I’ve spent the last week working on a dairy farm in Somerset. I’d never done any work with cows before (except briefly when I spent a week on a sheep farm) so it was a new experience for me. What I didn’t realise until arriving there the night before was that the farm was only a couple of hundred metres down the road from the self-catered accommodation I was staying in – which meant that I didn’t have to wake up ages before my 6am start every morning – so my routine every day was something like this:
5:30am - Wake up, eat breakfast, put on my boiler suit and wellies (in the photo below)
5:50am – Walk along to the farm
6:00am – Go to the field the cows were in and bring them up to the farm buildings
6:15am – Start milking
8:15am – Finish milking, give the milk to the calves
8:30am – Walk back to accommodation, get out of now very smelly/dirty boiler outfit
*Free time*
[Working on chemistry coursework/summer college work or relaxing]
3:30pm – Put my boiler suit back on and walk back to the farm
4:00-6:30pm – same as 6:00-8:30am
The farm had 130 milking cows which were all milked twice a day so by the end of the week I had become quite quick at attaching and removing the milking clusters, a 10 step process:
- Let the cows in one at a time onto the platforms
- Chain them in so that they don’t walk away
- Give them some food
- Check (from their markings) if they have mastitis or are only milking on 3 quarters*
- Wash away and dirt from the udders
- Wipe the udders
- Attach the cluster and turn on the vacuum
- Once the milk flow has reduced, remove the cluster
- Spray the udder with disinfectant to help prevent infection
- Open the door for the cow to leave
*Milk from the cows with mastitis has to be kept separate from the other milk and cannot be sold. Some cows which have had mastitis have ‘dryed up’ in one of their quarters, so only 3 of the 4 cups on the cluster are attached.
Despite the early mornings, I really enjoyed the week and now feel confident working with cows, which was what I was aiming for from the week.
