Nice warm ice warm, fresh milk!

It’s 5:40am. I get up and open the window on the verdant panorama which the early sun is warming, and listen for a minute to the dawn chorus. A quick wash then it’s on with my blue overalls and steel-toe-capped Doc Martin’s and outside to the dairy where I collect the two metal pails, the two plastic milking buckets, the dual-teated bucket for the calves Boris and Daffodil, the single-teated bottle for the youngest calf Bluebell, and another bucket of warm water with cloths for udder cleaning. My milking partner will normally meet me here.

These buckets are carried up to the milking parlour, the metal pails hung from hooks to protect them from any dirt, and I place some dry cattle feed known as ‘dairy nuts’ into three of the four bays. At the moment two of the Jerseys get two scoops and the other gets three, which I believe has something to do with how recently they calved.

I then walk over to wherever the three cows are currently kept (Pilsdon employs a rotational grazing system for the cattle around a number of paddocks) where they are impatiently standing by the gate, and release them. Off they trot straight to the parlour while I hurry after them, and they each find their correct position with no fuss or bother and begin to munch away. A chain is tied around each neck so they won’t move about too much during milking.

On with the latex gloves and I begin with Hyacinth, the eldest cow, by cleaning her udder with a wet cloth, first the pendulous teats then working around and back to behind her tail. If I’m lucky it’s been a dry night and there’s little mud to wipe off. If I’m unlucky, well, it’ll take a bit longer.

Placing the four-legged stool near to the udder, I perch next to the huge animal and grasp hold of two of her teats to give them a squeeze. The very first time I did this my instinct was that she would react violently, maybe swing round and kick me hard in the face. But thankfully the biggest reaction I have ever seen from her has been a lift of the tail and a large dump of fresh manure on the floor next to me - not pleasant but not painful either. 

After checking all four teats are giving pure white milk with no flecks of blood, I begin to milk her. I start with the back left and the front right teats, alternately squeezing one then the other giving a quick spurt of milk into the bucket each time. There’s a technique to it which took me about five sessions to get any good at, involving pinching at the top between the forefinger and thumb then quickly following with the rest of the fingers in turn. The back teats tend to be shorter than the front so I can only get one or two fingers around those; any more and the milk spurts all directions except the bucket.

Two teats can normally fill one plastic bucket full of fantastic frothy milk which is then poured into a metal pail before starting on the other two teats. Some of it is given to the three calves who are also clearly ready for their meal, waiting expectantly by the fence.  

My partner for this session milks Angelica, and whoever finishes first (not normally me) then milks Violet, herself the daughter of Hyacinth. We end up with two full metal pails which I then carry back to the dairy where someone else will begin to pasteurise it. Before we let the cows go, one of us heads back to the paddock and moves the electric fence along by four foot or so to give them some new grass to graze (this is known as strip grazing). Once the cows are back in, we wash down the parlour with buckets of rainwater and a broom and finally trudge back to the house. 

If all has gone smoothly it will now be about 6:40am so I go straight back to bed for a short snooze before getting up a second time for the morning service at 7:30am. The day has only just begun!