Ventilating your calf barn

The Healthy Calf Podcast series is designed to help Ontario dairy and veal producers make informed decisions about youngstock health and welfare, with a focus on taking a more proactive approach to reduce disease and improve performance.

Frequent air exchanges, appropriate stocking density, and management of drafts are of the utmost importance for ensuring adequate ventilation to prevent respiratory disease in calves. Producers can struggle with the concept of how to balance all of these factors, and the metrics for ensuring excellent ventilation can differ from farm-to-farm. Learn more about ventilation for calf housing systems and how to optimize it with Harold House, an engineer with Dairy Logix, in this Podcast.

Harold was raised on a dairy and swine farm in Southwestern Ontario. He received his BSc degree in agricultural engineering from the University of Guelph in 1978. He later returned to the University of Guelph and received a Masters of Science in engineering in 1990. Harold started his career working in agri-industry before joining the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) in 1981. With OMAFRA, Harold served as an agricultural engineer for Lambton County, a researcher and lecturer at Ridgetown College and as the agricultural engineer for Huron County. Harold was OMAFRA’s provincial dairy and beef housing and equipment engineer. In that capacity he provided information to producers and agri-industry throughout Ontario on farmstead planning, barn layout, comfort and welfare, ventilation and manure handling. He also worked with veterinarians and other company representatives in troubleshooting livestock housing and ventilation problems. Since retiring from OMAFRA in 2015, Harold has been providing consulting services to the dairy industry through DairyLogix and working with other livestock species through his own company StocTec.