RICHMOND, Ont. – The price of milk quota and the stability of the dairy industry will dictate how quickly Adrian and Arnold Schouten fill their dairy barn.
Last year the brothers built a state-of-the-art 400-cow dairy barn. But the barn is only half full of milking cows and the brothers aren’t rushing to fill it.
The pair milk about 250 cows out of their 500 cow herd. Any new heifers added to the milking line are from their own herd – a slow way to fill a barn.
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But Adrian said their new barn and milking parlor is more efficient and they can afford not to have it full.
The Schouten farm is just outside Ottawa in the municipality of Carleton in one of the most populated areas of Ontario. About 750,000 people live here and of the 60,000 who live in rural areas only 5,000 are farmers.
So the Schoutens wanted an efficient barn to get the most out of their expensive land.
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“We wanted a more efficient setup than we had,” said Adrian, adding they toured several American dairy farms before settling on the free-stall style.
“We’re as efficient as anyone else down there,” Arnold told a group of farm writers on a tour of the farm.
They also farm 1,800 acres, of that 1,000 is cash crop.
Being close to urban centres has changed the way the pair deal with manure from the cattle. In the new barn, pits underneath the floors slope into a lagoon. Every three months a contractor pumps the manure onto the fields. The process only takes a couple of days and there are few complaints from neighbors about smell.
“We’re not tanking it and spending all day doing it,” said Arnold.
When they built the barn they also added a 36-cow parallel milking parlor. Eighteen cows line up on each side of the parlor and the milker attaches the machine between the cow’s back legs, not from the side as in traditional milking parlors.
A computerized read-out lets the milker know how much milk each cow is producing. The cows are milked three times a day and the herd average is 30 litres of milk daily.
