MARCH 2017 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC


Dairy advancements north of the Fraser Two barns


showcase their dairy upgrades


by RONDA PAYNE DEROCHE – Dairy tours


kick off the Pacific Agricultural Show each year and two of the nine featured farms in January were north of the Fraser River, in Deroche. Close enough to be considered neighbours, Driessen Farms and Fraser Edge Farms both had unique and specific desires for the modifications made to the operations. Noah Driessen, the


youngest of the clan working at the Driessen farm, noted the family’s renovations were complicated because of the “bit-at-a-time” approach to portions of the project, where existing buildings were altered in stages. “We started in April 2015,”


he says of the first part of the project. “We started on the manure pit. It’s got a roof, cement walls and a cement floor now.”


The new pit was just the


beginning. Parlour construction began in June 2015, then the 160-stall barn development began in 2016. The entire renovation completed in May.


The Driessen family milks 140 head on their main farm and 52 from a neighbouring plot. Driessen notes the cows are much more comfortable


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Noah Driessen shows off his state-of-the-art, squeaky clean parlour at his family’s farm in Deroche. RONDA PAYNE PHOTO


with the dramatic reduction in milking times. The old parlour took about 3.5 hours to complete a milking while the new one drops that to about 75 minutes, plus 20 minutes for wash-down. To accommodate 30 cows


at a time, the new parlour is a fully-automated, double-15 stainless herringbone parallel with DeLaval meters and includes ear tag identification, sort gate and an Exit Plus system. It also features automatic dip and flush after milking, and heat detection


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monitoring with the supply feeding to a 5,000 gallon DeLaval milk tank. The choice to stay with


parlour-style milking (rather than converting to robotic milking) was a family decision. Driessen says by staying with “what they know,” family members continue to do what they love which includes hands-on interactions with the cows on a daily basis. “We stuck with what we


knew,” he says. “There were lots of [family] meetings. We


agreed on what we wanted. Definitely the parlour was what we were most excited for. Everything has been going really well. The cows are definitely a lot more comfortable.” That increase in comfort also comes from the changes to the barn. Overall, the Driessens have seen a milk volume increase without any change to the herd size or feed. The new barn features a four-row tail-to-tail layout with Artex Y2K stalls, SPI waterers, JOZ alley scrapers, a


Jamesway pump for flush flume, and manure transfer among other elements. “It’s more modern,” Driessen says of the new barn. “Now, we have the slower cows in one group and the faster cows in another group. I think the cows are in and out [of the parlour] quicker. They get more time to eat.” Ventilation for the new barn is courtesy of six-foot- diameter fans and heavy-duty motorized roll-up curtains


See FRASER on next page o


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