Standing outside their new dairy barn Thursday afternoon, David and Kate Dallam seem as if the weight of the world has been lifted off their shoulders.
More than two months ago, a two-alarm fire ripped through their Broom?s Bloom dairy barn. Ten cows died in the fire, but 45 were saved.
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Now the Dallams are about six weeks away from opening the doors of a new dairy barn on the ruins of the one that was destroyed. The new one will be unlike any other in the state.
“We?re going to install a robotic milking system,” Kate said. She said the system had been something she and her husband looked at installing before the fire, but it would have been several years off. “Since the fire, we decided to just go ahead and do it.”
Dallam said the system cost about $150,000 and will not only milk the cows, but will also feed them. She said the biggest obstacle would be training the cows to use the system on their own.
“To get a barn built this quickly is amazing,” said Harford County Farm Bureau president Sam Fielder III, a fellow dairy farmer from Jarrettsville.
Fielder described the Dallams as “resilient,” saying that if Harford?s farming community had not rallied around them in their time of need, they still would have bounced back.
Before the flames were out, farmers from around Harford County were rushing to aid Broom?s Bloom.
Kate Dallam said that shortly after the fire, a neighboring farmer, John Schenning, had contacted a Pennsylvania-based barnbuilding company that he had used. With Schenning?s help, the Dallams? had an estimate on the new barn while cleanup of the old was still under way.
“It has been an overwhelming task, but without the help of the community, mentally, it would have been a lot more of a drain,” she said.
But she also credited her husband.
“My husband?s commitment to the industry and his belief in getting back on our feet” led to the speedy recovery, Dallam said.
A man of few words, David Dallam stood in the shell of his new barn Thursday and smiled.
“We?re getting there,” he said.
