Wednesday, October 08, 2008

How do you Get Chocolate Milk?

I have just returned from visiting my first dairy farm. I have officially milked 68 cows-well now lets clarify I did not milk any cows per say. Ok here is what I did-After a short tour of the farm and the barns I drove a New Holand Tractor(PS Im getting really good at driving tractors) through town(Keispelt)-got yelled at by a bus driver(in Luxembourgish) for not pulling over and letting him have the right away and that was just a couple hours in. Then me and some other hired hanns(is that how you spell it?) moved about 50 or so beef cows from one field outside of town into the barn. Later at around 7pm I helped Andrique with the dairy cows. Each cow has a collar that has a sensor on it. This sensor detects which cow is being milked, how many litres it is producing and what its average production is. On each side their are four cows. You must first begin by wiping each tit with a paper towel, then draining the pre-milk(I don't know the proper terminology)then place the sucking tubes on each tit. Sometimes there are only two or three tits that produce milk and sometimes there are more than five tits but only 4 will produce milk-that is the max-at least that I know of. The sucking tubes stop pumping milk automatically. After the machine has stopped you disinfect each tit. Then when all 8 cows are finished you move a ne eight in and begin again. Of course during this whole process you must be careful not to get sprayed by pee or poop. I got wacked inthe eye by a tail drenched in poop and got sprayed by pee-but all in a days work right?:) Oh and to finish the night, Frankie(Farm owner) gave me some fresh milk to take home. My host dad, Claude and I each took or first drink of cows milk together and you know what? It was really good-way better than I expected.

1 comment:

KellieBetty said...

Good discription, sounds similar to what i was doing at my last family in Austria. I have not seen how they milk the cows here at the school but I'm hopping to.