Ground has been broken on the new University of Guelph Livestock Research Innovation Centre – Dairy Facility on 2nd Line East in Centre Wellington.
The $25 million project, part of the university’s Elora Research Station, replaces aging research facilities at the site.
About 100 people gathered Friday for a special ceremony to mark the beginning of the construction, crowding into a party tent erected on an open field. Across the road, grading work is underway for a large scale building that will house advanced research in a broad range of areas related to dairy production.
Rich Moccia, U of G’s associate vice-president research, said the facility will expand the university’s capacity in livestock research. The university is an international leader in research in areas such as dairy genetics, herd health management and novel product development.
“This facility is going to give us an incredible opportunity to pursue research across the entire food-chain spectrum in the dairy industry, right from original production technologies, to novel products, and the environmental and engineering side of producing milk and other products,” Moccia said in an interview.
He said the structure will house state-of-the-art, multidisciplinary research infrastructure that will give researchers the opportunity to carry out projects they were not able to do previously in one location.
“When you see this thing finally built you’ll marvel at the technology inside it,” Moccia said. “It won’t look like a dairy barn.”
The facility is operated under the university’s sweeping partnership agreement with Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, and the Ministry of Rural Affairs. The Ontario government has committed $20 million to the project, while Dairy Farmers of Ontario has invested $5 million. The new facility should be complete by late-summer or early-fall of 2014.
Bill Emmott, chair of Dairy Farmers of Ontario, said advanced research over the last several decades, particularly related to good selective breeding or genomics, has lead to threefold production increases in dairy cattle. Research is looking into things such as optimizing feed to further improve production, he said.
“When you have a research barn you are going to be teaching the next teachers, and bringing out the next generation of researchers,” he said, adding that dairy is a thriving industry, one that is attracting interest from a younger generation eager to take over family operations.
Karen Chan, an assistant deputy minister for the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Rural Affairs, said one-in-nine jobs in Ontario are directly linked to agriculture and food.
“In order to remain strong and competitive we need to continuously focus on areas of growth and improvement,” she told the gathering Friday morning. “This includes modernizing Ontario’s agri-food research infrastructure so that it can be used effectively by our research and innovation partners in government, industry, academia.”
To that end, she said, the province saw a need to invest $20 million in the Livestock Research Innovation Centre – Dairy Facility.
The agri-food industry, she indicated, is a priority of Premier Kathleen Wynne, who is also the province’s agriculture minister. She recently challenged the industry to double its growth rate and create 120,000 new jobs by 2020.
“It is these kinds of investments, it is this kind of work, that will really help us to grow that sector,” Chan said.
Michael Chong, the MP for Wellington-Halton Hills, said the investment in the research facility is good for area farmers. About ten per cent of Ontario’s 4,000 dairy farms are in Wellington County, he said.
“They rely on the research that universities like Guelph produce,” he said. “This new dairy barn and the research it produces will help our local dairy producers get more out of their herds and produce milk even more efficiently than they do today.”
Chong added that Ontario is a large exporter of dairy genetics and the research facility will help ensure the province remain a world leader in that area.
Karen Chan said there is a need for a research focus on “high value food products and processes.” The new facility will allow the research community to develop new ideas and technologies that “will drive production efficiencies, and impact the quality and safety of the food that we eat and that we can export.”
Source: Guelph Mercury
