A Year on a Dairy Farm · The Morning

The Morning, part 2

When the flow drops below a certain rate — the cow is finished — sensors in the cluster trigger a small cylinder that pulls the cluster down and off the udder automatically. This is called automatic take-off. Tom’s parlor has it, like most modern parlors. Older ones did not. Older milkers had to watch each cow and remove each unit by hand, which was the way the work was done for a hundred years.

If you stand in the pit while a cow is being milked you can hear the machine breathing: the high steady whoosh of the vacuum, and underneath it the chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff of the pulsator opening and closing. You can hear the milk hitting the inside of the receiving jar in long irregular bursts. You can hear the cow shifting her weight on the platform above you, and the small click of her hoof on metal, and somewhere down the line another cow letting her urine fall in a long warm stream onto the rubber matting.

The sound of a working parlor is, once you have spent any time in one, a sound you carry around with you for the rest of your life.

By five-twenty Tom and Marcelino are on round three. They have done thirty-six cows. They have forty more to go.

The work is the same on every cow, and it is also not. Some cows step up onto the platform like they are doing you a favor. Some cows balk. Some cows, who have been milked twice a day every day for years, walk into their stanchion, place their head into the headlock without prompting, take their grain, and stand still for nine minutes without ever needing a hand on their flank. Some cows are kickers. Tom has a list, in his head, of which cows are kickers and which kick because something is wrong and which kick for no reason; you learn to step back from the udder of a known kicker before reaching in. Some cows step on your foot. Marcelino, in his five years on this farm and at the previous farm where he worked for two years before, has had three broken toes. They were all on his left foot, because that is the foot the cow you are working on can reach.

Marcelino works on the right side; Tom works on the left. They talk to the cows more than they talk to each other. Easy now. Easy. Buena, vaca, buena. Stand. Stand. Good. Half of it is in English and half in Spanish, and most of it could be in either, because the cows are not really listening to the words. They are listening to the voice, which is steady, which is familiar, which is the same voice that has come to them at the same hour for as many mornings as they have been alive.

Hazel comes in on round four. She is on the left side, third from the back. Her udder has filled in the eight hours since the evening milking and her teats are, just slightly, swollen. Tom strip-cups her. Her milk is clean. He pre-dips. He wipes. He massages. He attaches. The cluster goes on with the small soft thunk of vacuum catching, and her milk starts to flow down the line, and her body relaxes the way every cow’s body relaxes when the pressure of a full udder is being lifted from her, and Tom is already on to the next cow.

She is milked in four minutes and forty seconds. The auto-take-off pulls the cluster off her with a faint hiss. Tom returns, post-dips each teat in a different iodine — purple, the post-milking dip, which forms a thin barrier on the teat end against bacteria for the next several hours — and releases the headlock. Hazel walks out the back of the parlor, down the return lane, toward the bunk for her morning grain.

She has given, this morning, about three and a half gallons of milk. She will give about the same again tonight. Over the course of a year, discounting the two months at the end when she is dry before her next calf is born, she will produce something on the order of two thousand gallons. The average American drinks about seventeen gallons of milk in a year. Hazel feeds, by herself, about a hundred and twenty people.

The thing the work does to the people who do it is not visible at first.

Marcelino is twenty-nine. He looks twenty-nine. If you saw him in the parking lot of the Walmart in Geneva you would not look twice. But his hands, if you took one of them in yours, would tell you something. The skin on his palms is thick the way a stonemason’s is thick. The joints of his fingers are slightly larger than they should be at his age. His right shoulder is, very slightly, lower than his left. His knees ache in the morning.

Tom is fifty-six. His hands look older than that. There is a permanent stiffness in his right thumb that has been there since the early 2000s and which he attributes, accurately, to twenty years of attaching milking units. His back hurts where it has hurt since 1994. His left knee was replaced six years ago. He sleeps badly. He has been told by the only doctor he sees, who is in Penn Yan and whom he sees once a year because Sarah makes him, that his blood pressure is high, his cholesterol is high, and that he should consider what the doctor calls slowing down, which is a phrase that has no operational meaning on a dairy farm.

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