For a variety of economic and engineering reasons, newly built livestock enterprises have a larger capacity than average, existing livestock enterprises. Large livestock enterprises may cause many types impacts in the community that houses them. One item of growing concern is the use of public roadways by livestock operations. As facilities grow larger, the sheer quantity of inputs and outputs that traverse the farm gate also grows larger. These materials often travel in large vehicles over public roads; larger vehicles can create additional congestion for local residents and can increase the local municipality's costs with respect to roadway construction and maintenance.
The purpose of this bulletin is to estimate the number of additional trips made by passenger and heavy vehicles over public roadways that are attributable to the operation of animal-confinement facilities. These figures may be useful for public officials who must estimate the increased roadway usage by new livestock facilities for use in forecasting increased roadway maintenance and construction costs. These calculations may also be of interest in calculating increases in traffic congestion that might arise from new or expanded livestock enterprises.
These calculations are made for seven different animal production enterprises: beef-cattle feedlots, dairy farms, swine farrow-to-finish operations, hog-finishing operations, sow-farrowing operations, broiler-chicken operations, and layer-chicken operations. All non-poultry calculations are made for confinement operations with an operating capacity of 1,000 animal units, while all calculation for poultry operations are made for facilities with a capacity of 10,000 animal units. The larger operating capacity for poultry operations reflects the greater relative intensity commonly found in modern poultry operations and roughly reflects common capacities of new facilities for the various species.
All calculations are made by assuming that the production technologies, transportation modes, and biological efficiencies are equivalent to those of an average Ohio operation as captured by the Ohio State University Extension Livestock Enterprise Budgets. Because certain assumptions, such as the technology employed to handle animal manure, can greatly influence the total number of trips generated by new operations, trip estimates are provided for several types of manure-handling systems. All trip calculations were performed using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program; this spreadsheet is available from the authors and allows recalculation of trip estimates for alterations of key-operation parameters.
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Keith L. Smith, Associate Vice President for Ag. Adm. and Director, OSU Extension.
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