stations. The scientific stations are in the neighborhood of $4000-$6000 for the most part. Regular, really good weather stations are usually purchased in the $500-$1500 range.

What Is A Pyranometer?

Ambient Weather TM-206 Solar Power Meter (Pyranometer)

A pyranometer is a form of an actinometer. I know, what is an actinometer?

What is a Pyranometer? Well, let’s get to the bare bones of what we are talking about here. We are talking about measuring the effects of the sun’s rays in an area.

This measurement is done by the sun’s rays, activating a chemical reaction in the measuring tool to see how effective the sun’s photons are actually working to help out plant growth in an area you are measuring.

Let’s look at an example. You have a small garden on the north side of your property. It really isn’t shaded at all, but you are concerned about how effective the sun will be in growing plants in a garden there. So you measure the sun using a pyranometer.

What you find out is that an area on the south side of your property actually rates as a better garden spot than the plot on the north side. It is close, but the pyranometer shows the south side plot is better for more effective plant growth.

Using The Readings From Your Personal Weather Station

Any advantage you can get as a gardener makes you a much happier gardener. Learning to effectively use scientific data to your advantage is your goal. Why do all the hard work, if you aren’t going to grow a great harvest of plentiful vegetables?

Let’s look at some things that are very important to maintain great plant growth. One of the first things is to maintain a good amount of water for growth but not too much water.

Too much moisture in the soil can result in stunted growth and can actually be bad enough that you can suffocate the root system of the plants and kill them.

What About The Rainfall?

Watching your rainfall by using your weather station can be a very invaluable source of this information. You will know when it rains and how much it rains. Knowing when the rain is falling can help you with preparing your plants for the rainfall.

You can make sure the soil around the roots is aerated well by loosening up the dirt enough around the roots to cause the water to be close to the roots but not pocketing enough to not allow the roots to get the necessary oxygen from the soil close to the roots. This will allow continued plant growth.

The Facts Show This

Scientific facts back up my statements. One of the most common reasons for the suppression of plant growth during very wet periods is the reduction of oxygen in the soil that is available to plant roots. Plant cells respire and need oxygen to survive and grow.

You will need to be concerned if the soil air drops to less than 12% oxygen. At that level roots will suffocate and die. Some things to watch for are, oxygen in the air in the soil forces out soil air. Also when there is less air available, the oxygen is rapidly used and becomes inadequate for good root growth.

In very wet soils, organic matter begins to decompose and this process will also further deplete oxygen in the soil area. So as you can see, how much water, where is the water, and proper care of the soil in your garden, does make a large difference to a successful gardener.

So in the big picture having a station in your garden area will allow you to measure the rainfall in your garden. The station’s rain gauge will be very useful for this.

Watering Your Plants

Watering habits vary widely from one gardener to the next. As an example, one group tends to get very busy with their lives and they end up forgetting about the plants. The plants often wilt and often don’t get the water quickly enough to save them.

Whereas the second group of gardeners tends to pamper their plants. They then have a tendency to water their plants too much. They often come close to killing their plants by drowning them.

With either of these extremes, you can stress your plants to the point that you will end up weakening your plants. Our experience tells us these weakened plants are the first to fall prey to bugs and diseases. Most importantly they also will produce fewer blooms or vegetables.

Watering seems simple but actually takes a little finesse to do properly. Start by identifying your soil type and measuring the actual amount of water your plants receive.

“Vegetables need an inch of water per week delivered by either rainfall or irrigation. This converts roughly to six gallons per square yard per week,” said Robert Polomski, Clemson Extension Horticulturist at Clemson University, in a report out of Clemson’s Agriculture Dept recently.

It has been found that thoroughly soaking the soil with infrequent watering is better than shallow regular watering. Experience also shows that a deep soaking will encourage the plant roots to reach deep into the soil.

It is also known that shallow watering will keep roots close to the surface, and this will cause the plants to be more susceptible to drought.

Sunshine Anyone?

Very important when tending a garden is that you have the necessary sunshine to grow the plants you have planted. It is very important that are able to keep track of how much sun and just how much good weather you have been having so that you can make sure you are on schedule with bringing your garden along.

You need to make sure your plants are maturing at the pace they need to be so that they will be producing the crop for consumption you have planned out. Always remember that your growing season is on a set schedule.

You do know approximately the length of your season and when you will need the crop harvested before the frost hits. So use the daily temperature data and keep track of the good elements days so that you know you are on schedule. Your station with the software provided will be able to give you this record.

Another thing a station will provide you with is the current wind speed, the top wind gusts in the last 12 hour period, and whether or not the wind speed is trending upward or downward. In looking at the anemometers provided the information you will be able to analyze where you are at with how moist or dry your garden is currently.

The longer the wind is blowing, the more dried out your garden will be. With this information, you will be better prepared to know when it is time to be watering your garden.

Remember, a garden that is too wet is prone to be killing off the plants, and a garden too dry will mean your vegetables will not be growing up to their potential.

Adding on or buying a newer, better-equipped station would be two ways to improve your gardening experience. Adding extra instruments and displays to your selection of tools would be a wise move.

With your added repertoire of tools, you will have more information to analyze, and then more timely work to be done, to maximize your vegetable’s growth.

In Summation

So looking at the much larger picture, when you are taking a view of the garden and using an instrument station, it is seen very easily, that the most important things you need to be concerned with are sunlight, rain, wind, and the growing season information.

Weather stations do provide readings for all of these areas. You just need to use the information. Let the information work for you. Data logging can be a very helpful thing.

If your unit does have software, this will help you out tremendously. Applying your knowledge of the vegetables you are growing, the station’s daily readings, along using proper weeding, and watering techniques will help your garden flourish.

You can check up on more sophisticated element station collection units to find even more complicated methods to use for even better gardens. More instruments, more information, and much better yielding gardens.

Read More About Gardening & Farming With Weather Stations-View Related Posts Below

How Weather Stations Help Farmers
Farming depends heavily on weather. So as a farmer you need the best possible weather information. Learn how to get the best information.

How Weather Stations Help Gardeners
Weather Stations help gardeners quite a bit. Grow a better garden with the guidance of a personal weather station.

George

Weather Enthusiast’s Journey

From an early age, I discovered the profound impact weather has on our lives.

A stormy day can disrupt your plans, while perfect weather feels like a precious gift meant to be savored to its fullest.

Through this site, I’m passionate about sharing my expertise on weather instruments and their practical applications for enhancing your daily life.

I’ll show you how a personal weather station can transform your home experience, giving you valuable insights about conditions on your specific property.

Explore my discoveries and gain the knowledge to truly understand the weather patterns in your area.

Welcome to a community where weather isn’t just small talk—it’s a fascinating science that connects us all.