From the March 22, 1994 edition of The New Castle Record
They may not read the funnies, but dairy cows seem perfectly amenable to using newspaper as bedding in their stalls.
Recent experiments in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania show that compared to straw, shredded newspaper keeps cows drier and saves farmers money, said Jerry Jones, Extension dairy scientist at Virginia Tech. Not only that, it provides another use for the low-grade paper that’s becoming a recycling albatross.
Right now, some recycling dealers on the East Coast are paying up to $40 a ton for someone to take it off their hands, said Mike Murphy, director of the State Division of Recycling.
“There’s very little market for newspaper,” he said. “We’re simply oversupplied.” One reason for the glut, he added, is that some landfills are no longer accepting newspaper.
Newspaper that does not end up in landfills can take decades to decompose in the often-anaerobic environment. And the amount of newspaper that makes its way to such landfills is enormous.
The typical American household discards more than five pounds of newspaper a week, Murphy said. Multiply that by the approximately 88 million households in the US, and Americans are throwing away more than 440 million pounds of newsprint every seven days.
A typical dairy farm might use seven pounds per week of shredded newspaper for every cow, said Bob Appleman, an Extension dairy scientist who has conducted research on the subject at the University of Minnesota.
With 10 million dairy cows in the United States, that could add up to 60 million pounds -or a not-too-shabby 16 percent -of the newspaper.
Virginia has approximately 143,000 dairy cows, yielding a potential use of more than 1 million pounds of paper per week.
Because it is a new idea, not many dairy farmers have ventured into using newspaper as bedding, Jones said, although studies have found it to be mores absorbent than straw. It takes only about 80 percent as much newspaper to provide the same dryness as straw.
And the newspaper is extremely easy to dispose of. As it gets mixed in with manure, it simply decomposes. A farmer can spread the residual product on his fields as fertilizer, Jones said.
So, what’s keeping the farmers from trying the new(s) practice? One possible hindrance is the needs to shred newspaper to the desired size.
“Straw is already baled when you buy it and sawdust is ready to use, but newspaper needs to be chopped,” Jones said. “Most farmers would have to modify a conventional feed chopper to chop more finely, creating a machine that also takes some extra power to run.”
Farmers may have to do a little scouting around to find a steady, reliable supply of dry newspaper. “The biggest problem is how to et hold of the stuff. I can think of various places,” Jones said. “But one possibility would be a landfill looking to get rid of newspaper. I also know one farmer who was buying it from local Boy Scouts. He was paying them so much a ton, and they were collecting it on Saturdays and actually delivering it to the farm.”
Finally, scientists are still looking into any possible side effects of cows eating newspaper or of any chemical residuals that end up on fields as fertilizer.
At this time, Jones said he knows of no significant problems with using newspaper as bedding.
“It’s actually getting to be a problem to find conventional bedding-sawdust is in demand for particle board, and many farmers don’t have access to straw,” he said. “So I think we’re going to see more and more interest in newspaper.”
-
Prepared by Shelly Koon