RICHMOND — Driven by the spirit of Bill Schouten, sons Rick and Ed and grandson Chris, have created through the farm’s building program, a blueprint many dairy farms will follow into the future.

In an expansion mode for 40 years, the Schoutens, at Cornerview Farms in rural Ottawa, built a new freestall barn in 1972, gutted it two years ago and renovated it for calves. They built another freestall barn in 1990 and this year connected a new 300-cow freestall barn by a covered breezeway to the existing milking parlour. The breezeway was extended a few feet beyond what was needed because the barn needed to be separated a certain distance from a residence.

The new freestall facility, can separate cows into two areas, each holding 150 cows. With 440 milking cows they have one of the largest dairy farms in Ontario. But they now have capacity to milk 550. They milk three times a day with three shifts of workers. After the herd expands, the milking parlour will be in operation 18 hours a day.

Altogether, Cornerview employs nine people.

Each new facility in the farm’s history marked an increase in brightness, size and cow comfort. The neck rails in the stalls went from 48-inches high in the 1990 barn to 51 inches in the new addition. "There’s more room to lunge," Ed says, but the stalls can get a little messy. The stall space is also bigger — eight-and-one-half-feet in length in the new barn, about a foot longer than the older facility.

The walls in the new addition are 14 ft.- high, 2-feet higher than the 1990 barn, and have curtains on 3 sides. Cornerview decided to go with curtains on one end instead of doors. The curtains saved them money but also provided better ventilation. The top panel of the side curtains can be raised electronically; the rest are raised manually.

This barn will be warmer than the 1990 barn, which has ridge ventilation at the top. "We insulated the ceiling better on the new barn," he says.

Ed’s pride is the management rail and treatment alley. A cow can be separated from the herd and contained in an alley stall where the vet can treat her from behind the management rail. The day Farmers Forum was on the farm 160 cows, about 15 at a time, made the trip down that alley to two hoof trimming machines. Dave Russell and his partner started trimming about 9:30 a.m. The last cow walked out of the machine at 4:15 p.m.

In a large milking operation, expansion is never only about the barn. It’s also about regulations, manure handling, care of calves and feeding systems. The milking barns will produce about 1.5 million gallons of manure per year that has to be pumped four times a year to an isolated clay lagoon more than a mile away. A second, smaller concrete manure storage pit, services cattle housed in the 1972 freestall barn and other buildings. At first, construction of the smaller manure pit was turned down by the city of Ottawa. Fortunately, the Schoutens were able to go ahead after they found they could build, if they decommissioned a previous manure pit about 50 ft. away.

Despite successes, after four decades of progress, Ed complains of expansion fatigue and says this is his last hurrah. The maze of regulations has taken the fun out of it, he says.