It won't be until January that Luke and Julie will get a break. The two months of the year, January and February, when the cows will be expecting their calves, there will be no milking. The only job for a farmer then is to feed them, which doesn't take up too much time. I have to trust Luke on that.
I was curious to find out what Julie's and Luke's parents think about their kids embarking on a farming life style choice.
"Oh, Luke's Mom thinks it's neat that we have a dairy farm operation here. She came for a visit earlier in the summer and spent a few weeks with us before she left for Taiwan, where she had just accepted a job to teach English. But she thinks we work too hard", Julie told me with a shy smile, knowing that she was absolutely right. "My Mom and Dad came and helped us out twice in the spring. They think we work too hard, too".
We were not that original to think that Luke and Julie work too hard as well. By far, Dairy By The Lake was the hardest working farm on our cross country trip, not to offend the rest of the hard working farmers we have met on our woofing cross country expedition.
Mirek volunteered on the first day we arrived, my turn was the next day.
There were the three of us in the milking parlor, Luke, Guildas and myself. After getting quick instructions of what to expect, I then had to shadow Luke for a while to see how everything was being done. Words are just that, words. When you get a visual stimulation of what you had just heard, the information seem to seep into your brain sells faster.
Apparently, Luke and Julie have developed a system that works great for a team of two. Total 20 cows are being milked at a time, 10 on each side. First, we needed to prepare the feed. The grain is dropped from the grain elevator chutes and the feeder gates have to be opened. On one side the gates are easier to open and close because Luke had made them. They are crude kind of carpentry but easy to grasp for an inexperienced milk maid as myself.
The feeder gates on the other side are metal and it gets a bit tricky to close them quick enough so that when the cows come in and find a spot to munch on their grains, and stick their heads into the slot, we then need to close the gates in. Otherwise, the cows will start wandering around the parlor looking for more food. And you don't want that! Squeezing in between these big bodies was nerve racking for me in the beginning. A few times Luke had to come up and rescue me from turning into a Julia pancake.
"The Holsteins are the best in this regard. They are like gentle giants in comparison to Jerseys, for example", Luke told me loud enough so that I could hear him through all the noise in the milking parlor. He might call them gentle, I was petrified of them anyway.
We started from the left cow on each side. Every other cow (since there are only 10 milkers and there are 20 cows) gets worked on first. We dipped their teats in iodide solution. Then we wiped off the teats with a clean towel, disinfecting the teats and stimulating the milk flow at the same time. Then it was race again time as it should not be longer than a minute after the teats were cleaned that we attach the milkers on, because the milk will start pouring down on the floor.
Some teats were small, some were large. Some cows would have only 3 working teats out of four, and there was one cow with 5 teats but only 3 working ones. Luke, being a master farmer, knows which cow is a kicker, which one is hard to put the milkers on, so it was his duty to take care of them.
Then when the first 20 cows leave, we prepare the milking stalls for the second round, repeating everything again. Since now they have 78 milking cows, milking had to be done four times.
We started rounding up the cows at 8:30 pm. By 9 pm they were ready to be milked and we finished that evening at 12 am.
"Honey, you stink!" I was greeted by my dear hubby when I opened the door of the Airstream and stumbled over the threshold barely feeling alive .
As I was walking to the house to take a shower, I was happy the next day it was going to be Mirek's turn milking.
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