I milked a cow!

The ladies

The one in the back, you can just see her backbone above the second cow. Her name is Mercy and she was really nice to me while I was fumbling around her underside, although I’m sure she was rolling her eyes and thinking “pff, amateur.”

This was the udder!

I don’t have any pictures of me actually milking (I swear I did it though!) because I had to stay focused, but I will describe the general process.

So I didn’t do hand-milking (Sally says I can sometime soon though) but rather bucket-milking, which is when you put these little cylindrical things on the teats and it pulses with suction and milks the cow that way. Kind of seems like cheating, no? But apparently my image of a farmer and a bucket is terribly outdated and no one’s really milked like that since the 30s or something. Oh well. This is how it’s done at small dairy farms these days.

So first you have to set up the (previously sterilized) equipment. Basically there is an enclosed bucket with a tapered top and on it sits the pulsator, which is what regulates the suction from the machine and makes it come in pulses. Here Sally is setting up the bucket and pulsator:

 

 

the blue thing is the pulsator

Then there is a tube that goes from the bucket to the “spider” which is the four-legged thing (OK so half a spider) that has the metal tubes that attach to the teats. There is also a tube that attaches from the pulsator to the spider to regulate the suction.  

The spider, upside down. Reminds me of the robots from the scenes from the future in Terminator.

 

Then you take the bucket and spider into the milking room and hang the spider on a hook from the ceiling so the cylinders hang down. It’s very important that they don’t touch the ground because they’d get infected and be no good to use until they are cleaned again. While the spider is hanging, you attach the air tube (kind of making names up at this point) from the suction-creator to the spider. Sally’s suction-creator (vacuum maybe?) is from the 30s and is loud as a truck engine. Once everything’s connected, you hold off on turning on the power because you have to prep the cow first.

So I milked Mercy who is a very experienced and very chill dairy cow, so she is perfect for beginners like me. To get a cow ready for milking, first you let her know you’re there and it’s time for milking by just giving her a few pats and cooing what a good girl she is. Then you take a washcloth that’s been dipped in warm soapy water and clean off the teats, getting rid of any dirt or crud that’s on there. This was a little weird at first and it kind of felt like I was groping her, because you just have to squat down and get all up in her business and rub down each of the four teats. But I got over it. Mercy doesn’t get too dirty but Dorie, the other Brown Swiss, does. Perhaps she lies down more?

After the initial cleaning, you then use this little squeeze bottle of iodine attached to a funnel-type thing to disinfect the teats. You squeeze iodine into the funnel part (where it doesn’t drain back into the bottle) and then dip each of the teats in up about halfway. Then Mercy whips her tail at the bottle and you spill iodine all over yourself. Then you dry the teats and yourself off with several paper towels, which you discard.

If the cow is familiar with you and ready to be milked, she’ll often let go a little and leak some milk. Mercy didn’t do this for me but I wasn’t too surprised as I've never milked her before.

Then, with your hands you do a squirt or two from each teat into a little cup with a filter on it,. To do this, you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger and grip the teat at the top, then close around and gently squeeze with your lower three fingers. It is more about technique than pressure, and as everyone says, it’s harder than you would think. Mercy’s back teats are kind of small so it was hard to grip them, but I was able to clear the milk from all of them.  This step serves two purposes. First of all, it gets rid of the milk that has been in the teat all day and is full of bacteria, and clears the way for the day’s fresh milk. Secondly, the filter allows you to look at the milk before it goes into the bucket and check for any lumps, which could be a sign of mastitis (udder infection, basically.) Hopefully, all is good to go and you can move on to the next step.

Then, you plug in the suction-creator and let a little pressure build up and, while trying to keep all four cylinders of the spider above ground while its legs flop around all willy-nilly, slip the cylinders one by one onto each of the teats, and you are milking a cow! It’s not hard to get the cylinders on, they just will slide on up when they are aligned. The whole apparatus seems to suck at about two-second intervals and you can see the milk running through the tube into the bucket. Now you just kind of chill out, tell her she’s being a good girl, and massage her udder a bit which is kind of fun (it’s like kneading at a warm, hairy water balloon that has veins.) Mercy wasn’t letting her milk go as much as normal, no doubt because I was unfamiliar and she could tell I didn’t really know what I was doing, but we got a respectable amount. 

This is Sally milking sparkle, just so you can see how the spider hangs off the udder

 

When the stream of milk slows, you put in this little plug thing on the spider which cuts the section, and the spider falls right off the udder. This is where you have to make sure not to let it touch the ground again. Then you hang it up on the same hook and cut the suction-creator while you do the post-milking iodine dip. Same as before, you just fill up the iodine cup and dip the teat all the way up the top this time, and don’t dry it off afterwards with a paper towel so it dries into a sort of seal against any bacteria. And that’s it!

After the three cows are milked, you pour the milk into the bulk tank which cools it to 38 degrees F and agitates it so the cream doesn’t rise to the top. From there it can be poured into bottles (jars is what we use here.)

This is the spider on top of the bulk tank. The bulk tank is from Slovenia because no American companies manufacture ones that are so small because there are hardly any small-scale American dairy farms.

 

Overall it was pretty cool, and while I still want to do some hand-milking, I can now officially say that I milked a cow which has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember.

The ladies munching pre-milking. They are so cute with their heads all turned to me! Couldn't quite fit them all in the shot though.