He had two goals. One was to beat the Kemptville College in milk production. "They had been the top herd in the county since I could remember," he says. He’s done that for the past five years. His composite BCA this year is 248.

His second goal was to prove that a small farm could be as efficient as a large U.S. farm where one man-year can produce close to one million pounds of work. He has done pretty well, raising the production to a 12,000 kg average. Today he operates with 42 kg of quota.

Over five years, he doubled the number of cows and tripled the amount of quota. "I aggressively went after quota," he says. "I had a plan to buy five kilograms a year." With quota priced between $15,000 and $25,000, any extra money disappeared. "Things were tight for the first three years."

He turned to American style management and focussed just on the dairy herd. The planting, harvesting and combining were all done by custom operators. Otherwise, he couldn’t have managed the herd by himself.

Highly capable, he had other careers available. He graduated from Kemptville College, then went on to take an honours degree at Laurentian University. He became a territory manager for ShurGain but the farm beckoned. At 36, he is president of DHI, after serving as vice chair for several years.

The future of the dairy cow is phenomenal, he says. "As we learn more on how to feed them (cows) and house them, we allow them to express themselves. Many young cows get BCAs of 300 with ease," he says.