Tuesday, June 5, 2007

This week we have Farm Days for Fifth Graders, where kids from all over come to get a tour of the farm. The official name of the farm is Heart's Delight Farm at the William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute. We tend just to call it the Miner Farm. There are 8 stations that the kids rotate through: Horse behavior, field equipment, 100 years ago, horse care, calves, feeds, dairy barn, and cannulated/fistulated cow. I was working the dairy barn station with Melisa, a research intern who actually has more farm experience than I do.

Melisa mostly talked about the milking parlor: it is a double-12 parallel parlor, meaning 24 cows can be milked at once; each cow produces 15-30 lbs of milk, on average, at each milking; the cows are milked three times a day at 4:30 am, 12:30 pm, and 8:30 pm; it takes about 5 hours to milk all 272 cows; we have 2 milk tanks that hold 2,000 gallons and 3,000 gallons; the milk truck comes one a day; the milk here is used to make cheese; a Holstein makes enough milk in one year to 54 families, assuming a gallon of milk per week; all the milk produced in the US goes to make 1 billion pounds of butter, 7 billion pounds of cheese, and 1 billion gallons of ice cream.

Then we took the kids to the dairy barn and showed the the stars of the show: our Holstein cows. Our barn has 272 free stalls; each stall is 52" wide, which is wider than the industry average and enables the cows to rest in a more natural posture; they rest from 12 to 14 hours per day because making milk takes a lot of energy; there are automatic insulated sidewall curtains that are raised when the temperature outside dips below 40°F; the temperature in the barn this winter never dipped below freezing; there are automatic aisle scrapers running continuously, which helps keep the flies down; there is a fan and sprinkler system used in the summer to keep the cows cool; all the cows wear a neck collar with a transponder that has a pedometer to track their activity and is also synched with the milking parlor to keep track of how much milk they produce.

This is the floor plan for the dairy barn. The top of the picture is the front of the barn. The milking parlor is on the right, just at the 'Y' joint towards the top (whminer.com). This picture was taken from the catwalk in the dairy barn and it shows the aisle scraper as well as several very happy cows (whminer.com).