How to Keep Your Dairy Animals Clean When Milking, Part 2

Reader Contribution by Nick Zigelbaum
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If you’ve read the last post, Making Clean Raw Milk, Part 1: A Simple Guide for Small-Scale Dairies, you’ll know what clean milk is and how to find a healthy animal to start your herd. In this post I will describe how to milk your cow or goat and process that milk in a manner that keeps it clean.

Creating a Clean Space to Milk

There are many ways to lay out a milk parlor and each has pros and cons depending on the number of cows and style of milking (by hand or by machine). I milk two cows by hand in a 12-foot by 12-foot stall. Steve Judge, founder of Bob-White Systems, milks up to four cows in tie stalls with a machine and pipeline. However you lay out your milk parlor, make sure you have a method of keeping things clean. My cows stand on wood chips and are only in the stall for milking. I muck their stall daily. In barns with concrete floors, where cows tend to spend more time, there is often a manure trough behind the cows that sweeps manure outside onto a pile as often as you like. Whatever your method, removing manure and soiled bedding from the milk parlor is an important step to keeping the milking area clean. I also prefer a sand or dirt floor to allow moisture to drain away, but a concrete floor can be cleaned more easily if your cows are in there for many days. Airflow is also important to keep the buildup of dust and moisture to a minimum. Cows also like an open space and will more readily walk into your parlor if it doesn’t look like a dark dead-end.

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