When it comes to calf barn cleaning, is “best practice” real life?
There’s always a “Gold Standard” to every procedure and goal in the calf industry. You need your calves this big by this time and you need to use this, this and this to be successful.
That’s fine and dandy, but what happens when real life gets in the way of these perfect standards?
We are going to take a deeper look into cleaning and sanitation protocols in calf barns.
We are well aware that there will be errors in the way things get done from time to time, and the last thing we want to happen when protocol drift inevitably happens is someone getting hurt.
Yes, we still use chemicals on our farm, but it only gets mixed with water, and you can’t do it wrong to make it dangerous and gas off.
We also knew that it wasn’t in the budget to have a special machine that mixed our chemicals for us. The best we could do is a $500 machine to mix chemicals and water at the right ratio.
We didn’t want to have chemicals that required a special temperature for activation and to avoid gassing off. Storing things in our refrigerator or keeping track of how old a solution is to make sure it is still effective isn’t something we have space or time for on our farm.
Lastly, we didn’t want a chemical that became a health concern at a certain ppm level, that would require PPE to use. One, for our employees, and two, for our calves. It’s not often that we have a whole barn empty that we can use products at the intended ppm level for sanitation. For some people, that might be a more regular occurrence, but for us, we empty a barn about once every 5-6 years, so it’s not practical for us to be trying to use chemicals that work best at a ppm level that can cause lung damage.
That might seem like a laundry list of things, especially when talking about industrial chemicals, but there are options out there that are SAFE, effective, and aren’t what the “gold standard” tells us we have to use.
BUT, just because they aren’t the “gold standard”, doesn’t mean they aren’t gold!
We have chosen to use DK-ll in our calf barn, why?
For all of the opposite reasons above!
It’s safe. It’s made from hydrogen peroxide (7%) and Ike Joe (acidified water). Acidified water with a pH of 1 sounds pretty dangerous though, right? And what the heck is Ike Joe?
The Ike Joe is a proprietary process that uses food grade sulfuric acid to create a very low pH, very antimicrobial agent, changing the molecular structure. Because of the hazard of sulfuric acid, it gets run back through the process and food grade calcium hydroxide is added to remove the hazard in sulfuric acid. This changes sulfuric acid to acidified calcium sulfate, a very weak acid but still low pH and still very antimicrobial acid that is very safe. Creating a positively charged hydronium ion which is very effective against the gram negative disease organisms common to the industry. Thus Ike-Joe.
All of that to say, it’s safe.
What else makes DK-ll so great? It’s stable. It doesn’t have to be mixed a certain amount of time before you want to use it, it can be stored at room temperature for at least a month (we have kept it much longer than that), it doesn’t gas off, and it doesn’t have a minimum activation temperature. I mean, can it get more practical than that?
Lastly, you might be wondering how effective this stuff can be considering how safe it is. Well, we have been using DK-ll in our calf barn for the last 5 years, and we can say with great confidence that it works. Don’t take our word for it though, contact us and we will send you over the data to prove it.