Located in Blain, Pa., Pleasant View Farms is a third-generation, family-owned dairy farm. Logan Bower is the current owner and manager of Pleasant View Farms and bought the farm from his father in 1997.
Bower explained, “Our milk is marketed through Land O’ Lakes, which most of it goes to Hawley, Carlisle and Shippensburg.”
The small Pennsylvania dairy farm has a total herd of 630 cows, milking 550 from the herd and producing more than 13 million pounds of milk a year.
Pleasant View Farms originally used sawdust on mattresses for its bedding. While sawdust is a common and cost-effective bedding, it does have some downsides.
Sawdust is an organic material that promotes the rapid growth of pathogens and bacteria. These pathogens and bacteria can cause infection and mastitis in dairy cows, decreasing the cows’ comfort and milk quality.
About 15 years ago, the dairy stopped using the mattress and sawdust combination, opting to use sand bedding for their cows instead.
Sand is considered the “gold standard” for cow bedding. It provides cows with a clean and comfortable resting place, increasing milk quality and maintaining cow health. Because sand is an inorganic material, it is less likely to harbor bacteria and helps prevent mastitis. Sand also decreases the chances of hock lesions and hoof diseases in cows.
While sand bedding has numerous benefits, it has the potential to be expensive. Sand is abrasive and can wear out manure systems, meaning frequent replacement of parts. It also takes time and money to remove the used sand from the stalls and replace it with clean sand. Disposal of the sand-laden manure can also be an expensive and labor-intensive task.
“We were buying fresh sand for quite a few years - not recycling, just buying it,” Bower said. “We got to the point where I needed to do something.”
Buying new sand and disposing of old sand quickly becomes an expensive process. McLanahan Sand Separation Systems allow farmers to reuse sand, saving costs on hauling and buying clean sand.
Bower was initially hesitant to try a Sand Separation System.
“I was always intimidated by the system,” Bower said. “There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of maintenance.”
However, when searching for a solution to his problem, another farmer told Bower about his success with mechanical sand separation and recycling bedding material.
“His comment was ‘We either work on cows or we work on maintaining the separator system,’” explained Bower. “And that is what we decided to do.”
Having knowledge of McLanahan from early on in his dairy career, Bower chose to work with McLanahan to recycle his sand bedding.
Pleasant View Farms uses a skid loader to push manure into a flume, which is flushed into a reception pit. Sand-laden manure is then pumped into a conditioning box where it combines with overflow from the Hydrocyclone, creating a dilute mixture.
The diluted manure flows into a Rotary Drum Separator to remove fiber and debris. The water and sand portion that is separated from the manure fiber and debris is pumped up to the Hydrocyclone. Sand and water are further separated by the Hydrocyclone, with the sand discharging into the Sand Washer for cleaning and rinsing.
Excess liquid is combined with the previously removed fibers and pumped into storage. Clean sand discharges from the Sand Washer onto a Dewatering Screen to remove excess moisture. Clean, drip-free sand is discharged from the Dewatering Screen for reuse.
Since implementing the McLanahan Sand Separation System, Pleasant View Farms has continued to provide comfortable and clean bedding for its cows, while saving time and money.
“What I like best about the McLanahan Sand Separation System is that we don’t have to buy as much sand,” Bower said.
The Sand Separation System allows the dairy to efficiently clean and reuse sand for bedding, while still reaping the benefits of using sand bedding. The farm no longer clears sand from the lagoon or hauls new sand, saving resources and time.
“That was like a two-week job – hauling sand – so that’s gone,” Bower said. “I didn’t realize how much work, how labor intensive, our old system was. This whole project has given me more time because I don’t have to spend so much time handling manure or worrying about manure.”
Bower’s hesitancy to use a Sand Separation System was completely eliminated when he saw the results that the system provided.
“It’s been running pretty flawlessly,” Bower said, “Compared to what we were doing before, it actually made the process easier.”
