"Manure is a cheap source of bedding and the cows really love it," say Adrian and Dutch Rovers, Chazy, N.Y., who have come up with a method to turn manure into dry, absorbent bedding for their 420-stall free stall barn.

The Rovers use a chain harrow every three days to spread manure evenly on the concrete exercise lots outside their barns. After the manure has dried for one or two days, they use a front-end loader to scrape it into piles, then store it in their commodity shed. When they're ready to bed the stalls, they load the dried manure into a feed mixer truck which drives down the alleys, unloading bedding into the stalls.

"It eliminates the need to buy straw and keeps cows comfortable and clean," says Adrian. "We bed the stalls about once a month. It takes only two hours to bed the entire barn. The final product is gray in color and very dry and fine in consistency. Our method works better than using a hydraulic extractor to press moisture out of manure because extractors never get the manure completely dry. It takes only about 10 minutes to chain harrow the entire lot. The manure spreads more easily if it's moist. If there are too many solids, you get clumps. If it rains after we've chain harrowed the manure, we just chain harrow it again and let it dry. If we think it's going to rain, we pile the manure up, then spread it out and chain harrow it later. Cows walk across the concrete exercise lots on their way to and from the milking parlor. The lots are sloped to provide for water run-off and faster drying. However, when drying conditions are good, we bring extra manure over every week from our heifer barn and chain harrow it too. We mix lime with the manure as it's loaded into the mixer truck. The lime raises the pH of the mixture, kills harmful bacteria, and makes the bedding more absorbent. It's also good fertilizer."

The Rovers make their bedding from the first of May to the end of October. When they run out of room in their commodity shed, they store the extra bedding in a vacant bunker silo, covering it with plastic. "Chain-harrowed manure has a small particle size, causing it to pack very tightly," says Adrian.

Manure from the free stalls is scraped into an outdoor pit. Since the manure can't be used again for bedding, it's spread over fields.