A blast of fresh air is a powerful disinfectant

Getting foul air out of calves’ housing and clean air in should be the cornerstone of every calf health programme, writes Martin Ryan

ONE of the most effective disinfectants for the rearing of healthy calves is already available in an abundance on farms and it’s “free” because it is nothing more than plenty of fresh air, said Liam Gannon of Volac.

“If there are viruses in the air outside generally on a cold day those viruses will generally only last about 20 minutes and within the calf shed when you have 20, 30 or 40 calves there, those viruses will last for up to 24 hours.”

He stressed that it is very important to get adequate volumes of fresh air through the calf housing and the challenge is to “get the foul air out and fresh air in as quickly as possible”.

He said that a calf requires about 2.3sqm of housing until they go out to grass.

“You can get away with 1.61.7sqm per calf but everything needs to be very right when you are putting big numbers of calves tight together,” he said. In the ideal situation the shed would be positioned and laid out so as to suck the foul air out through ventilation in the roof, but in most situations that is not the case as the calf housing has not been custom designed and built.

The guideline for adequate ventilation is 0.04msq per calf and generally the air inlet should be twice the size of the air outlet and normally divided between both sides of the building so generally for 40 calves the provision for outlet