There was an explosion and fire at a dairy farm in Texas recently and approximately 18,000 cows were killed.
How large would that barn have to be to contain that many 1500 pound animals? That’s 27 million pounds of beef on the hoof!
The space required for a cow weighing 1300-1500 pounds to rise, recline and rest comfortably is about 48" wide and 9’ long. In a recumbent position, the cow’s body space occupies approximately 68 - 70" of the stall length (see Figure 1). The stall surface should slope upward (1-2") in the direction the cow lies.
4’x9’x18,000= 648,000 sq ft. No idea if that’s usually one building or several.
Looking at the farm in Google Maps, the biggest building appears to be about 2,400 by 800 feet (though I don’t know if that’s the building that burned). That’s about 44 acres.
I saw this earlier.
How to dispose of 18,000 cow carcasses? They’re already halfway cremated, I guess.
In Texas even the barbecue is oversized.
This is a problem that has not yet been solved.
I see a study that says the volume of a cow ranges from 0.61 to 0.96 m3 (sometimes you gotta love the Internet). Taking an average of .785 m3, 18,000 cows packed together would have a volume of 14,000 m3. That’s a cube 24 m (80 feet) on a side, roughly the size of a large office building. I’d like to calculate it as a cone, but I can’t find any data on the angle of repose of a pile of cows.
My grandpa told a story about how his family’s horse barn burned down and their hogs got to have a horse carcass smorgasbord. There were some bones left over, though.
Given that they didn’t die of disease, I would think it would be relatively straightforward to use the bodies to feed other animals. It wou"d be a shame to simply destroy them!
Or occupying almost 19,000m3 if they were spherical cows.
Texas is small: that is a macro pig farm in Enzhou, China. Slaughtering over a million pigs a year means one every 30 seconds, 24/7. And then processing them. 18,000 animals are handled in less that a week.
If the cows are spherical you can send them rolling to China, they will handle that. Pigs eat that and more.
Is it just me that sees these things?
Out of an entire internet full of cow pictures, the best picture USA Today could find to illustrate a story of cows that died in a fire is a picture of a cow in the middle of a flood?
Hell, if the damn barn had had a flooding sprinkler system like the picture implies the cows would mostly have survived.
I’ve been trying to calculate how many cows were being milked simultaneously around the clock at this mega-farm.
Assuming each cow is milked twice a day, that’s 36,000 milkings each day. A typical milking takes, say, five minutes. So that’s a total of 180,000 minutes of milking each day. Dividing that number by 24 yields 7500 minutes of milking each hour. Dividing that number by 60 yields 125. So if my math is correct (a dubious assertion, to be sure), there would have been 125 cows being milked at any given minute on this farm.
Is that correct?
I doubt it. Modern cow breeds yield more than 20 litres of milk per day, my guess is that it would take much longer than two time five minutes to squeeze that out of an udder, and I doubt cows are being milked after midnight. So I would multiply your 125 cows by at least four: make it 500.
Are you accounting for the sphere packing problem?
In our town we had a barn fire that took out almost 100 cows. A excavator was used to dig a trench and pile the caucuses in and they were buried. The smell was getting pretty bad by the time the fire was out and this started.
Apparently you can milk 10-12 per hour.
I can think of several caucuses that might be improved by burying in a trench. Preferably before they get a chance to vote. 