Why I won't be a farmer.

Even though I was raised on a farm and enjoyed some of the aspects of farm life, there were several activities that canceled any desire I may have had to become a farmer. Let me describe one of these dismal  activities.

First was tending and milking a milk cow.  The morning of my eighth birthday my father awakened me early and said, "Happy birthday son, now that you are eight years old it is time for you to start milking the cow."  From that moment until I was seventeen years old I milked a cow night and morning.  The only exceptions were illness or some important social event such as having a date to the Junior Prom or being out of town.   The memories of milking a cow are embedded in my mind never to forgotten.

For those of you who have never even seen a cow, let me describe one.  A cow has four legs, On the front side there is one head with two eyes and two ears.  The most important part of the cow is an  udder located at the tail end on the bottom of the cow. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary describes an udder as: "an organ (as of a cow) consisting of two or more milk glands enclosed in a large hanging sac and each provided with an nipple". Personally, I never saw a cow with only two milk glands.  Any cow that I ever milked had four milk glands and we call them teats.

There was no ideal time of the year to milk a cow.  In the winter your hands had a tendancy to freeze.  The cow wasn't overjoyed to have someone with frozen hands grab hold of her teats.  In the summer, flies were constantly flying around the cows head and were excited to have an additional head (mine) to land on. It was hard to milk and brush away the flies at the same time.

Now, with that brief description of the trials of milking a cow, I'll list the critical steps to be followed. First you grab a pail and fill it with cold water in the summer time and hot water in the winter.  Why the water, you may ask.  The water was to wash the udder before you started to milk.  Cows had a terrible habbit of messing and then lieing down in the mess.  Thus it was absolutely necessary to first wash the udder unless you wanted a strange taste to the milk.

Second, using both hands you grab hold of two teats and squeeze and jerk in a coordinated manner and the milk starts to flow. When the milk stop flowing, you're done.  Now that seems like a rather simple operation.

But there are other problems to be solved.  Because of space restrictions, I will list the problems but not the solutions.  If there is ever anyone reading this blog (obviously having too much time on their hands) I won't take the time to describe the solutions to these problems. But, if you are planning on buying a milk cow in the future and want to be well prepared, let me know and  I'll Email the solutions to you.

The problems are:
What to do when your cow jumps over a fence trying to get to a bull in the adjoining pasture and cuts her teats and refuses to let anyone touch her?
What do you do when in the winter you grab hold of the teats with ice cold hands and the cow suddenly rebels and turns on you and attempts to stomp you to death?
What do you do when upon entering the corral, the cow darts through the gate and you spend the next thirty minutes chasing her around the pasture.

Remember, solutions to these problems are free and you pay only a triffling amount to cover costs of paper, time, postage and any other costs that may arise.