One-cow Family Meets the One-family Cow
(Page 5 of 14)
May/June 1972
By Hank Rate
HOW TO PREPARE TO MILK YOUR COW
RELATED CONTENT
It'll help if you can milk your homestead's new darling once with the previous owner . . . or at least get an idea of the amount the cow produces at each session with the bucket and stool. I'm not going to figure that you'll get even that much help, though. Instead, I'll assume you're plumb green and start with the most basic nuts and bolts of milking.
If you buy a gentle old family cow, as I've suggested, the actual milking really won't be difficult at all. It will be tiring and time-consuming at the outset and the muscles in your hat and forearms will knot up and tucker out and make you want to weep. You'll feel like cramming this whole magazine down my craw long before you finish that first milking . . . but have faith and patience. Those muscles will shape up quickly and you'll soon turn into a fearsome arm wrestler with a bone-crushing handshake. You'll also soon be short of friends if you persist in demonstrating your new strength.
With a placid well-experienced "queen of the barn", you'll be able to take a good seat on a comfortable stool (about inches high) on her right side with no thoughts about remaining poised for a rapid retreat at any instant. The calmer the cow, in other words, the more completely you can concentrate on the actual act of milking.
A modest understanding of physiology will help you in your first attempt at getting Bossy's bounty out of her udder into the pail. Rather than being a basketball with faucets, cow's bag—or udder—is a complex system of glands which milk into a labyrinth of voids that are gathered into "quarters" above each teat. Each quarter is relatively independent of the others and each can develop its own problems.
A series of sphincter muscles cuts off the flow of milk and through the teats and relaxation of these sphincters ("letting her milk down") is the key to an easy harvest of your cow's creamy white nourishment. And that's the whole theory behind the slogan about "contented cows" and the proven fact that dairy animals produce more when milking always follows the same, familiar, pleasing routine.
I'm sure that other ideas will work but, normally, a cow is put into a compliant mood by feeding her grain at every milking. Soon, she starts thinking about that good grain whenever she sees you approach the barn . . . and such soothing thoughts tend to cause the production of a hormone called oxytocin (honest) which starts to relax the sphincters. When Bossy finally gets her nose in the feed box she really starts hanging loose and her milk surges to the teats where it's as easy as it'll ever be to coax into the bucket.
Some cows don't remain in the proper mood for very long so you should start milking yours while she's still eating. Washing her teats with lukewarm water will also help Ole Bossy relax. As soon as she's as serene as possible (milk may actually squirt out of one or more teats in a thin stream), dry her bag and start filling your pail. The routine will soon become familiar and calming to both you and your bovine beauty.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 | 5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
Next >>
