MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW…

Some days are more special than others and yesterday was one of them as I left the End of the Rainbow Valley to help my friend Yun celebrate her birthday. Yun will be returning to her homeland China soon and there’s something that she hasn’t experienced- so we headed to Cashton, a town of a 1000 + to spend the afternoon with 120 pregnant females… Yep, how many of you have been surrounded by that many with raging hormones all under one roof? You see we visited Diane, a Jazzercise buddy and her dairy farm with 120 milking cows, 11 calves and 130 grazing cows. (FYI as far as I know Diane's hormones weren't raging she has been haying.- a story for another day.)

We had a great visit seeing the life of the cow on D&D farm. First we saw the calves that are separated from their Moms at birth to be bottle fed by Diane. There goes a couple hours out of your day...

Remember, this is a dairy farm and you don’t want to affect the farm's 9000 pounds/day milk supply.But DANG that’s a lot of bottles for the 11 calves. Eventually the calves will be given some milk to whet their appetite before they eat other food. The calves in this photo are 2 months old. They will stay separated from the others until they reach at least 750 lbs. That’s a lot of woman! NO BULL, There are no bulls on the farm as the calf males are sold. Here’s another factoid for you - the girls even start trying to mount each other...Just thought I'd throw that in to see if you're paying attention. ANYHOW once the cows are inseminated, a log is kept to know exactly when each cow will give birth. These pg cows will be kept under one roof. They receive a special diet and rest on sand bar stalls. Tails have been cropped for sanitary reasons.( Less poop flinging) Floors are squeegied 2x/day. If a cow has an infection/whatever, they have a red tape band placed around a leg, sometimes secluded and milked with their milk not going where the others' milk is collected. Diane and her husband make sure their cows stay healthy!

Cows are milked twice a day and know the process as they head into the milking station where 16 at a time will be milked first having their teats sanitized before having a pneumatic system extract their milk.Very cool. It takes an hour and 40 minutes to milk the 120 cows. A milk truck collects each day's supply. A cow's milking life is about 10 years and then they go out to pasture.

Besides all this new knowledge about where milk comes from and new vocab like freshen and dry, Diane also sent me home with an organic liquid to apply to Unojo's hard udder with instructions to massage after application. 

Today a former masseuse friend demonstrated the best way to apply it. Let's see if I have magic fingers... AH, To milk or not to milk, that is the question.