Bedding sand may be hygienic and freely available, but it destroys pumps at an alarming rate. Sand is a great bedding material in cow cubicles. It's inert, doesn't harbour harmful bacteria, is easy to use, always available and relatively cheap. But ithas one serious failing, which has limited its use for the majority of dairy farmers. And that is its ability to reduce, sometimes in only a few days, the inner workings of pumps to ineffective lumps of congealed rubber and flakes of deformed metal. Plus its reluctance to go anywhere other than at a bottom of lagoon in one immovable, solid mass. Long-time sand users have usually worked out their own systems of handling the sand that inevitablyescapes each day from cubicles and finds its way into slurry passages and then into lagoons. This loss-rate usually amounts to about 5t a cow every year.
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