Podcast: How has innovation changed dairy farms?

Clinton Monchuk: (00:00)

From Canadian Food Focus, this is Ask A Farmer . I’m your host Clinton Monchuk, a Saskatchewan farmer. In this podcast, we talk to food experts to answer your questions about your food.

Clinton: Hi everybody, this is Clinton Monchuk and we have the privilege of hearing from Andrew Campbell, also known as Fresh Air Farmer. Andrew, how are you doing today?

Andrew: (00:58)

I’m doing wonderful. Clinton, how are you?

Clinton: (01:00)

I’m doing well. I’m looking forward to this podcast. So within this podcast, we’re going be talking about how innovation has changed dairy farms, and we’re going to go back, we’re going to use me as a little bit of an example of what it was like for me growing milking cows on our dairy farm, all the way to your new barn. Talking about innovation, technology, as well as some of the sustainability points that the dairy industry is actually striving for both now and into the future. But before we get into that, I think everybody who’s listening wants to know more about Andrew Campbell.

So Andrew, could you give us a little bit of a background? You’re very active on social media and maybe give a little bit of that background that you have as well as your farming background too.

Andrew: (01:46)

Sure Clinton. We’re here in Southern Ontario. We’re in a in a pocket that gets pretty close to the US border, west of Toronto, west of the city of London. And here we are dairy and grain farmers is what we do farm wise. We milk cows with my wife . We’ve got two kids that are eight and 10 and then my parents; very much a family enterprise. On the dairy side we’re milking about 65 cows now. Robots do a lot of it nowadays, which obviously as you mentioned, we’ll talk a little bit more about that’s the dairy side and then the grain side. Actually I’ve got three siblings.

One of them has decided that he would also like to be involved in agriculture more than he has been. And has come back to help support us on the grain side. So we’re expanding our grain side more and more all the time. And growing corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay. Very typical grain parts for here in Southern Ontario.

So that’s really our farm side. And then, for me and for my wife: We both have off-farm, whether they’re jobs or hobbies or projects, you can decide for yourself. But we do have a communications company too, that we do. You mentioned some social media work. We do some work for other companies and organizations, just really supporting things that they need in the agriculture communication space. And it’s a nice way that we feel connected to the industry at large as well as obviously, operating the farm here at home.

Clinton: (03:14)

So Andrew, getting into a little bit of the new technologies and the innovations of dairies throughout this country I’m always looking back to the way it was when my family was in the dairy business. And so we built a brand new barn in 1983, and at that time it was state of the art.

Okay? So we had these, you could open and close doors with a button, right? So you didn’t have to go and pull on the chains to get up. And we had these lines that went through the barn with vacuums and the milk went directly into the tank. And he didn’t actually have to carry the milk into a big tank.

And now I look at some of the videos that you’ve posted of your new barn and think to myself, man, I wish we were still in the dairy business because it is awesome, the new technology. So maybe tell us a little bit about your experience for moving from your old barn into your new one and some of those technologies that I think a lot of the listeners would be really interested to know about.

Andrew: (04:11)

When you talk about your farm, Clinton, you know the one you grew up on, that sounds very similar to the barn we moved out of earlier this year, with the exception that it wasn’t a new barn. The barn we were in was built in like 1880 or something. The big hay mow up top in where the cows were, low ceilings.

I hit my head regularly in there, but still a comfortable place for cows, right? But one where obviously the technology just isn’t there. We would take the milking machine around to each cow. We’d bring the feed to them, the water would come to them. We did have the pipelines and that, that would carry it back to the tank.

But very labor intensive was a big part of it. And one where for us, as we continue to grow more cows, meant more work was one challenge we had. But then the other one is, just being able everybody being able to do the jobs. Dad, he’s in his sixties now, still wants to be very involved in the farm, but to do all of the work all of the time was challenging.

For me, I couldn’t do it all by myself and even my wife, my mom, my kids, they still want to be involved, but there was only so much they could do. So we built what is today’s version of that state of the art barn in that great big high ceilings, no mows anymore because feed’s stored differently than it used to be.

Now the cows kind of roam around the barn wherever they go and choose when they want to eat. They go to the manger. When they want to drink, they go to the water troughs. When they want to lay down, they go down to sand is what they sleep on here. So they go down, lay down in that. And then robots are actually the ones that do the milking.

So the cows, again, they decide when they want to get milked. They walk up to the robot. They walk into the robot, they get a little snack while they’re there, and the robot arm comes out, cleans the udder off. Lasers detect how to hook up the milker. It milks, it comes off by itself, and then that milk automatically gets pumped where it’s filtered, pre cooled, and then dropped in the big cooler waiting for the milk truck.

So it’s a very big change for us. And probably, as you said, sounds a little different to how you used to do chores as a kid.

Clinton: (06:28)

So we used to have to bring the milkers, like you said, to each cow. And we had a, what was called, a tie stall. So the cows come up, you tie them in, and then you hook up the machines to that vacuum line and then the line that the the milk goes into.

But each time you did this, you had to bend down, put the milker on, and when they were done, you had to take it off and you could see there was a little kind of a plastic, clear plastic thing that you could see when they were done milking. However, think about this: after all those years, and my dad retired from the dairy when he was about 65.

All those years of up and down, up and down meant that his knees were shot completely. And he had to have knee surgery and actually hip surgery after he was done. But I think about now and how this works. And maybe just explain a little bit. You mentioned on the labor side, not only does it take a little bit less labor, but the labor that you’re using is different now.

I watched a video of you doing the maintenance on the robots and it’s completely different than what we would’ve done. So maybe explain a little bit about that, of how that’s changed and how the labor is, it’s just different.

Andrew: (07:43)

Different is the right word. Because as you mentioned, we had that same tie stall, you’re up and down all the time. In fact, one of the things that I’ve noticed a lot is, my phone has a step counter. In the tie stall, just because of that process of milking, especially, I’d easily be able to get 20,000 steps in a day because of that up and back and up and down and around the barn all the time.

Whereas now I’m more at like 10,000. I’m still spending the same number of hours around here. It just is different because now versus in the old barn, every morning I would have to sweep the manger, so the feed that the cows didn’t eat was now a day stale. So we would sweep it, clean it all up, and feed it to some of the younger animals.

It was still good, but we didn’t want to leave it in the manger long enough where it wouldn’t be good. So we’d take our broom and I would sweep and pitchfork, and sweep, and pitchfork, and sweep and pitchfork. Now I drive in this barn with a skid steerer and sweep the bucket across and pick it up that way. And take it over to another pen.

So right there, the pro, we still have to do that same job. It just now requires, you know, somebody in a skid steer versus somebody on the end of a broom. The milking part is the biggest time saver in that, we would spend probably between dad and I, you know, together we’d spend, four to five hours on the milking process every day.

Whereas now, as you mentioned, a lot more of it is now we’re walking the barn to check cows. We’re cleaning up the robot, we’re maintaining it, making sure that it continues to operate because now it’s doing that labor. Now we can focus on just other areas. So that’s really where one of the nice things and it’s made a huge difference for our kids in that I mentioned off the top that, they’re eight and 10.

I was never comfortable with them going up in between cows to do jobs. The cows are tame here, but they’re still animals and you don’t necessarily want to put the kids in a situation like that. Whereas now whether they like it or not, they now have jobs around here where it is, okay, you’ve got to take your shovel and you’ve got to scrape off certain areas that the automatic manure scrapers can’t get to make sure they’re always clean.

We have rakes to move the sand around and fluff it up for the cows to lay on. They now have to do those jobs. It’s one of those where it’s much easier and more comfortable for someone like them, someone like me, someone like my mom or dad. We can all take part in those jobs.

Clinton: (10:21)

So maybe just explain a little bit more. So we’re talking about a robot and I want people to visualize what that looks like. It’s not the robot from the Jetsons who’s flying around on little wheels and trying to find the cows and whatnot and milk them. And then second of all, you mentioned before when we were chatting that you have about 65 milking cows in your herd.

Does it take numerous robots to do this? How does that work? How do you judge how many you need actually for your farm?

Andrew: (10:50)

So we have two milking robots. Very cleverly named ‘One’ and ‘Two’. We couldn’t decide on real names, so we kept fighting over that. So they just kept their names but it basically is, we’re at that level where we might be able to get away with one.

Usually one can handle that kind of 60-ish cows because we’re just over that and we still want to grow the herd some. We put two in initially, and you’re right. They don’t look.. There’s, they don’t have a face. They’re not moving around in great things. In fact, they’re lagged to the floor.

They’re in what we call robot rooms. So we have special little rooms in the barn with a little bit of a roof over it and a three walls around it to keep the cows out from the hoses and the wires. And then basically what it is, is on the left side. It’s a great big box.

And if you open the door, there’s a whole bunch of wires. There’s breakers, there’s hoses, there’s motors and pumps and air valves. And like you look in it, it’s a complicated mess. It’s not actually, when you start to look, each wire has a certain function. Each hose has a certain function, but to just glance at it looks like a wild mess.

But then on the right side is what is the arm, and this arm is what moves around. And so it sits off to the side. When a cow comes in, it slides in, goes under the cow, and then flips up and there’s brushes. Those brushes just spin. It knows where it’s looking. And then that arm comes down, it washes the brushes.

The brushes go back clean a second time. Then the brushes come out of the way, and then the laser eye takes over and that laser has red in it and it scans. It’s constantly scanning and that’s how it knows the distance from its eye to where the teat on the cow is. And then that cup, basically it looks, once it finds it, it throws a cup on and then comes down a little, and then searches for the next one.

Throws a cup on drops, throws a cup on, throws a cup on, and there’s four then, and then it just sits there and milks away. If it doesn’t get milk out of one quarter, it’ll pull it off and think, oh, I must not have got it right and try to put it back on. And it’ll do that a few times before it even gives up.

99.5% of the time, it gets it fine. Milks the cows; knows when there’s not enough milk coming out anymore. Pulls those off, its laser takes over again. It sprays an iodine solution just to make sure that the udder stays clean and disinfected when she goes back to the barn and then that arm comes back, slides in and gets a quick rinse so it’s ready for the next cow.

That’s how the robot works.

Clinton: (13:42)

It’s really interesting to think of the advancements in this technology. And it’s just again, mentioning it before, it’s fascinating to me and part of me wishes we would’ve kept our dairy to see some of this technology. But I did want to ask so when you bring a, when you change this over, okay from you walking up to the cows, putting those milking machines on to the robot, doing it, how did the cows react to that? Was it a difficult process to get them accustomed and acclimatized to this or was it pretty?

Andrew: (14:14)

So it was two weeks. We spent many, many, many hours in the barn in what we referred to as pushing cows, and that was basically we lined all the cows up. And we took them to the robot for those first two weeks because they weren’t used to the idea of, I’m going to walk in here and get milked. They didn’t know what it was.

In fact, the first day some of the cows are even kicking at it because here’s this arm sliding underneath them. They don’t really know what’s happening. Within about two days, they were all very quiet and very calm. We continued to, you know, take them to the robot, all of them. And then within two weeks we stopped doing that and we would only bring the cows that didn’t go on their own to the robot.

And within probably two more weeks, so only four weeks after we moved in, basically everybody was doing it on their own. So it was actually a really quick process. And now we find the cows are, very calm, very content because they just do what they want when they want that way. There’s nobody coming in doing anything, coming back and forth, anything.

They just kind of do it. So some of the cows that maybe are a little more nervous, they tend to stay a little further away. The cows that are very friendly are always right beside you helping you do whatever job you are doing. It lets each cow do their thing.

Clinton: (15:39)

I had the opportunity to look at a dairy in Abbotsford when I was out speaking at an event. And it was interesting. I think you probably can attest to it too, that it was a barn full of mainly Holsteins, so the black and white cows for everybody out there. But there was a jersey in the mix as well.

So the all brown cows with usually blackish nose and eyes. Well, this jersey figured out that if she went in there enough that she’d get the grain coming down from in front of the robot. So she would push her way to the front every opportunity she had and it would just kick her back out because it was, no, you’ve already been milked.

But I just thought it was funny that the intent of that jersey was to figure out the system and maximize on the amount of feed she got.

Andrew: (16:24)

Yes. Her name is Eminem. Around here we have a few jerseys. The one that is the most common is Eminem.

Clinton: (16:32)

There we go. So we talked a lot about the innovation and whatnot in your new dairy but that’s only part of it. Right? Because these animals now that, that are in your barn are substantially different than the Holsteins that we had in our barn back in the early eighties. Because of a lot of the genetics that have changed.

Maybe just talk a little bit how that’s changed your dairy to get better cows in that barn to produce high quality milk.

Andrew: (16:59)

So genetics is actually a really big part of agriculture in general, but very much on the dairy side. And it comes down to how do we make sure that the next generation of animals that we have is very capable of all the things that we want them to do. They’re healthy, they live a long time.

They move well, they eat well, a whole bunch of things. And that really just is that trait of matching father and mother and hoping that the good traits of both of them come down in a calf. So we actually have, if I pull this from the side of my desk, I get a sheet that looks terrifying to anybody, with dozens and dozens of numbers. And basically it outlines every detail of an animal that says, look, this is the sire or the father of, and it charts out maybe of a thousand cows in North America. On average, here’s what these daughters of this bull look like. Here’s how high their angle is on their hoof.

Here’s how wide their back legs stand. Here’s how high their front is. Here’s where their tail sits on their back end. And as I said, it’s dozens and dozens of different things. And what we try to do is then match and say, okay, we really like this cow, but if we could improve four things on her, these are the four things we would improve on.

And we’d find the bull that would match up and say, okay, he’s got on average really good these four things and there is a lot of hope in it. And that you hope that this cow’s strong traits and this bull strong traits match up. They don’t always work out well, but you can be pretty confident that that animal is still going to be somewhat of an improvement over what her mother is.

And that way you get a cow that, for us, here’s a barn where the cows are, moving around all the time. Guess what? They need to have, strong feet and legs. They need to be able to move around. They, we don’t want them to be susceptible to things like arthritis.

So we pick traits like that. We want them to, not necessarily, aggressive is the wrong word, but we want them to be, feel really confident going up to the manger to be eating, despite the fact there might be a few other cows around there. So we want them to have that feeling.

And then obviously we want them to be able to milk well. Another trait that is gets tracked, is we want them to produce lots of high quality milk. You know, hopefully more than what their parents, what that animal’s parents did. If I look back, my grandpa he marvels at the barn we have now because , he brought the first milking machine to this farm.

He was doing it by hand when he started milking. And he brought the first milking machine. Now he sits here and watches the cows get milked, but he also watches their production. We get more milk in kilograms than he used to get in pounds. So you’re talking, each cow is milking twice as much as what his herd did.

And there’s lots of reasons for that. The feed is good. There’s more science in terms of what a cow needs to eat, but it’s also the genetics in that. We picked cows that milked well and then had daughters that milked even better than that.

Clinton: (20:46)

Excellent. So we’re getting to the Fun Farm fact. So to all the listeners out there, did you know that a cow has one stomach, but it has four compartments? And maybe Andrew, just explain a little bit what those four compartments are and why does that cow then have those four compartments to make it that much more efficient?

Andrew: (21:08)

You’re testing my biology knowledge. Clinton. That’s amazing. No, and actually it’s no . We can do this because it is very much a case of they eat and if I look right now, I’m sitting here in my barn office. If I actually look past my computer, I see my manger. And right now there are cows up eating. At the manger right now, not everybody, there are lots laying down.

There’s a bunch eating and they’ve got a whole bunch of feed in front of them. Very heavily forage based. So there are grasses, there are hays there are silages all mixed up in one. What they’re doing right now is they are eating, swallowing, eating, swallowing, eating, swallowing. Then what they’re going to do is they’re going to go lay down. They’re going to chew their cud and if you ever see a cow just kind of laze around, just chew chew, as if she’s almost chewing gum. What she’s actually doing is chewing her cud. So she ate fast. She didn’t necessarily chew her food completely like we are supposed to, but now she’s doing that process.

And what that’s doing is she brings that up, chews it, and then swallows it again and it goes to a second stomach. And that’s really where the digestive system then starts, is going through the next three stomachs. And the real benefit that she has in doing that is that then she can collect the nutrients and eat foods that our bodies just aren’t going to pull the same nutrients with.

If all we did was eat grass or silage or hay all the time, we’d get some of the nutrients out of that, but not nearly as much. We’re not nearly as efficient at collecting the nutrients as a cow is and having those four stomachs allows her to be able to do that and allows her to be able to eat things that we are not going to eat or we can’t digest nearly as well.

Clinton: (23:04)

As you were talking, it gave me time to think about those four compartments. Okay? So correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m. Back to my 4- H days. So there’s the rumen, the abomasum, the masum and the reticulum. Is that correct?

Andrew: (23:19)

Not the masum, the omasum.

Clinton: (23:21)

Omasum. Ah, see there you go.

Andrew: (23:24)

But see, you’re very, very close. I’m glad you took that leap because I would’ve missed reticulum.

Clinton: (23:31)

There you go. So anybody that is listening in now, you know a little bit more about the cow’s stomach and this kind of leads a little bit into the sustainability side of things. So you mentioned that the animals are taking some of these different feed stocks and they’re turning it into an actual animal protein that we can use as humans.

This is sometimes missed when we start talking about the sustainability and some of the discussions around the environment. Really and truly, cattle are recyclers. They’re taking stuff that we can’t actually use and putting it into a usable form for us. Maybe talk a little bit, and you’ve already mentioned some of the process on your grain farm and the different crops that you grow.

What does it take to keep the feed, keep those animals with enough feed from your grain farm to make sure you have healthy dairy cows.

Andrew: (24:26)

Well, you mentioned at Clinton in terms of that sustainability conversation and sometimes how it’s missed is that I am an enormous fan of. Livestock in general, but especially cows at being part of really a full circle food system because it really is one of those situations of it’s, it’s hard to do just one grow just one thing without the other.

So on our farm, as I mentioned, we grow corn, soybeans, wheat and hay. All of the wheat we grow gets sold into the consumer market. It gets turned into flours that then get baked into a whole bunch of ingredients. A hundred percent of our wheat does. A hundred percent of our soybeans are sold off farm and go into things like biodiesel, soybean oil, a whole bunch of other things that as consumers we have, and then the corn, we grow a bit of corn to feed the cows, but most of the corn, again, is going off into the consumer world. The challenge with those crops and the way that our soil is here, we don’t have the most beautiful, lush garden soil that you have ever seen.

It’s hard, it’s clay. If anybody has like clay around their flower beds, hard dirt, they can get a sense of it’s not perfect for growing things. What I really love to be able to do is add different crops that really help that soil. Things like grasses, alfalfa’s, triticale. Different crops that we can add in that no consumer wants to eat, but cows love.

So we can balance a lot of that and say, okay, we’re going to improve the quality of our consumer crop by planting these cow crops back and forth. And then the cows can also eat other things that maybe didn’t work as well. We feed things like soybean meal. So after the soybean oil is extracted to make vegetable oil there’s a meal, there’s a protein left that consumers aren’t interested in.

We can take that and we can feed it to the cow. So we’re using more and more of that crop. Same with distillers coming out of making ethanol or other fermented products from corn, we can take the waste back and feed it to the cows. Actually right now in one of my sheds, I have a load of carrots.

In fact, the carrots didn’t make it to the processing plant in time for the processing plant that shut down for the winter. So here’s this pile of carrots that would’ve rotted in the field, letting off obviously a whole bunch of greenhouse gas emissions. We can take that, feed it to the cows in place of grain corn and all of a sudden turn that into a viable food product being milk.

That’s what those stomachs allow us to do, and being able to balance and have that full circle in terms of we can do a really good job on consumer crops at the same time on cow crops. We can take the manure to use as a very natural fertilizer on those crops. That’s why I am such a huge fan of cows in being part of our food system.

Clinton: (27:56)

Yeah, 100%. It’s always interesting when you start talking about what cattle do and some of the benefits around the recycling, using some of those feed stocks that we can’t use it, it really, broadens a lot of people’s horizons when you fully understand that. One of the things when I was looking just a little bit about the dairy industry I did see that the dairy farmers of Canada, came out with a new goal for 2050.

And what the goal is, they want to be net zero as a farm dairy sector by the time of 2050. And I have to ask you, so what are some of the things that maybe you know, your family, your wife and yourself are doing different than say your parents or your grandparents are doing with that in mind for the long term sustainability of your farm.

Andrew: (28:45)

It’s not one where, push a button or check a box to say, good, we’re there. It’s going to take a whole bunch of little things for us to do over a long period of time. So some of the things, for instance, is, common things that I think everybody thinks of.

Things like energy efficiency. How can we reduce our energy consumption here? What things can be more efficient? How can we use more renewable product? Things like that go a long way. Certainly we have a bigger barn with a lot more motors and controls and a whole bunch of things. We actually are using the same amount of power as we were in our older barn because it’s all more efficient and all of those things as we continue to grow.

The power consumption won’t change as we move forward. So it’s one of those that every time we add a couple of cows to our herd, the amount of energy needed to produce milk is improved. That’s some of the things we’re, that’s one of the things we’re going to do if we look out into the field. How can we do a better job of sequestering carbon?

We’ve got this land base that is meant to be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. You know, if we all of a sudden change our practices around the farm to be able to not disturb that soil near as much or plant different crops at different times of the year, to be able to pull even more carbon from the atmosphere to sequester into the soil.

That’s going to lead us closer to a net zero. And then while we are not there yet, but many farms are, and I think in the future we will be using manure to produce renewable energy. I think it’s one of the big futures for a lot of livestock production, but particularly in dairy. And so what is happening in the plants that are being built right now?

It’s about taking the manure that comes from the cows, sealing it up in covered pits and then pulling them through biodigesters. We can actually make renewable natural gas so we can make natural gas that pumps to your house to heat your house to be used on your stove and in your fireplace and wherever else you’re using natural gas.

And it didn’t come from the ground, it came from cows. All of a sudden to be able to do things like that, I think is where the future is for livestock overall. But obviously for dairy, as we go to net zero in 2050.

Clinton: (31:31)

It’s really interesting the progression of things and the goal to get to that net zero. And I think some of the consumers that are listening to this right now want to know how do they know that they’re buying a Canadian-made dairy product in the store?

Maybe give us a little insight into how they can actually make sure they’re supporting Canadian dairy farmers.

Andrew: (31:51)

So one of the easiest ways to do it, and there are literally thousands of products in Canada that carry the blue cow symbol. And that blue cow is just a blue cow with a white maple leaf. In the middle of her says “Dairy Farmers of Canada;” sometimes says quality milk. But that is the sign that of the dairy that was used in that product, a hundred percent of it came from Canadian dairy farms.

And then really the product of Canada can also be assigned, not necessarily made in Canada, that usually means something different. But “Product of Canada” can also be a sign that it’s Canadian dairy. And I think it really speaks to going back to the sustainability side.

It looks at supporting what those initiatives are. Because I do think, my big feeling is, on the whole sustainability thing is not necessarily that one product is better over another or we should stop using this and start using something else. So much of it is with the technology advancements we’re seeing today.

We can make so much improvement in the things that we’re already doing. So you can still enjoy dairy because the technology is improving. And the sustainability goals are improving so that we can hit the same target. The target is net zero. We can still hit that by making the advancements we’re already seeing.

Clinton: (33:22)

Anybody who is listening, it’s a good idea to support local Canadian dairy farmers and look for that logo on all your products.

We want to say thank you very much, Andrew, for being a part of the podcast and providing this information on the new innovations that are coming for Canadian dairy farms. So thank you very much for your time.

I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to our Ask A Farmer podcast. We at Canadian Food Focus value the input from our listeners and ask that you share this podcast with your friends and family. Remember, this is a two-way street, so we seek your input for future segments that are of interest to you about food and farming.

To do this, please click on the ‘Ask Us’ icon at the top of our website, canadianfoodfocus.org. While you’re there, feel free to follow our numerous social media links and sign up for our newsletter. This segment was produced and edited by Angela Larson, research and writing by Dorothy Long and Penny Eaton, music by Andy Elison.

I’m your host Clinton Monchuk and from all of us here at Canadian Food Focus, we wish you good health and great eats.