Program

Tine van Werven is an Associate Professor Dairy Herd Health at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She also works with the University Farm Animal Practice in Harmelen, the Netherlands. In this large dairy practice, she is responsible for the Herd Health Programs of the more than 300 dairy herds. She is conducting many randomized clinical trials in the field, in order to obtain more evidence for new and existing therapies. Within the University Farm Animal Practice, she has been working for several years on the responsible use of antibiotics. This practice was one of the first dairy practices in the Netherlands that made an inventory on the use of antimicrobials. Based on those figures they organized workshops and meetings for their farmers to reduce the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials. An antimicrobial reduction of 35% was achieved within five years. In 2013 she was a member of the committee who created the guideline “The use of antimicrobials at dry cow treatment”. This guideline allowed veterinarians and farmers to reduce the antimicrobials at dry cow therapy by 50% without detrimental effect on udder health performance.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a Professor in food distribution and policy in the Faculties of Management and Agriculture at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He is also the Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab, also located at Dalhousie University. He is as well the former Dean of the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University. Before joining Dalhousie, he was affiliated with the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute, which he co-founded. While at the University of Guelph, he was also the Associate Dean of Research for the College of Business and Economics.

Known as “The Food Professor”, his current research interest lies in the broad area of food distribution, security and safety. He is one of the world's most cited scholars in food supply chain management, food value chains and traceability. He has authored five books on global food systems, his most recent one published in 2017 by Wiley-Blackwell entitled “Food Safety, Risk Intelligence and Benchmarking”. He has also published over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles in several academic publications.

Kurtis Andrews is farm and animal welfare lawyer who focuses his legal practice on issues typically involving farmers and rural residents from across Ontario. Mr. Andrews has a wide range of experience which includes: rural issues, agriculture, animal welfare and constitutional law, and defense work involving provincial and municipal offences. Mr. Andrews is also Vice-chair of the Normal Farm Practices Protection Board and a regular legal columnist for the Ontario Farmer.

Haanview Farms is a 70 cow Master Breeder herd located just outside of Alliston, ON. Our family also owns and operates Sheldon Creek Dairy, an on-farm processing/bottling facility. We make whole milk, cultured products and in February 2019 we launched our A2 milk product line. My sister Marianne and her husband Mike manage Sheldon Creek Dairy. In 2013 I graduated from the University of Guelph with a Bachelor of Science in Animal Science and a Minor in Applied Music. After working for Pioneer Hybrid and TD bank during my time at Guelph I returned home in the fall of 2013. In December of 2018 we moved from our 50-cow tie stall barn to a robotic milking facility with 2 Lely A4s. In our tie stall barn we hosted annual open houses and would have 3000-4000 attendees tour through the barn. Since opening our new robotic barn we have an average of 3-4 private tours a month and monthly open houses for the general public to come and have a guided tour of the barn. Both my parents are very involved in the dairy industry. My mom, Bonnie den Haan, is on the Board of Directors at DFO and my dad, John den Haan, is the president of the Ontario 4-H Foundation and on the Board of Directors at EastGen.

Sergeant Laura Lee Brown serves as the Regional Community Services Coordinator at OPP West Region Headquarters.  Her current portfolio covers Community Safety/Media Relations Officer, Community Mobilization Officer and School Resource Officer programs for the 14 counties in West Region.   In addition to the management of these programs, Sgt. Brown is also a member of the West Region OPP Crisis Negotiator team.  She has served as both a municipal and provincial police officer for the past decade.  Her career began in community social services, where she spent 10 years, and states that this has given her a solid appreciation for the importance of community partnerships.  Throughout her career, she has worked on domestic violence committees, elder abuse projects, road safety initiatives, rural partnerships, human trafficking investigations and education, mental health services, suicide prevention, homelessness programs, school programming, diversity education, and numerous other advocacy initiatives.  She believes that safe communities begin and end with partnership, and is always looking to make new connections.

Stephen LeBlanc is a Professor in the department of Population Medicine at the Ontario Veterinary College, and Research Program Director – Animal Production Systems at the University of Guelph. He received a BSc(Agr) in Animal Science from McGill University in 1992, and a DVM (in 1997) and DVSc (in 2001) from the University of Guelph. After five years of private dairy veterinary practice, he joined the faculty at the University of Guelph where he teaches veterinary and agriculture students and provides clinical farm service. He is past-president of the Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council and serves as section editor for the Journal of Dairy Science. His research focuses on transition dairy cow metabolic and reproductive health and management, including field validation of precision technologies. With graduate students and collaborators, this work has resulted in over 140 peer-reviewed papers. He has given invited talks in 20 countries.