Krauss Dairy center is located at 2250 Oil City Road between Secrest Road and US 250. Krauss Dairy Center provides cows for research and is home to the Animal Sciences’ bio-mass to energy conversion laboratory.
The Krauss Dairy Center maintains a herd of approximately 120 lactating cows for mastitis, nutrition, and reproduction experiments. The breeds of dairy cows in the herd are Holstein (90%) and Jersey (10%). Lactating cows are housed in either a 158 free-stall barn or 48 tie-stall barn. Cows are milked twice daily in a double-3 side-opening parlor. Stalls for lactating cows are bedded with either recycled manure solids or sawdust. Areas used for physiology and nutrition experiments include twelve customized stalls for metabolism studies and six digestion stalls.
Pregnant, non-lactating cows are managed in either free-stall housing or on pasture. The maternity and calving barn has 14 box-stalls bedded with straw and shavings. Calves are raised in hutches and nurseries until weaned from milk. Weaned calves are in loose housing and grouped by age. Breeding age heifers are in a free-stall barn and pastured during Summer.
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Located at Krauss Dairy Center are pilot scale methane digesters. These digesters provide researchers the opportunity to explore the biological conversion of agricultural and industrial bio-mass to energy for use as heat and electricity. |
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