We like that there is nothing for the cows to get caught or stuck on. Before it was a fight, especially for fresh heifers. “The cows turn into the parlour really well. In reference to the results the family has experienced with this retrofit project, they said, “We were impressed with how organized the DLS crew was to do the parlour switchover. The parlour retrofit project took place in January. They transitioned the home farm from leg bands to neckbands and upgraded to the GEA Cow Scout system, so the home farm will now be the same as the robot farm.
They determined the logical decision was to utilize the existing milking cabinets/automation and give it new life by updating it with a DLS Vertical Lift parlour stall with individual indexing.Īnother update factor with the purchase of the second farm and the decision to go with robots on the second farm was to try to make both farms work on the same activity systems in the event they decide to move cows back and forth. Their milking equipment was in good shape, and two years ago, they had updated to Dematron 70 milking controls. They wanted a safer solution for their cows. The main concern was, on occasions, a cow would fall in between the posts making it challenging to get her out. They were seeing some wear and tear on the sequence gates, and over the years, their cows got bigger, and they needed more room within the parlour stall.
The free stall addition in 2017 provided them with enough room to house the additional cows, but they needed to perform some updates to the milking parlour to make for a smoother milking process with the extra cows.įrom 2002, they had a GEA Mag 90 parlour with the posts at each stall. With the purchase of the second farm, some decisions needed to be made on the home farm they were milking 200 cows, and the purchase would add another 85 to the home farm until the new robot barn was completed. They are in the planning process of building a perimeter feed robot barn with 2 GEA R9500 robots. In 2019, they bought the first one for Micheal. The future plans and desires for the family are to purchase separate farms for each of the three brothers. In 2009, they built an addition off the parlour building for a calf barn, and in 2017 they built a large addition on the free stall barn. In the beginning, they were milking 60 cows and increased to 80 cows rather quickly. They built a double 10 milking parlour with a free stall barn with sand bedding. Jeff recalls meeting with Bill in Holland and touring barns around Ontario as they planned what they would build when they moved to Canada. They purchased 200 acres of land and built their first barn with Bill van Logtenstein (DLS). Jeff & Monique Reijnen immigrated from the Netherlands in 2002 with their three sons, Jordy (4), Michael (6) and Kevin (8).