Tour the Miedema Family Dairy Farm with Us

Welcome to Minimal Farm! The calves are born here and then when they are born they're moved over to the calf barn where they're monitored and they grow to the point where they're weaned and they're no longer taking milk. And then at that time they go over to our farm where they just grow and they're essentially like a teenager cow. They come back over to the dairy barn and they're artificially inseminated. When they're ready to be bred, it's around 13-14 months of age. So the goal is for them to have their first calf at two years of age. And then from there, once they're confirmed bred, the vet checks her every two weeks. The vet comes in and checks the herd. Once they're pregnant, we milk them to about 60 days of calving. We dry them up. Let them rest. We call it the vacation pen when they're just resting and they're preparing to have a baby. And then they come over to the calving pens where they're monitored. They're really close to the parlour, so we check on them a few times a day. That group of cows are on a different ration as well. It's a lower energy ration. Once the cows go in the dry period, we don't want them to just maintain their body weight. We don't want them getting fatter. We don't want them getting skinnier. So they're on a diet balanced by our nutritionists to maximize these cows' dry period and the calving healthy and ready to go for the next lactation. We're here in the calf barn right now. We try to get the calves out of the barn as soon as we can just so they don't pick up any bacteria or anything and they can get sick over there. So we bring them over here. We make sure that they get their six litres of colostrum as soon as we can get the cows milked or we feed them dried colostrum. They come in the calf barn. They come in the hutches for about three to four days until they learn how to drink the bottle by themselves. And then we move them in the group housing as you see here. We here have robotic calf feeders. They enter the calf feeder here. It reads their ear tag and it kind of dispenses the amount of milk they need per day. So they get small increments about six times a day I want to say. So about a litre and a half, two litres every time they enter. And then they can come back three to four hours later and get some more. Once we get them trained on the calf feeder, they start coming in here. So within a week, I see calves that enter about 20 times a day trying to get milk. So they want all the milk they can get. In groups of 12 or 13, it works best if you overcrowd them, that they're fighting over the feeder. And we want to maximize the space that we have here. So we've got four groups and we fill up one pen and then we go to the next and we start there. Every time the group is done or the calves are done and get moved to the home farm, we clean the bedding pack right out and we start totally fresh. This bar is about 20 years old now and we've updated the calf feeder once. And the new calf feeder is definitely working a lot better. It has a better cleaning system. So every six hours, it's doing a big clean of all the lines. And we've seen optimized, the calf health has been a lot better. When they're young, they're going to pick up anything they can and can get sick on us. So we try to prevent that and invest in the proper equipment to keep these cows healthy. The collars you see on these cows here, they're rumination collars. They've got basically three purposes. They show how much they're eating a day, their activity, and how much they're ruminating a day. If their rumination levels drop, that collar will tell us there's problems with the cow before physically seeing an issue with the cow. So if my computer tells me, attention 1660 to this cow here, I'll come out and take a peek at her. If she's looking a little ill or whatnot, I can kind of act on it quicker than her dropping off milk and then me realizing it. It's just another health benefit that we have with these cattle. It's easier to monitor them and help them along the way, especially with the amount of cows we have. It's tougher to see just one a day or whatever. So these collars help a lot. Plus with the activity, basically do 90% of our breeding off of the activity on the cows. Before these collars, I'd kind of have to physically see the cow in heat, standing heat, and then breed her maybe 6 to 12 hours later. And that's what I was based off of. Now these collars are telling me the best time to breed them for the best chance to get them pregnant. So this is the crowding gate, this here. So like at milking time, those gates behind you will open up and the cows will feed in through here. This gate will push back and lower. And then there's a button in the parlor. It's all automatic and it'll push the cows into the parlor as they get through the milking. The cows are in here. We've got a double-full parlor here. All their information will come up on the screen here. If it's a fresh cow, it'll warn us that it needs to go in the bucket. Usually cows will have a red leg band on it anyways to make sure we don't milk colostrum or put anything medicated into the milk tank. That'd be very bad. But from here, we can see how much milk they're giving. So at the end of the milking, they'll tell us the plus or minus if they're up from their normal milk or down. If they're way down, obviously we're going to get alarmed on a computer system. Or maybe they just didn't get prepped properly and they didn't drop their milk in time. So then those guys will have to reattach the milker. Once the first six are washed, cleaned, and stripped, we attach the milker. It's an automatic take-off. So when it senses the milk slowing down, it starts to realize that the cow's getting close to being done. It pulls the milker off before actually over-milking it. So it pulls it off before the T-ends get damaged. The cows then get iodine again. And then when all 12 are done, they head out. Their necklaces will feed them through here and they'll be sorted back automatically into their pens. But while they're being milked, the guys are working on the other side of the parlor getting them prepped and ready to go. So it's a never-ending cycle. It's non-stop. It's non-stop in here. There's no downtime.