Dairy day deux

After a restless night we woke up to an alarm at 05:30, not a nice feeling after weeks of lie-ins! The strangest part about getting up at that time was that it was so light outside, we opened our window (which nearly came off in our hand) and outside it looked as if it was midday. It was so sunny and so hot that it didn’t actually take long to adjust to being up at that early hour. We asked Peggy and Hank what time sunrise was and they said 04:45…no getting up to photograph the sunrise then. As Nicola was due to help babysit Damian, I had a cup of coffee and headed up to the dairy to start my first full day on the farm. In the mornings, a 74 year old man with a brilliant white beard called Herman helps out with the milking so when I arrived at the dairy I was pleased to see all the cows in and all lined up, ready for milking.

I was surprised with myself, after a few nervous milkings (I’m not sure what else to call the action of putting a milking sucker on udders) I started to get the hang of it and became more comfortable with the cows. There was one incident of note though, perhaps I became too comfortable and took my eye off the ball. Well, as I described previously, you are in a vulnerable position in the central walkway where you do the milking because, as sod’s law would have it, the best place to attach a milking thing to a cow is from behind…directly below the cow’s arse. As you are around knee level with the cow the bottom is out of sight and unfortunately on this day, out of mind too. I guess you can tell what’s coming, although I couldn’t at the time. As I was attaching the final sucker onto the cow’s teat I heard the tell-tale plop, unfortunately, I was having trouble putting the last sucker thing on and just as I finished attaching the sucker I looked up and just managed to move my face out of the way as the cow opened its bowels and a massive pile of cow sh*t came tumbling towards me. I was lucky I managed to move my face, but not lucky enough. In my outstretched arms I discovered myself cradling 5 pounds of cow sh*t. It was all over my chest, and on my legs, from my upper arms all the way down to my hands…completely covered in warm, green, sticky, smelly cow sh*t. I was stunned into silence; I had been christened into the dairy farm way of life and all I could do was hose myself down and get straight back into milking as we still had over 60 cows left to milk by this point. Not an ideal start for me.

After the milking was done I accompanied Hank to do some afternoon chores (even though we were expecting to do 4 – 6 hours max per day I couldn’t say no to a bit of work on my first full day) and I hopped on the back of his tractor and made our way towards one of the grazing paddocks to move an electric fence. When I heard it was an electric fence I expected, rather unrealistically, for it to be a pretty big fence. When we arrived, it was an electric box on a metal pole connected by pliers onto a white fabric tape that stretched from one end of the field to another. We unhooked the pliers (after turning off the power of course) and began removing from the ground a number of fence posts upon which the white tape was held up by as it stretched along the field. Hank asked me to then walk to the bottom of the field and reel in the white tape. At this point I should mention that most of this work was done in rather long grass, I was getting nervous about snakes and the like but as Hank hadn’t said anything I just assumed there were no snakes in the area. After we finished moving the electric fence back around 50 metres and hooking it back up and turning the power on I asked Hank whether there were any snakes in the area…

“Oh yeah, you get taipans, king browns, red belly blacks…you got to watch out for them. The blacks aren’t so bad as they are not aggressive, but the taipans and king browns can get aggressive. They are pretty venomous”

I was a little taken aback so I asked “where do you find these snakes?”

“Over in that long grass there” Hank said, pointing towards the long grass I had just been walking through for the last 15 – 20 minutes.

“Ahhh right” I said, started to palpitate. “What do I do if I see one of these snakes?”

“Well, you stand still. Their eye sights no good, but they sense by vibrations so if you move they’ll bite. Sometimes they stand up on you, sensing the air ready to bite, if that happens stay still, it’s hard but that’s what you have to do. Then they just go off in the other direction as they don’t know where you are”.

I had a thought about what Hank had just said and replied “But what if they don’t go in the other direction and they come towards you?”

“Oh I don’t know…it’s not happened to me before”

Not reassured in the slightest, I got on the tractor and we headed back to the dairy where more chores awaited.

We had a brief respite however, and had our breakfast (made by Nicola). As I munched through my toast I could see Damian being a bit of a brat, to both Nicola and mine’s annoyance. He was almost two years old, but he was a lump of a child, probably the size of a 3 – 4 year old. He drank nothing but fresh whole cow’s milk (straight from the milking vat I kid you not) and no one ever told him no. When they did say no, he threw a tantrum and slammed his head onto the floor/wall/anything hard as well as screaming and crying until he got his way…which he inevitably did. As we were eating, Hank carved up a few slices of steak and fed them to Damian. He clearly enjoyed this, and he then grabbed an entire chunk of steak and started chewing on it. After a few minutes of this, the steak was removed from his hands before he started crying (classic Damian) before he managed to grab a bone which he started to chew on for a few minutes. Nicola and I sat in amazement and just looked at each other and shrugged, we were both itching to tell him off/say no but we knew there was no point as no one else had seemed to tell him no and we were not here to raise a child. We left him chomping on chunks of steak as we headed down stairs for a bit of privacy.

The next chore I had to do was to take apart the milking apparatus and remove the rubber linings and replace them with new rubber linings. That may sound easy, but it wasn’t. The milking apparatus kind of look like the egg-injecting alien from Alien, with four legs coming off it connected by a main and a secondary rubber tube. Due to the purpose of the suckers, a vacuum forms when the rubbers are attached. So trying to pull them apart you had to break the vacuum seal for each tube. The rubber was thick and it was hard work as you had to pull off the main tube (the end of which was encased in a metal covering which surrounded the teats) and then the secondary tube. After that you had to pull the rubber from the inside of the metal casing so that a new one could be inserted, which was the hardest bit. Fortunately, only eight boxes had arrived, so only eight out of the 12 milkers could be changed. That was still 64 tubes to replace and after an hour and a half or more of solitary work, I finally finished. By which point my chest and arms were burning due to the physical exertion of removing all the rubber and I was ready to call it a day…

…Hank and Peggy had other ideas however, and as I was finishing up it was time for the evening milking. Nicola joined us after her day looking after Damian and being a general house slave, cleaning, washing, folding, packing and cooking for everyone else (including Hank and Peggy’s daughter… Nicola was driven from the farm to her house to tidy up there too). The milking didn’t take too long as there were four of us in the pit (Hank was off doing odd jobs) and after two hours of milking, and feeding calves we were done…finally.