The Fall season has arrived at Hill Top Dairy.　 Harvesting of corn silage is now complete.　 The weather cooperated and corn silage was harvested at 60 to 65 % moisture.　 Manure in the lagoons has been pumped out through a hose and injected into the soil of harvested corn and soybean fields.　 Now it is a good feeling to have lots and lots of lagoon storage capacity.　 I hear many dairymen say they should have built a larger lagoon.

Our article was finally published in Hoards Dairyman, September 25, page 604.　 I think many of you subscribe to Hoards Dairyman and will read it in Japanese.　 I could summarize the article by saying our recently calved cows were telling us that they wanted at least three feet of bunk space.　 If we had two feet of bunk space per cow, dry matter intake (DMI) would decrease.　 If we provided three feet of bunk space per cow, DMI would increase.　 Based on these results, we constructed a new 4-row barn with three feet bunk space per cow just for our recently calved cows.　 We started moving cows into the new barn October 16.

We were surprised that recently calved cows needed three feet of bunk space.　 We thought two feet would be very adequate.　 We repeated the trial four times with the same results each time.　 Our fresh cows (days 1 to 28 after calving) were telling us they would eat more if we gave them three feet of bunk space.

I still find this hard to believe.　 I look forward to feed back from other dairymen on this subject.　 Have any of you seen this situation in Japan?　 Watch close when a dairymen moves a group of cows out of the fresh cow pen.　 Monitor DMI closely to see if it changes.

So far I have had only limited feed back on this article.　 I will let you know in future newsletters if I get interesting feed back from dairymen.

Dr. Colloton taught another ultrasound class for veterinarians at Hill Top Dairy on October 12-13.　 Dr. Colloton likes the fact that we have lots of pregnant cows to examine.　 She told me that dairymen with very high producing herds are switching to ultrasound so they get a visual diagnosis of twins.　 Use of ultrasound for bovine pregnancy diagnosis is increasing slowly.　 Veterinarians are still going through a learning cycle.