I was born and raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York. My grandfather
milked 360 head of the biggest Holstein milk producers on the planet, 3
times a day. I, on the other hand, have more sense than to work 18 hours a
day like he did most of his life. I do, though, have extensive experience
running milk machines, bailing hay all summer, loading silos, unloading
silos, feeding, shoveling sh*t and spreading it across pure snow all
winter, to the delight of the crops planted in the spring....

Joining the Navy in 1964 was one good, politically-correct way out of the
dairy business.....forever....(c;

I didn't find out until I was in the Navy that you DIDN'T pour pure cream
from Grandma's precious Guernsey's onto breakfast cereal! Those idiots
were putting SUGAR on it! Very strange, city folks. They think "milk" has
only 6% butterfat in it...which, to us farm boys, is like "skim milk"...(c;

Larry

Wow! And I thought that all American kids lived in cities and didn't
realise that milk came from cows but was just another factory product
- there were/are 9 year old kids in South Auckland (N.Z.) who thought
so as well.

I too lived on several farms as a kid and did as you did but we never
milked 3 times a day. N.Z. mainly had Jerseys (high milk fat content
and lovely natured) and Fresians (similar or same as Holsteins - with
high volume). As the farms I lived on took their milk to the local
cheese/butter factory in cans, in the morning, before stirring them
up, we would skim some of the settled cream off the top of and take
it back to be heated - clotted cream. As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,
choumolier (sp?), turnips, swedes and mangolds (the least three beet
crops). We also made ensilage - made by stacking cut undried grass or
green maize (plants and all) in a heap and excluding the air -
fermented and smelled a bit like sauerkraut. This would be fed out by
pitchfork on the back of a tractor.

No barns either so no alimentary wastes to shovel out apart from the
washdown sump in the milking shed every couple of years. We would just
use chain harrows to disintergrate and spread out the cow pats. Even
though the farm families got paid handsomely by the government for my
upkeep, I still had to work just the same as the other farm kids which
i am glad of now.

Sigh! Memories. feeding chooks (laying hens), collecting and cleaning
**** off eggs, making hay throughout the night because of impending
rain - so tired that I was found asleep in the full bath with my
overalls on, going to school on the school bus and managing to "cop a
fe--" from the early developer good time girl on the way, smell of cut
hay, training my own farm dog to fetch the cows "Get away back Flo",
going to stock sales and best of all, looking over my shoulder in the
dawn from the cow shed at the first light turning the snow cap on the
dormant volcano, Mount Taranaki a deep purple. (Google it - it is a
more perfect cone than is Fuji in Japan and doesn't have the heaps of
consumer rubbish up its flanks). Even now, when I hear the Rock group
"Deep Purple", I visualise that mountain. - I mentioned that N.Z. was
God's Own country didn't I?

You're right of course. Most of the brighter farm raised kids left for
either education or jobs elsewhere. It was the town kids who packed
the agricultural classes at high school. Tried to tell about to
dropout University friends of the Hippie era that farming, and in
particular subsistance farming, was damned hard work, but they had too
many stars in their eyes and thought they would sit back and watch
everthing grow while they lay in hammocks under a verandah smoking
good ol' Coromandel Green. Couldn't afford to drop out myself. I was
trying desperately to drop in.

Oh yes! The rules. On one farm I biult a stringers over plywood framed
and canvas and enamel paint 12 foot canoe from a magazine at school -
can't remember it but it was American - "Practical something or
other". The hardest part of building the BOAT was in the translation
of the text to English.

My God, I must be old. All of this was so long ago.

cheers
Peter