The Bryant family has lived and operated on their dairy farm in the Strathroy area since the early 1900’s. Today Dean and Amy Bryant (dairy), and Ian and Emma Bryant (crops), run the farm along with parents, Ervin and Jeanette Bryant.
In 1977, their first free stall and parlour barn was built. They were milking 80 cows in a D-4 parlour, which served them for over 20 years. By 2000, they were milking 100 cows, and they renovated the parlour to a D-7. A year later, they had a barn fire, and they built a new sand bedded free stall barn.
In 2016, a new D-10 DLS/GEA parallel parlour with vertical lift and individual indexing was built complete with a Biolynk flush system to clean the parlour holding area and breezeway. The parlour is expandable to D-15 for future growth. Also, a barn addition for dry cows was built along with a connecting link to connect the parlour building to the existing barn.
Dean says, “We felt DLS had more innovative and newer ideas than anyone else. Our confidence in DLS/GEA grew as we spoke to other producers, and found that they were all very happy with their completed project.”
They currently milk 200 cows, and over the years the farm grew from 200 acres to 1,500 acres. They have reduced their milking time by 1 hour per milking. SCC has dropped by 50,000 since transitioning to the new parlour in 2016. Dean says that “The sort gate is my favorite part of the new set up. It’s a huge time saver to automatically sort the cows to the
appropriate pen rather than walking through the whole barn to do it manually.” Jumping into 2020, a 3 row DLS Structure was built for heifers, that replaced an old bank barn 3 kilometers down the road. Dean says “We have saved a lot of time and bedding with the new heifer barn…”, and laughing, he says, “…plus it’s been 4 years since we did the parlour, so we were excited to get new DLS hoodies out of the deal!
