Bluffton Dairy Ltd. farming more efficiently and sustainably in every practice

Published 3:19 pm Thursday, July 9, 2026

Cassidy Felder, her husband Robert and their children took over Bluffton Dairy Ltd. in 2019 and got to work making it as efficient and sustainable as it could be.

That same year, the Felders put in three milking robots and continued on with the daily grind that comes with owning a busy farm.

“We decided it was time for an upgrade, and a little less man hours and whatnot. So, in 2024 we moved into a fully automatic barn,” said Cassidy.

This includes the milking robots, robotic feeding, robotic calf feeding and robotic manure scraping.

“That has greatly reduced our man hours, and when we did the math it came out to 50 days extra in a year of man hours.

“We’ve had way more flexibility than we ever thought we could with the dairy and family and trying to do things outside the barn,” she said, adding that it’s also helped them to have time to get projects done outside of the barn that have sat for a long time.

From their new barn, they took all of the problems they had in their old barn, and built the new barn to fix all of those issues, like things to do with nutrition, fertility, hoof health, foot health and cow comfort in general.

“Now that we’ve been in the new barn, it’s definitely a noticeable difference. We’re milking 125 cows right now and easily filling our quota, which would not have been possible in the old barn,” said Cassidy.

The Felders decided to originally take part in the Dairy Farmers of Canada’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Calculator Pilot Project to see what they’re looking for in terms of sustainability in a dairy farm going forward, and where they stood in terms of that.

“The first year was really just about seeing where we were, how we benchmarked to other people and the things we could improve.”

She added that the second year they took part in the project, and were able to implement some of those best management practices and some things on their own that they decided to research.

“Our goal going forward is to just continue with keeping our farm sustainable for the next generation, and one of our challenges is land. We don’t have enough acres, so we’ve done more tillage than maybe what they’re looking for in the project,” she said.

They currently have around 320 acres that they farm. Within that, they rotate alfalfa, grass, hay, barley silage and corn silage.

“The corn silage we did for the first year in 2023 to try and increase tonnage per acre…” she said, adding that it has been going okay, but the weather hasn’t been the most favourable lately.

The project is currently wrapped up for this year, so some of their goals going forward are looking at ways they can reduce their footprint in the field, so researching into things like cover cropping and seeing different types of crops they can grow in the area to better manage less tillage.

“And then looking at the cow herself and how we can improve either our genetics to get better feed efficiency out of them and better milk production out of one cow,” she said, adding that they want to improve the efficiency of the cow’s stomach, and milking less cows, therefore creating less emissions output.

“The project has just helped us look at tweaking a few things here and there. We used to run five tractors a day minimum… now there’s days where we don’t even start an engine,” said Cassidy.

The project included dairy farms from all across Canada, and had around three or four in Alberta, which included the Felders.

The project will potentially run again in 2028 for the 2027 year, giving the Felders over a year to implement some of the practices, do some research into them and see if they’ve improved during the project.