The 170,000 sf wood framed Dairy Research Centre, which is a joint venture between the Agricultural Research Institute of Ontario (ARIO), the University of Guelph, and the Ontario dairy industry is located just south of Elora, in Ponsonby, Ontario.

This innovative building is a unique multi-discipline research facility where faculty and students from the Ontario Veterinary College, the Ontario Agricultural College and other departments at University of Guelph can collaborate on a variety of dairy-related research projects and initiatives within its state-of-the-art world-class dairy research facility built to address the research, education and training needs of the Ontario and Canadian Dairy Sectors.

The entire building is sloped 1.1% from one end to the other and includes a special needs barn, milking house (with a state-of-the-art rotary milking parlor), lactating barn, replacement barn, two concrete manure tanks and a metabolic research facility.

The completed barn houses approximately 600 cows, 300 milking cows in the lactating facility and 300 cows being raised in the replacement barn.