Agrarian Nation: —1867—How To Make Milkers

23 September 2011

—1867—
How To Make Milkers

#51

No matter what breed you have, something is necessary to reach the highest success in raising good milkers. It’s a great thing, to be sure, to have good blood, whether it be Ayrshire, Jersey, or Short-horn grades, but apart from this important advantage, the course of treatment in raising a milker is somewhat different from that in raising a beef animal, or animal for labor.

The calf should be well fed and petted while young. Well fed, to induce a rapid growth, so as to enable the heifer to come in early; petted, to make her gentle and fond of the presence of her keepers. Fondling helps to create a quiet disposition, so important in the dairy cow, and this education must begin when young. For a milker, we would have the heifer come in at two years old, and if she has been well kept, so as to have attained a good size, she is then old enough to become a cow. She will give more milk for coming in early. It forms the habit of giving milk, and habit, you know is sort of a second nature. An older bull is better. We use too many young bulls. A three or four year old is far better as a stock-getter than a yearling, and many prefer a five or six year old to any other. After the heifer has come in, let her feed be regular. Clover is preferred to all others for the stall feed. A little oatmeal induces a large flow. Indian meal is rather fattening. In bad weather, give her a clean, airy stall.

[Thomas’s Farmer's Almanac]

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The Salem Towne barn at Sturbridge Village

My wife and I spent a day at Sturbridge Village last week and I took the picture above. Inside the barn is an educational display and a sign with the following information about dairying in the Agrarian Nation...

Up through the middle of the 19th century, dairying on New England farms was women’s work. Boys might help with the milking, but farm girls learned the “art and mystery” of butter and cheese-making from their mothers. The dairy was a crucial part of every farm’s economy, and it became ever more important as New Englanders gave up growing grain to concentrate on butter and cheese.

On the majority of farms, the dairy produced most of the surplus that could be traded for goods or turned into cash. Salem Towne Jr., whose house is just next door, was a farmer and businessman who frequently traveled. He wrote his wife Sally letters with instructions about the farm’s workers, field crops, and livestock—but he never mentioned the dairy, which was busy producing butter and cheese. That was Sally’s domain, and he left its management to her.

This milking stool was in the Salem Towne barn at Sturbridge Village. The seat is a section of tree (the bark-side bottom is rounded), as are the handle and legs. A stool like this would be a great little woodworking project. I'm inspired.

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2 comments:

Practical Parsimony said...: It's too bad those feedings and supplements are then passed on the consumers, most too small to have a say in what they eat.; 24 September, 2011 20:32
Jet Set said...: I find the above farm fact very interesting because if one pays attention to the excerpt we can see that way back in 1867 these same practices were already taking place. Specialized Breeding: they wanted an older bull this was most likely because they wanted to know how well his progeny were milking if they were all milking poorly I bet that bull getting fattened ;). Feeding: clearly they were well aware of what made a cow milk better "A little oatmeal induces a large flow" and to this day clover makes incredible forage for cows. Supplements: OK so maybe they weren't using supplements at this time. However, I dare say that if the technology had existed to determine that what they were feeding was short in some mineral and that by supplementing it they knew that it would make for a healthier cow they probably would have been using supplements. Ultimately a cow is going to make milk, it's going to contain a percentage of fat, protein, and solids. Irregardless of what those percentages may be in our bulk tank what you get in the store had been through a standardizing process at the milk plant that it is shipped to. What is left over after this standardization is then used to make butter and cheese. We dairymen do our utmost to produce the highest quality most wholesome product that we can. If you don't like what ends up in the store you need to complain about the processing and the processor not us the producers.; 19 January, 2012 23:08

Welcome To Agrarian Nation

How did people in rural New England live and work before electricity and tractors arrived on the scene? This web site will seek to answer that question by looking at the old agricultural writings of 1825 to 1900.

Join me on a historical journey of discovery into America's agrarian past. We will get advice from the old-timers about the art of farming, gardening, and living a good life.

Like archeologists studying an ancient culture, we will look at excerpts from original-source documents (primarily almanacs and agricultural journals) to better understand how people thought and lived their lives in pre-grid America.

Herrick Kimball
hckimball@bci.net

"From the beginning it was always possible to find farmers who were intuitively suspicious of the industrialization of agriculture. Perhaps they objected to the increased authority of suppliers and experts. Perhaps they felt the discord between machinery and living creatures. Perhaps they had a rational fear of toxic chemicals. Perhaps they disliked paying cash for energy and fertility that they had previously received in kind from their farms and their good work. Among at least a few, for whatever reasons, there was a persistent distrust."
—Wendell Berry

This field, which when the owner took it over eight years previously was barren, now was bursting with life. As I passed alongside of it on the cart, getting a good view of it as a whole, I often thought of the latent power that lay there till released and channelled by man. Nothing to see on that former dry and barren field, save tangled yellowish grass: yet holding within it the force to throw upward what I now beheld. A farmer is a liberator of the energy in the earth, ceaselessly creating what is good, and adding on a vast scale to the beauty of the world.
.....

John Stewart Collis
The Worm Forgives The Plough

"Through World War II, farm life in my region (and, I think, nearly everywhere) rested solidly upon the garden, dairy, poultry flock, and meat animals that fed the farm’s family. Especially in hard times farm families, and their farms, survived by means of their subsistence economy. The industrial program, on the contrary, suggested that it was “uneconomic” for a farm family to produce its own food; the effort and the land would be better applied to commercial production. The result is utterly strange in human experience: farm families that buy everything they eat at the store."

Wendell Berry
(Renewing Husbandry)

A love for the soil and all the pursuits of outdoor life is one of the most healthful signs in a people. Our broad and diversified land affords abundant opportunity for the gratification of every rural taste, and those who form such tastes will never complain that life is losing its zest. Other pleasures pall with time and are satiated. We outgrow them. But every spring is a new revelation, every summer a fresh, original chapter of experience, and every autumn a fruition of hopes as well as of seeds and buds. Nothing can conduce more to happiness and prosperity than multitudes of rural homes. In such abodes you will not find Socialists, Nihilists, and other hare-brained reformers who seek to improve the world by ignoring nature and common sense. Possession of the soil makes a man conservative, while he, at the same time, is conserved.

E.P. Roe