"This is pretty much what they call a closed herd,"
Tim Leary says. "In other words, everything that we have was born
here, we raise it, and either milk it or sell it."
Twice a day, every day
"They've been milked twice a day, every day since
back in the 1940s, without exception and without fail," Leary says.
Tim Leary's day begins just after 5am when he heads
to the barn to clean-out the stalls, sterilize and run the vacuum pumping
system, and prepare the cows for milking and feeding. He's able to milk
five cows at a time and compares the process to juggling.
"I
can keep five balls in the air, but I can't keep six."
Once a cow has been milked, Leary moves the equipment
to the next cow. It takes roughly two hours to milk the herd. Once all
the cows have been milked, they're moved out to pasture until the evening,
when the process starts all over again.
With a smile on his face, Leary explains matter-of-factly,
"It's not the hours either, it's relentless, that's the thing. It's
every single day...it's one thing to get up early every day and sleep-in
on the weekend, but on this operation, it's every day. And if you start
late, you finish late and it just pushes the whole thing back."
Every other day--no matter what day it is--Oakhurst
sends out a truck for pickup. The driver measures the quantity of milk,
attaches a hose to the holding tank and pumps the milk into the delivery
truck.
Cows are athletes too
As the dairy industry evolved throughout the last century,
artificial insemination of cows has played a key role in creating better
herds of milking cows. They are generally stronger, healthier and capable
of producing more milk as a result of selective breeding.
Leary
uses a catalog to choose an appropriate bull to compliment one of his
cows. He picks up the phone, places an order, and someone comes to the
farm to inseminate the cow when she's in heat.
"So instead of having one bull on a farm and just
hoping he's a good bull, I have a catalog of 100 of the best bulls in
the world. Over generations, you make incremental progress. If you look
at what the production was when my father started milking cows, versus
what our production is now, it's an order of magnitude greater,"
Leary explains.
Since the Leary family began dairy farming, they have
more than doubled their average pounds of milk per cow, per day. The
cows now average over 60 pounds of milk each day. "The best cow
I ever had made a 170 pounds in a day -- which is no where near a record,
but it was our personal best," Leary says.
Dairy cows are athletes in Tim Leary's eyes, and his
job is to train them for greatness.
"You're really asking a lot of them all time. We
try to get as much feed as we can into them so we can get out as much
milk as we can...we're trying to keep them as healthy as we can. It's
a game you play, all the time."
November 3rd, 2004
