Cow barn.

This was Austin's cow barn the morning before the auction - extra sawdust and numbers marked on the cows for the impending doom.

A mix of Jeseys, Holsteins, Guerneys, Ayrshires.............

Note the AM radio halfway down the left main beam. This was on all the time. The cows were calmed by it and the early morning news was always welcomed by the milking team - Austin and the hired hand at the time. Don Mullally was the local am DJ and worked the radio for many years. I had the privilege of meeting and knowing Don. His son and I were on the same wrestling team.

Blue Boy the cow dog is looking for a morsel. Dogs are for sure ominivores. Nothing, I mean nothing is off limits. Mouth-to-mouth contact was not advised for him or any other dog that I've known. Blue Boy was a bordie collie and was probably only a year or 2 old at this time. This canine knew and loved cows. They thought otherwise.

The gutters behind the cows were used to collect the manure which on a daily farm is everpresent. A producing cow would easily dump 50 lbs of floor spatter a day. These gutters were cleaned by hand - daily in the winter. The steel rail running along the ceiling cross beams was for the gutter carrier which rolled along the rail and was loaded by hand. Once full it was pushed to the end of the barn, out the back doors and dumped into the manure spreader parked outside just beyond the barn doors. One cleaning would fill it. In the summer the manure spreader was pulled and spread by tractor. Of course, this is somewhat moot because in the summer the cows spent most of their time in the pasture and gutter cleaning was infrequent. In the winter the spreader was a flat wagon on skids pulled by horses and spread by hand.

The hay was stored in the hay mows on the second story of the barn, hence the large ceiling beams. The hay bales would be thrown down holes in the ceiling and fed to the cows. The other winter roughage feed was silage - chopped spring grass and fall corn. This was pitched out of the silo next to the barn. In the very cold months it was partially frozen and made for some frigging digging.

The de Laval milking machines were run off a cycling vacuum line. After each cow was milked the milking machine pail would be dumped into another pail that was then hand carried to the milkhouse tank at the other end of the barn. Each cow would normally be hand stripped to get the last pint or 2 of milk. This herd would take about an hour to milk with 2 machines.

This was mid '60's dairy farming. Hand and back work was involved in most all operations. Every dairy farmer that I knew had poyeye hands and forearms and a grip that could choke the life out of a fresh hickory stick. Hand calluses were tougher than 10 grit sandpaper. Obese farmers were a rarity.

Today's open pens and automated milking parlors with computerized self-feeders are hugh productivity improvements and work savers. But is today's dairyman tired at the end of the day and can they recall the names of each cow and production stats? I doubt it.