Milking & Herding and loving it.

So, while living with Denise and David I landed a job on a dairy farm in Ellinbank, Victoria - and loved it.  I can't wait to have an opportunity like this again.  And I got paid for it too - how much better can it get?  I even made some good friends, like 1886 here.  She was a cutie and loved a nice scratch behind the ears.

The job was exactly what I wanted - I got experience milking, herding, helped with a little blood and rumen sampling (the cows first stomach), and got to drive around on quad bikes and farm utes.  Speaking of utes, check out my sweet ride lined up with the other utes in the parking lots.  I fit right in!

(Mine is the super awesome turquoise one on the left.)

And this is the Kawasaki mule we were drove around.  Here we're in the paddocks grabbing samples of grass for quality testing.  The Ellinbank farm was a government research center and for this particular study we had three sets of cows on different dietary programs.  Within those three groups they were divided into smaller groups of four - these were getting fed different quantities of their particular diet to see how that affects milk production and quality.  We were always grabbing samples of the grass they were grazing to get sent to a lab (and measuring the amount of grass in the paddocks before and after they'd been there).

This one sort of shows the cows separated into their groups.  We had to do a lot of fencing work every time the cows moved to different paddocks.   If you look closely you can probably even tell which cows are the hungriest (the ones getting fed the least) and which ones are getting almost more food than they can eat by how much they eat down the grass.

Here's the feed pad, full of silage and grain, ready for the cows to come in for a feed.

The feed pad full of cows munching away.

This is me hard at work, making sure the cows got to their right place on the feed pad.  Always had to be careful not to touch the electric fence - the one around the feed pad in particular could almost knock your knees out from under you.  And make sure to stay away from the electricity on rainy days...oy.  Learned that lesson pretty quick!

Couple of characters around the farm.

These girls are ready for milking - hanging out behind the dairy for their turn.

One of the bulls (this is Andrew) that was put in with the cows for a couple weeks.  Yup, stay away from them.  They're not happy fella's.

If you look closely you can see Buzz (one of the milkers) on a quad bike herding some cows up the race back to their paddocks.  That's what we did for a good portion of the day.

Hanging out in the paddocks. The building you see right behind me is the dairy.  To the left of it is the feed pad and the very far left, up the hill, are the Ellinbank office buildings.

And of course some shots inside the dairy.  It's a pit with 25 stations on each side so you can milk 50 at a time.  They walk in at the far end, get fed and milked, and when they're done the trays in front of them swing up and they walk right out.

Jock cleaning up the gadgets.  Had to be careful for pooping and peeing cows when you're in the pit.

The computers by each cow read the numbers on their collars as they walk in and keep track of how much milk the cow gives at each milking and per day.  It'll also track things like whether they're on any medication so that their milk can be put into a separate container and thrown away.  The cups here had to be manually put on the cows, but once the machine could tell that they were done milking it would stop suctioning and fall off.  We'd spray a little antibacterial on there so they don't get mastitis and off they went.

One happy cow after being fed - grain all over her nose.

Missing my cows and fun job, but off to more adventures.  I had a week to hang out with Denise and David after my job at Elliinbank finished and then I caught a plane to New Zealand.  Two months away then I'll be back to good ol' Australia!