'Moood' music to relax your cows

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Some farmers swear that playing music in the parlour or the coop makes their animals more relaxed and productive. And it's as simple as pressing "play."

The staff of Tomlinsons Dairies in Wrexham, Wales, told Wales Online that playing songs by Tom Jones during milking "keeps (the cows) relaxed and improves milk yields." The cows are partial to the tunes She's a Lady and Delilah. There are even pictures of the legendary Welshman hanging up in the barn.

Steve Ledsham, an English chicken farmer, told the Daily Mail he discovered his chickens' appreciation for the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber when egg production doubled after he had been playing the tunes while building a barn near the coop. Now he makes sure music is always playing for his hens.

The practice is fairly popular. A 2012 Freedom Food survey of British farmers found 44 per cent play music for their animals or keep the radio on for them. The key, it seems, is a constant rhythm that can drown out stressful background noises from machinery or at feeding time.

Evidence is largely anecdotal. One University of Leicester study from 2001 found that playing cows slow, relaxing music like Everybody Hurts by R.E.M. boosted milk output by three per cent. However, don't play them any old thing; the cows in the study preferred no music to fast songs like Bananarama's Venus. And farmer Frannie Miller told Modern Farmer that her cows "do not like Willie Nelson."  BF