Depends on design of the bedded barn and how its managed. Most bedded barns are too wide with too flat of a roof, both of which make for a wetter building and in turn requires more bedding and more fuel and labor to put it in and out.

I have a client with 9 bedded barns and 15 years of records on them. Total cost of the bedding, labor, equipment, fuel, etc for bedding the barn is 7 cents/head space/day. I don't think you can cashflow the additional construction cost of a slat barn for 7 cents/day.

The other way to look at it is you cannot cash flow a slat barn on yardage income alone, you need to add in the fertilizer value to cashflow it. You can cashflow a bedded barn on yardage income, plus the fertilizer value is still there as added value.

I'm not at all against slat barns, I like them. I just like to have folks do the math before they make that investment.