Milking Cows
As a young kid on our farm, I can recall Dad hand milking the cows just as pictured above right in the cow stable. He’d take a bucket and milk each cow for about 10 minutes or so until the flow of milk was dry, then he’d move on to the next cow. The herd included about a dozen cows at the time and once the bucket was about full, he’d dump the milk into a strainer positioned atop a 10 gallon milk can.
When the can became full, Dad would carry the full can weighing about 100 pounds to a tank of water outside near our well about 75’ from the stable. Here the milk would cool down until the milkman came the next morning to pick up the cans, typically 3-4 per day.
Those old vintage cans now go for over $100 on eBay! Wonder whatever happened to ours?
The proceeds from the sale of the milk provided a regular income for the family rather than relying only on the sale of livestock and harvested crops once a year, The family could live off the milk income and use the other income for major purchases and supplies for the next growing season. But as our family grew, the funds to feed and clothe our family also grew, so Dad had to improvise.
The first step was to buy a milking machine as pictured here. The system was powered by a vacuum pump with a valve that pulsated to simulate the same action as hand milking. In this way, milking a cow took about 1/3rd less time as hand milking. That allowed Dad to increase his herd to 18 cows, improving his income proportionally in light of our larger and growing family.
About that time, I was old enough to help, so he bought another milking machine and increased the herd again to about 25 cows. Also customers were demanding higher quality dairy products, so Dad upgraded to a Grade A dairy, which meant he had to have a milking parlor separate from the stable with a cooled bulk milk tank storing several hundred gallons of milk. The milkman would then hook a hose to the tank every 3-4 days and pump out the milk into a tank truck.
That meant a significant and expensive upgrade to our dairy facilities but yielded a higher price per gallon that made the investment worthwhile. Making that decision involved calculating return on investment, which Dad analyzed meticulously. And it taught me a valuable lesson as well, a technique used countless times during my career and to this day.
To earn the higher prices for Grade A milk, dairy inspectors showed up randomly several times a year to check out the cleanliness and quality of our operation. Dad was meticulous about making sure we passed the inspections. One problem I recall was the presence of “milk stone” in one of our milking machines, which meant the cleaning process after milking was not adequately performed (that was my job!). So I was trained and retrained on how to avoid the build up of milk stone. Eventually better cleaners were developed that readily dissolved the milk stone rather than relying on just my elbow grease.
Eventually, I went off to college so my younger brother took over helping Dad with the milking responsibilities. They continued to improve the milking technologies until Dad was nearing retirement age and sold his dairy cows. Had either me or my brother been inclined to become farmers, no doubt the improvements to the dairy operations would have continued. Today milking technologies are impressive.
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