PEOPLE

Instead of renovating their 51-cow tiestall barn, Amanda Lukassen and her husband, Kevin Sundborg, chose to build a new 80- to 90-cow robot barn. Using robots gives them more flexibility in their schedules and enables them to run the dairy in Ormstown, Quebec, without hiring outside help. View the slideshow below.

Put $50,000 into their existing tiestall barn to keep it running for another year, completely redo the facility or build a new robot barn.

With no room to expand at his home farm, Roelof Meilink built a new freestall barn near Red Deer, Alberta. It originally housed heifers, but the plan was to one day add on a parlour and move in the milking herd.

As Roelof Meilink, owner of Meilink Dairies Ltd., home of Breezynol Holsteins, recognized limited capacity at his home farm, he found an answer in an open space with more opportunities than he first imagined.

In 2015, the Hammond family built a four-robot barn with 240 freestalls and sawdust bedding. The previous freestall barn is now used for heifers and dry cows, while the old parlour and holding area were renovated for calves in group pens with automated feeders. The family is looking to expand their new barn this spring with two more milking robots and a maternity area.

Overcrowding and an aging parlour had the Hammond family contemplating the next step for their dairy farm near Ingersoll, Ontario.

“We decided going forward that robots were the best idea for the long-term,” Glen Hammond says.