A Year on a Dairy Farm

1. Chapter 01 February Inside The Barn

It is four in the morning, the thermometer outside the kitchen window reads minus six, and Tom Hartley is putting on the second of his two pairs of socks. The first pair is thin wool, the second thick. Then Carhartt overalls over long underwear, then the boots, then a flannel, then the brown duck coat that is missing two buttons because he keeps meaning to fix them and keeps not fixing them. A wool hat. Gloves in the pocket — he won’t need them yet, inside.

The kitchen is dark except for the small light over the stove. The coffee is in a thermos; he made it the night before and reheated it just now in the microwave for forty seconds, which is exactly long enough. The radio is on low — the Geneva station, weather and farm news, a man’s voice talking about hay prices in a tone that suggests he has been talking about hay prices for thirty years and intends to keep going. Sarah is upstairs, asleep. Their daughter Anna, home from Cornell for the long weekend, is asleep in her old room. The dog, an aging border collie named Jess who has stopped being useful around cows but is still useful around the kitchen, lifts her head from the rug, considers the situation, and decides to stay where she is.

Tom goes out the back door. The cold is the kind that feels personal. It enters the inside of his nose and turns the small hairs there into a foreign material. He walks the eighty yards from the house to the barn on a path he has shoveled and re-shoveled all week, the snow piled waist-high on either side. The Finger Lakes do not get the heaviest snow in New York — that distinction belongs to the cities along Lake Ontario, Watertown and Oswego, where the lake-effect bands stack up — but they get enough, and they get the kind of cold that comes off the long fingers of water before the lakes freeze and then sits in the valleys for weeks.

The barn comes up out of the dark like a ship. It is a long low building, a free-stall barn, built by Tom’s father in 1978 and added onto twice since. The east-facing windows of the milkhouse are already lit. Marcelino has been here since a quarter to four. He is from a town in the highlands of Guatemala that Tom has looked up on a map exactly once, in 2019, when Marcelino first came, and which Tom could not now find again without looking again. Marcelino speaks Spanish to Tom and Mam to his wife on the phone, and the phone is in his shirt pocket, on speaker, more often than not, because his daughter, who is seven, likes to hear what is happening even when there is nothing to say.

Tom slides open the door to the milkhouse and the warm hits him in the face. It is not warm warm. It is forty-five degrees, maybe forty-eight, and after minus six this is the tropics. The milkhouse smells like detergent and stainless steel and faintly of milk, which is the cleanest smell in any working dairy and the one that, if you have ever lived around it, you can identify in a stranger’s coat from across a room. Marcelino is at the wash sink, hosing down a length of pipeline. He nods. Buenos días. Buenos. The vacuum pump is already running, a steady low hum that you stop hearing after about a minute and then notice again, like the refrigerator at home, only when it cuts out.

Through the next door is the parlor — a double-six herringbone, which means twelve cows can be milked at a time, six on each side, standing at an angle to the pit where Tom and Marcelino will work. The pit is a trench three feet lower than the cow platform, so the cow’s udder is at chest height for a person of average build, which Tom is and Marcelino is not; Marcelino works on a small wooden box he made himself, two winters ago, and which he has carried into the pit every morning since. The pit smells like rubber and warm metal and very faintly of the iodine teat dip in its bottles along the wall.

Beyond the parlor is the barn proper. This is where you would go if you wanted to understand what a dairy farm in February actually is.

It is two hundred feet long and seventy feet wide and the roof is high, and the cows are in it. There are ninety-four of them this morning. The number floats between eighty and ninety-five over the year, depending on who is fresh and who is dry and who has gone on the truck. They are lying in stalls bedded with sawdust, or standing at the feed bunk pulling at the long ropy strands of baleage — last summer’s grass, cut and wrapped wet in white plastic and fermented into something between hay and silage — or walking, slowly, in the alley between the rows of stalls. The barn is open at the eaves; in summer the breeze moves through it; in winter the warmth of the cows themselves, ninety-four bodies of about fourteen hundred pounds each, keeps the inside of the building twenty to thirty degrees warmer than the outside. You walk in and you can feel them before you see them. You can hear them: the low rumbling of cud chewing, which is constant, and the occasional deep exhale, and the sound of a hoof on the concrete alley, and the wet pulling sound of a tongue wrapping around hay.

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