Cooling cows

Dr. Robert Collier from the Department of Animal Veterinarian Food Sciences at U of I talks about how to relieve the heat on dairy cows. Today, dairy cows are very sensitive and the first sign of heat stress is they will drop their food intake and drop their milk production. And they're doing this to avoid overheating. If the stress is severe enough, they can get into real dangerous situations where they could die from it. Once their temperature gets above one hundred one, which is the cows body temperature 101, then the air around the animals hotter than the animal itself and heat will actually start to flow into the animal. When you have temperatures of 104 or 105 degrees, this is extremely dangerous for cows that are producing milk unless you provide some kind of cooling for the animals. There's two major ways. First, once the air temperature is above the cows body temperature, you cannot just use a fan because that's the temperature, the air in the shade. Let's say it's 105. So if you put a fan on an animal, you're just going to drive the heat in faster because it's cooler than the air temperature. So what you need to do is you either need to drop the temperature of the air by evaporating water with mist, but it must have so a fan mist combination and that will bring the air temperature down, which allows the cow to move some of her heat out, or alternatively, you can directly with the cow and then evaporate the water from the cow skin. Great tips for dealing with oppressive heat.