Stories From First Year: Dairy

Ever since I started this blog, I've had "prac work" on my list of topics to write about. It would have been fun to see my original impressions of everything, but maybe the reason I never got around to it is that I couldn't think of any particularly exciting stories to tell. Now that I've finished all of them, I think I can cobble together an interesting assortment of notes from my experiences. We had to do 16 weeks on various farms during our breaks and summers, and I'll talk about them one at a time.

The first one I did was on a dairy farm in the states. As someone with no large animal experience, I didn't have a clue about working around cows or what a dairy farm was like at all. I remember being quite surprised at how all the cows had electronic collars, and the milking machine registered it and recorded their individual milk production and sent it to the computer, where you could look at it in charts and graphs. I also was impressed by the gigantic automatic pooper-scooper that moves slowly back and forth across the floor.

The most fun was on days when the vet came. I followed him around and talked to him heaps, and he let me help on a few surgeries. It was my first year out of vet school, so it was the first time I was ever treated as a vet student. I remember feeling excited but also super confused at all the vet-lingo he fired at me, as he explained the surgery. At this point I didn't even know cow anatomy, so my thoughts were along the lines of "I don't know what he's talking about but it sounds so professional and cool!"

The other distinct memory I have is following him while he was doing pregnancy scanning, and this one cow followed us the whole time. She kept rubbing up against me and pushing her head into me and sort of knocking me around. Cows are really cute!

Unfortunately, the farm I was on was well run and had everything covered. They didn't need a student to do anything, so apart from the odd job here and there, there really wasn't anything for me to do. The one time I tried to help out in the calf barn, I got myself completely soaked from trying to carry the big water buckets. Most of the work was done by a handful of Guatemalans. I ended up spending most of my time helping out with milking, and the Guatemalans flirted with me and tried to teach me Spanish.

As it turns out, that farm was a barn-based system, and in New Zealand it's largely pastoral farming, so when I got back to school I still was clueless about what we were learning. I spent the next two years trying to sort it all out in my head. Pasture-based farming is really different, but more fascinating I think.