A Trip to Unit Lembu Tenusu

A Trip to Unit Lembu Tenusu (Dairy Cattle Unit)

On 2nd of June 2016, we went to Unit Lembu Tenusu (Dairy Cattle Unit) which was Ladang 9 by bus. We waited for the bus at Pusat Asasi.  The journey took about half an hour to reach there. Once we reached there, we listened to a talk about the cows by Penyelia Unit, Encik Mohamad Tarmizi . Then we went to the grazing area. We drank the fresh milk from the cow and we feed the calf some milk.

            There was new knowledge that we gained from the talk. First of all, there were two types of cow, dairy cattle and beef cattle. For the dairy cattle, they only ate at the farm and the beef cattle was a grazing cow. The dairy cattle was not allowed to graze at the grazing area because they should not walk for a long term otherwise the milk produced would be a little. However, they still need to exercise to stay healthy.

To differentiate between male and female cow, the male had the penis, on the other hand, the female had udder cow. There were three categories of cows, as putih, emas merah, and emas hitam which were the milk, meat and faeces (fertilisers) respectively.

The facilities for the cows at the farm were the toilet. For the commercialised farming usually, the flush was used to dispose of the faeces by flooding the farm. Secondly, cow barn and gate. There were two types of gates, electric-supplied gate and non-electric-supplied gate. At the UPM we used tie lock fencing which was a non-electrical gate for the cows safety. Thirdly, feeding trough to put cow’s foods, the grass and pallet.

The cows’ foods were the grass and the pallet. They only ate guinea grass. The pallet as the supplement for the cows. The pallet was made of corn, soybean, palm, bran, sugar and wheat. The pallet can be in the state of solid or liquid. Each cow consumed 3 kg of the pallet that cost RM 16 per day.

         The worker milked the cows at 8 in the morning and 4 in the evening. The time gap for milking was 8 hours. The worked used device that was called milking pouring. The milking procedure began an end with sterilising the device with boiling hot water. At the end of the process, the worker put iodine at the nipple of the cows, to avoid bacterial infection. Each dairy cattle produced an average of 3.5 litres of milk. The cows were milked twice a day. Some of the dairy cattle will experience dry period. Dry period caused the dairy cattle stop producing milk. In Thailand, the dairy cattle is injected with oxytocin to increase the milk production. The consequence of oxytocin is there will be no bleeding when the cows gave birth that will eventually die.