A Year on a Dairy Farm · The Morning

The Morning, part 3

The hours alone would do this. The schedule alone would do this. Cows are milked twice a day, every day, including the day your daughter is born and the day your father dies and the day your roof collapses and Christmas. There is no version of the work in which any of these things give you a day off. If you do not milk the cows, the pressure builds painfully in their udders within hours, and within a couple of days you have mastitis running through the herd. Most dairy farmers, asked when they last took a vacation, will look at you the way you would look at someone asking when you last walked on the moon.

Add to the schedule: the bending. The lifting. The cold and the wet. The kicks and the steppings-on. The repetitive motion of attaching forty-some clusters in eighty minutes, twice a day, every day, for thirty years. The work does not break a person quickly. It breaks them slowly. By the time they notice, they are halfway through being broken, and there is no exit they did not already foreclose by being who they are.

Tom would not say any of this out loud. Marcelino would not either. But it is true.

The cow’s experience of the morning is harder to know.

She walks into the parlor on her own. She places her head in the stanchion on her own. She stands more or less still while she is milked. When the cluster comes off she walks out, on her own, and goes to the feed bunk. If she is one of the cows who likes the parlor, she will sometimes show up early in the holding pen and stand pressed up against the gate. If she is one of the cows who finds the parlor unpleasant, she will hang back, and Marcelino will have to walk down to her with a soft slap on the flank to get her moving, and she will walk in reluctantly, and stand reluctantly, and walk out as soon as she can.

What we can say with confidence: the milking unit, properly attached, does not hurt. The relief of a full udder being emptied is a real biological relief. Cows in a well-run parlor do not show signs of stress — no eye-whites, no rapid breathing, no stiffened bodies — and they show many signs of routine: chewing cud during milking, leaning against the stanchion, half-closing their eyes.

What we cannot say with confidence: what it is like to be a cow in a milking parlor at four-fifty in the morning, twice a day, for the entire seven or eight years of an adult dairy life. We do not have the language for it. We do not have the access. We have only what she does, and what she does is walk in.

By six-forty Tom and Marcelino have finished. The seventy-sixth cow is down the lane. The pit is empty. The vacuum pump is still running, because the wash cycle is about to begin.

The wash cycle is itself a small ceremony. Marcelino disconnects the receiving jar from the pipeline. Tom flips a series of valves in the milkhouse that send hot water with a chlorine-based sanitizer through every inch of pipe and tubing in the system, then a hot rinse, then an acid wash to dissolve milkstone, then a final rinse. The whole thing takes forty minutes and runs on its own. By the time it is done, the bulk tank in the milkhouse holds about two hundred and seventy gallons of milk at thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, and the parlor is clean enough to do surgery in, which it is not far from being.

The milk truck will come tomorrow morning at five. The driver, a man named Greg who has been picking up Tom’s milk for fifteen years, will sample the tank, hook up his hose, and pump the milk into a tanker that already has milk from two other farms in it and will pick up four more on its route. The tanker will carry it to a processing plant in Cortland. From the plant, after pasteurization and packaging, some of it will go to the co-op’s organic line. Some of it will go to a yogurt company in the Hudson Valley. Some of it will go, in cartons that say organic grass-fed and bear the seals the farm has earned, to grocery stores in New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts, where people will pick them up off the shelf without thinking about any of this and put them in carts and pay nine dollars and take them home.

But that is tomorrow. This is now.

At seven Tom comes back across the path — there is still snow in patches in April — and into the kitchen, where Sarah is at the stove and the radio is on. He has been awake for three and a half hours. He sits down. Sarah sets a plate in front of him.

He will be back in the barn by eight-thirty for morning chores: feeding calves, scraping alleys, pushing up feed, doing whatever the day asks of him next. By three-thirty in the afternoon he will be back in the pit. By six-thirty tonight he will have done all of this again. Tomorrow, at four in the morning, the alarm in the bedroom will go off, or it will not, because his body will wake him a few minutes before it does.

The work is the work.

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