Are there any other dairy farmers here?

[stuart.reinke]

Just what the title says.

Let me hear from you. Where do you live? How many cows (or goats, or sheep) do you have.

If there are enough of us maybe we could start a social group.

This is me:

I'm in south Nebraska, USA
we are currently milking 65 cows, but with dry cows and heifers will be milking close to 100 in a couple of months.

With close to 1 million users on UF. I can't be the only dairy farmer here, can I?:)

[Swagman]

1 million **** takers and 1 Milk taker !!

[drs305]

stuart,

I can lend (a little) support. I've milked a cow but was a village kid in a dairy town. Dairymen and their wives were the hardest working people I knew while growing up.

And my grandfather was an independent milk man (deliveries and sales) during the Depression. Still have a milk bottle with his name on it.

[cmay]

I used to work on one if that counts. actually I did not work with cows that long but pigs some years. I never worked with horses but I used to take care of the horse when I was at the first farm I worked on. it was standing alone all day long so I took a few hours every now and then to take care of it.

[hobo14]

Dairy farmer's son here...

[Irihapeti]

I'm a retired relief milker. On occasion, I'd milk about 200 cows by myself. At another place, I helped a guy to milk about 370 of them. I decided a few years ago that I was getting too old for that kind of work, and I didn't really enjoy the freezing cold spring mornings and the sweltering hot summer afternoons any more.

[Swarms]

Nothing like dairy products when you are have lactose intolerance :(.

[Eisenwinter]

I'm a dairy farmer. I work in a farm which is considered to be quite large, in northern Israel.

We have ~500 milked cows, 3 milkings a day.

The milking parlour consists of 2 sides, with 16 milk posts at each side, giving us the ability to milk 32 cows at the same time.

The milking still takes close to 4 hours, depending on the seasons and how the cows feel.

In the winter there's usually more milk (Israel is a very hot country and the cows don't like the summer), so it's common for the milkings to last close to or even over 5 hours.

We also have about 200 baby cows, and around 150 "adolescent" cows who are pregnant currently.

All the cows are the Holstein breed.

[hobo14]

Holy #@$&!

500 cows in a herring bone dairy that holds 32?!
That must drive you insane.
You guys should splash out on a rotary ;)

[Eisenwinter]

Yeah man, tell that to my boss, lol.

You get used to it after a while, it's mostly very difficult for the newcomers because to them it seems to never end.

I've been working in that place for almost 3 years now.

[stuart.reinke]

Good to hear from you guys. Our milking herd is down because of summer also. I can milk our 65 cows in 2 hours. we have a double 8 parallel parlor.

[tcoffeep]

I'm lactose intolerant. Any dairy farmers who also produce soybeans? *wiggles eyebrows*