May 29, 2012

Today in class we went and visited a dairy barn. This farm has about 180 dairy cows on it. I did not realize how many different types of dairy cows there are but they mainly have the black and white cows on their farm as well as a few brown. We were able to see the new part where they do all the milking, the old part which they now just use for shaving around the cows utters, and anything that the cows don't really like. We also got to see where all the calf's stay and how they separate them based on age. Over all the farm seemed really clean, there were flies like you would expect but they weren't that bad. They showed us where all the milk goes after they have milked the cows. The milk goes into this huge refrigerator type thing that can stir the milk and cool it down at the same time. It can hold about 4,000 gallons at one time. The cows are milked 2 times a day and the trucks come to get the milk from the refrigerator every 4 turns so about every 2 days the truck comes. I thought it was cool how everything worked off a machine pretty much so the machines did most of the work. They even had chips in the cows collars that would help the feeder recognize which cow it was and dispense the right amount of feed based on how much fat and protein was in the cows milk that day and based on how much milk they were producing. So they were doing everything they could to help keep the cows as healthy as possible and get them to produce as much as they could. The facility stays really clean and they have to sanitize everything and wash everything down after every milking. It was kind of cool to see how high tech the dairy farm actually was. This farm is a family run business and you could see how every family member did their part to help out.