The Penultimate Cow Experience: Milking a Beef Cow

The ultimate cow experience will be seeing that last cow have her calf. She's been holding out on us for days. This is week 9 of the 10-week term and students in the calving class are dropping like flies because of the demands of final projects, term papers, preparing for final exams. I have the same demands on my time on top of working on the thesis but I don't have the luxury of slacking off. 

I promise that this is the last pregnant cow post. I hope to have some dog training stories in the queue shortly. A nice change of topic.

But today I have to write about the penultimate cow experience: milking a beef cow.

Besides pulling blood from the calves every 12 hours, we get blood and colostrum from the mothers. Despite overseeing new calf activities for many calves, I have not yet collected colostrum myself. There wasn't any reason or excuse, it was just one of those things that I thought that the students could do. They aren't allowed to draw blood so I tried to get their hands on the cows and calves in other ways. We only need 50 ml of colostrum so it's a few pulls on a teat to fill a plastic collection tube and you are done.

But a calf that was born yesterday has not been thriving. We all thought she was nursing, it certainly looked like she was nursing, but she lost nearly 5 lbs before the PI decided we needed to bottle feed her in an attempt to teach her to nurse properly. What does one put in that bottle? Mother's milk, of course. And there's only one way to get that. So we've been hand-milking the cow every five hours or so and bottle-feeding the calf. 

These cows are not the gentle pets that dotted the Swiss Alps around Heidi's village. They aren't feral range cows either, but something in between. You don't pull up a comfy stool, rest your head on the side of the cow, and milk into a bucket, surrounded by meowing barn cats. No, you have to run the cow into the squeeze chute, take the sides off the chute, and crouch down beside it, reaching under to squeeze a teat with one hand while holding a plastic bottle under it with the other, hoping that the teat is pointed into the mouth of the bottle because you can't see a darned thing. You don't squeeze all at once but sort of close your fingers sequentially along the length of the teat (no, you don't pull on the things, that produces nothing). Your hands are cold because it's been 28F in the barn the past week or so during my pre-dawn shifts, and the cow most certainly does not like you messing about with her udder even in the best of circumstances. You have to move from one side of the cow to the other to reach all the teats (there are four, each with its own milk reservoir). You have to be ready to pull your arms and head back if she kicks, or pees or poops (splashy). You have to be patient: once you empty a teat, it might take a few seconds to refill. This is not a fast process.

I'd never in my life had my hands on a cow's udder until 4am this morning but I was able to pull 3 pints out of her in about half an hour. The student who was helping me never got the hang of it so he supervised.

Before I got it down myself, I managed to spray milk pretty much everywhere. Of course it quickly froze so my jacket cuffs and hands and the outsides of the bottles were soon sticky and icy--raw milk has a lot of fat in it, and that part doesn't freeze but the rest of it does. The crouching is viciously hard on your thighs. My wrists and forearms are now stiff and sore.

Good thing I've got some other career plans in place because I'd never make it as a farmer or in the porn industry.

I spent most of the half hour mumbling about the insanity of this mammalian progeny-feeding system. What was evolution thinking?

Anyway, we got the milk into the calf eventually (it took longer to get it into her than it did to collect it). And I just got an email from the PI saying that they managed to get the calf to successfully nurse from the mother while in the pen (not the chute). So it looks like we turned the corner on that one.