we're bringing dairy back

I thought I'd share the links I had found recently with the help of google and the beginning women farmer's yahoo group should anyone else be hunting for obscure diary supplies or old/new ideas.

http://www.microdairysystems.com/
-out of south royalton VT. has 40 and 50 gallon bulk tanks and other good stuff.

http://www.smalldairy.com/
- a wealth of information, links and classified section.

http://www.microdairydesigns.com/
- their website seems like it is still a work in progress, but offers small scale pasteurizers.

http://www.hambydairysupply.com/
-if you find a pail milker at the salvage yard and need new gaskets for it, this is the place to go. also has lots of other neat stuff.

barn cats say hello

he sees you when you're sleeping. he knows when you're awake. he knows if you leave your milk room doors open!!!

This week the milk inspector came. The milk inspector is someone employed by the state to inspect all dairy farms twice a year and make sure that we're not doing anything too egregious. As you might imagine, he is not the most popular of characters. In fact, for a while I didn't even know his name, I knew him only by the unfortunate but descriptive epithets used by the people at my old job to refer to him.

Now don't get me wrong, I think he is a good guy who does his best at a difficult job. But it gets my panties in a twist to have someone walk around the farm and find shit to criticize. But I smile and nod and agree that I will find out what the meat withold is for some obscure Chinese herbal medicine stashed in the back of the vet cabinet and thank the department of ag that he won't be back for another six months.

My uncle told me a story that sums up most dairy farmers' opinions of their milk inspectors:
When my uncle met his girlfriend's (the woman who i have known as my aunt for my whole life) dairy farming father for the first time, he addressed him as Mr. So-and-So. My uncle says his future father-in-law looked him right in the eye and said "Son, call me by my first name. Only one person calls me Mr. So-and-so and it's the milk inspector."

santa brought me a new vocabulary word

i was listening to says you in the barn sunday night. a quiz game that they play each week is one where the host gives a strange word and one team gives several definitions, one of which is correct and the other team must guess what is the true meaning.

last night the word was jibb, which turned out to mean "to milk a cow out completely." i think they should use the word in a sentence or at least say where they found these words because it was hard to know how to use the word in context. but google books seems to suggest the word "jibbings" was in some sort of usage in scotland, meaning the last, richest milk.

i wanted to try out google's ngram viewer with this but i found out that jibb is an alternate spelling of jib - the part of a ship, and is also something bad (i can't quite determine what) that a horse can do, and, more recently, it refers to a trick done on a snowboard.

here's a sentence that i think is correct:
the light on top of our milking machines flashes when the cow is giving her jibbings.

Praise Him for His Grace and Favor to our fathers in distress

A few years ago I read a passage from a book by Gene Lodgson that was a nice description of livestock in a barn which concluded with the idea that the place was so pleasant that, naturally, god would choose it as the spot for his son to be born. I thought I would find it again and type it out here for Christmas. But I can't remember what book it was in or where I read it so that will have to wait for another year.

Here is a Christmas story by Willem Lange, a writer from New Hampshire. It is very farmy and very New Englandy, so I thought it would go well here. http://www.vpr.net/episode/30488/

inflammatory mediators that cause hypersecretion

This entry contains elaborate descriptions of poop and pooping.

On Wednesday one of the cows had the shits and a runny nose and the next day a few more did and then a few more the next until by Saturday I was convinced they were all going to die in an ebola like puddle of their own body fluids. After my anxious phone call vet came and said it was probably just winter dysentery and that it was highly unlikely that anyone was going to die. I talked to a few other more seasoned less panic prone farmers who said that their cows get this (perhaps not so severely) every winter and get over it in a week. The Merk Veterinary Manual will tell you all about it. It's basically super contagious diarrhea with cough thing that cows who have to stay in a barn for the winter are pretty likely to get.

After my fears were assuaged, the situation became amazingly comic in a way that I, (and my candy ass digestive tract) having spent some time living in south east Asia, could fully identify with. I had no idea an animal could project it's own fecal matter a distance that would be measured in yards without using their arms. If the cows coughed while they were shitting, they could hit cows on the other side of the barn. Normally cows will lift their tails before they go to the bathroom, but sometimes the need to poo seemed to come on too fast and the stream would hit the back of their tail and splatter in all directions. I tried to stay out of the way of most of it and being on my guard spared me from a few direct hits. The barn cats retreated out into the cold and snow rather than be forced witness (and perhaps clean themselves off from) the mayhem. I milked last night with a rain coat on. But when I got home and looked in the mirror while I was brushing my teeth, I immediately had to stop and wash my face. twice.

morning milking haiku

cows were so filthy
what are they doing at night?
milking takes for ever