PEOPLE

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.

As a parent, you try to incorporate teaching the alphabet into daily life, and as dairy farmers, what better way to learn your ABCs but to use the letter of the dam and come up with another word that starts with the same letter?

A background in dairy farming and a love for science led Bill Vanderkooi to own and operate EcoDairy. This farm focuses on agritourism and research. In doing so, it regularly adopts systems that are new to British Columbia and sometimes Canada.