Say Anything Blog

The headline says it all! Well, almost...milk production is up 20% with the well bedded bovines!

Auburn Township [OH] - Happy cows produce more milk. That’s why Bill Timmons put waterbeds in his barn.

Go ahead, get the chuckle out of the way. Timmons expects a few laughs over the creature comforts now extended to his herd. The Geauga County farmer installed 200 of the squishy mattresses in the bovine boudoir. Spent nearly $40,000 doing it, too.

Crazy? Far from it. The black-and-white Holsteins love the amenities - so much so, they’ve already started paying Timmons back.

Daily milk production jumped more than 20 percent after just two weeks of relaxed reclining in the new five-star accommodations, Timmons reports. Apparently, the cows adhere to a certain you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours philosophy.

“You take care of them,” Timmons said, “and they’ll take care of you.”

Timmons caught a rising wave in dairy decor. At this point, he’s one of the first Northeast Ohio farmers to invest in the bedding, which reached the United States nearly a decade ago after debuting in Europe.

An estimated 150,000 of the beds now slosh around the country, according to Dean Throndsen, owner of Advanced Comfort Technology, the lone North American producer of the beds.

Several thousand of those can be found in the eastern half of Ohio.

Each waterbed - slightly smaller than a full mattress, though without a headboard - holds 14 gallons of water within a tough rubber hide. The liquid cushions a lounging cow; in essence, the 1,500-pound animal blissfully floats atop inches of water.

No headboard? Well there goes the joke about a padded headboard being “safe sex”!