Kind of Like Water Skiing

In Don't Try to Catch This I wrote a little about how my brother and I grew up on a farm that had dairy cows for a time. My brother and I were required to help during the summer especially when my uncle went for his 2 week military training. As my brother and I got older, we had to help more and more. Some of the kinds of chores we would do include:

• Retrieving the cows from the pasture to be milked - we had to go and herd the cows from the outer pastures into the holding area for milking.
• Feeding the cows their special grain blend - this consisted of getting the feed out of the grain bin in 5 gallon buckets (normally 5 buckets) and spreading it evenly in the feed bunk. The goal was to have each cow get a little of this supplement.
• Milking the cows. Cleaning the cows and putting on the milkers, removing them when finished, keeping the parlor clean.
• Cleanup of the milking parlor - scrape, sweep, hose, and bleach the milking parlor. 
• Scrape down the holding pen - the cows would always "use the facilities" in the holding pen and we used a snow shovel type scraper to clean the floor.
• Cleaning the automatic water trough
• Annoying your older/younger brother

The area around the buildings was concrete, including the area around the water feeder and the feed trough. It was concrete  because sometimes the automatic watering device would overflow. If there was not concrete it would make a muddy mess. Also, the cows spent a great deal of time near the food. Concrete makes clean up much easier when you have one of these things.

It makes cleanup much easier. Scrape all the poo into a pit to be later hauled off and spread on a field where crops were soon to be planted.

It is impossible to stay clean when you are working in a dairy. There are certain things you wear to prevent you from becoming too filthy. We wore water proof aprons to keep most of our clothes dry, at least in the front. We also wore knee high rubber boots over our shoes. The aprons are good for keeping water and cow poop off of your clothes. The boots work well until your brother comes up to you with the hose and squirts it inside the top of your boot... or maybe I did that to him. I'm sure we did it to each other a fair amount, and probably to dad too when we could get away with it.

Dad would take care of the larger maintenance tasks. Equipment break downs, and construction projects were what he would work on as well as the health and wellness of the cattle. He would give them vaccinations and medications as prescribed by the veterinarian. 

Sometimes my brother and I would get done early with our chores and we would wait for dad to get finished doing whatever he was doing so we could go home, or to grandma's for some food. We didn't want to go and find him because then if he was not ready to leave, he would have more stuff for us to do while we waited. Sometimes we would have a few minutes to spare, anywhere from 5 to 30 generally.

We would generally entertain ourselves. One way that my brother came up with was to go into the barnyard near the water trough and feed bunk. He would sneak up behind a cow and grab its tail. It would run away and by brother would hold onto the tail and be pulled behind the cow across the concrete. This would work much better before cleaning as cow crap between concrete and rubber boots makes for some decent lubrication...

I tried it a couple times. Neither of us face planted into a steaming pile although there were some close calls.

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