LACOMBE, Alta. – Hennie Bos and Tinie Eilers came to Canada looking for
wide-open spaces to set up a dairy farm.
The desire to immigrate had been on Bos’s mind since he started farming
in Holland, which is crowded and where environmental restrictions are
growing.
“From the time I started on my own I thought I would spend part of my
life over there and part of my life somewhere else,” he said.
As his 40th birthday approached, it became a now-or-never decision.
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“We thought if we are going to do something, we better do it now,
otherwise we would be getting too old,” Eilers said.
The immigration process took about two years once they decided to move.
They arrived in Lacombe, Alta., in 1994 after selling everything –
lock, stock and milk quota. With that money and a bank loan, they were
able to consolidate three dispersal herds of purebred Holsteins on
three quarters of land surrounding a rambling 80-year-old farmhouse.
They named the farm Bles-Wold Dairy, a combined name of their
respective hometowns in northern Holland. Their intention was to
quietly farm in Alberta and build a new life.
However, their oldest daughter is a diabetic and Eilers couldn’t find
European-style yogurt for her.
She started to make it herself, developing a naturally sweetened,
low-fat product. Her recipe uses pasteurized skim milk and yogurt
culture imported from Denmark. It is cooked and cured slowly, creating
a creamy, mild-flavoured product.
“That is the difference in our recipe,” she said. “Our incubation time
is quite long, about 16 hours. Commercial yogurts are eight hours.”
Bos and others encouraged Eilers to sell her yogurt at local farmers’
markets in 1996.
“Farmers’ markets are fun, but they are a lot of work,” she said.
Store managers started asking if they could stock her yogurt, which is
now available in 70 provincial retail outlets. Sales are also expanding
to Peace River and she sells yogurt on the farm.
Bos and Eilers also make sour cream from the skimmed-off fat.
They received business advice on pricing, labelling, health department
requirements and distribution from Alberta Agriculture and the food
processors association. They learned how to mass produce and market
2,000 litres a week.
Most of the work is done by hand and Eilers wants to automate the
filling and sealing of containers. Small containers are filled by hand
while a machine fills the bigger pails.
A dairy farmer all his life, Bos did not find the adjustment to a new
country as hard as Eilers, who had to learn English.
A middle school health teacher in Holland, she never envisioned herself
as a food processor working with staff.
There is plenty of laughter in the processing room and Eilers is
learning how to explain herself to her employees, who help mix and
package the yogurt.
“I think it is quite important to have fun in what you are doing,” she
said.
They obtained federal approval for their yogurt-making facility and,
along with eight other
Alberta dairy farms, are seeking full Hazard Analysis Critical Control
Points certification. While that means more paperwork and inspections,
they do not consider it burdensome because quality assurance rules in
the Netherlands are strictly monitored.
When they moved to the County of Lacombe eight years ago, the
municipality had not yet written the environmental bylaws now in
effect. The building permit application took about 10 minutes. However,
they were used to strict requirements in Holland so building an
environmentally friendly farm was not a challenge.
They milk their 200 registered Holsteins three times a day, with the
first milking at 5 a.m. The cows can move freely out of the barn to
pasture and receive a diet of silage, hay and grain. Each stall
contains a thick rubber mattress covered with sawdust to keep the barn
cleaner and drier.
Cows wear two sets of ear tags for national identification programs and
carry a yellow collar with a correlating number. The collar is read by
a sensor as the cow enters the milking parlor and its number goes into
the dairy computer to record milk output, how long it has been in milk,
breeding dates and heat detection.
The computer can tell them when something is wrong so they can begin
treatment and pull the sick cow from the production line.
They raise their own heifer replacements to maintain herd health. A few
bulls are kept for clean-up breeding, while the rest of the male calves
are shipped to a nearby veal farmer.
