Meet Our Cow Emily
July 11th, 2013 · 2 Comments · Posted in farming
Emily settles into her new home
Emily, a year-old Jersey heifer, arrived at Spy Dog Farm in the back of a pickup truck. Assisted by three young men, she jumped off the back of the truck and into our permanent paddock. It was the first time she had ever seen real grass. In fact, it was the first time in her life that she had ever been out of a barn.
When she gets a little older, Emily will be our milk cow. Or so we hope. Finding her was not as easy as you might think. Dairies don’t like to part with their females, the milk producers. Males are a dime a dozen. Some farmers just give them away.
The way I found Emily began at a pancake breakfast at the Elk’s club in Greenwich. These kind of functions are great for meeting the locals. I filled my plate with eggs and sausage (passed on the pancakes) and settled into a table where a family of three generations were already enjoying their breakfast. This turned out to by The Rymphs, the elder Rymph being chair of the Washington County Board as well as the town supervisor in Easton. His son, Andy, is a landscape designer and one of Easton’s tax assessors.
My auspicious company also happened to be longtime dairy farmers. Or at least they had been milking cows at one time. Now, Andy Rymph sort of collects Jersey cows so his daughters can show them at the county fair. Andy invited me to his home to see how he has things set up there for his cows. He had three nine-month-old heifers he was going to list for sale. But he dissuaded me from buying any of them. If all I needed was a milk cow, he said, I should talk to a dairy. He promised to put me in touch with a woman named Kathy.
Kathy turned out to be someone special. She is in love with cows. By day she works the cash register at a local Mobil station. In her off hours, she runs a dairy of 40 milking Jerseys–along with all the calves and heifers in various stages of growth–all by herself. She sells commodity milk, meaning a big tanker truck pulls up next to her barn and drains her tanks for transport to a local processor. She gets up at 2:30 in the a.m. to milk the cows and be at her job by 5:30, then milks them again when she gets home in the afternoon.
I asked Kathy if she ever takes a break. “I took a couple of days off in 1990,” she said. “That’s when my son was conceived.”
In the interest of not getting pregnant again, I suppose, Kathy hasn’t taken any further breaks. But she loves it. “My worst day on the farm is better than my best day at my job,” was how she put it.
The dairy Kathy runs is old-fashioned with old-fashioned equipment. The cows only occasionally leave the barn. They’re held in place by head restraints. They feed on hay and some grain. Their manure is channeled away by a conveyor.
Kathy wasn’t quite sure how to respond to my request for one of her heifers. “I don’t want you to be shocked by the price, because I’ve already got a lot invested in them,” she said. But her thoughts eventually turned to one yearling who was a bit smaller than the others. She was at the end of a long line of heifers–gorgeous Jersey cows with their big, doe-like eyes and buff coats. They like to grab your wrist with their tongues as you pass by, to get the salt. They’ll nibble on your pants leg as well.
The heifer at the end of the line was Emily. I couldn’t take her home right away. Kathy’s husband, she said, wanted to move her in their trailer, but their trailer was out on loan. Over the following days, I would visit the farm a couple of times to see if the trailer was back. Kathy’s farm is only five minutes from us. “You come by and visit any time you want,” she said. Finally, yesterday, I found her husband at the barn. We started talking about farming and the weather ;and making hay. Suddenly he pulled out his phone and called his son, recently returned from military service from Afghanistan. Within a few minutes, the son and two of his buddies arrived. We led Emily out of the barn–she wasn’t terribly anxious to go–and the boys lifted her into a Chevvy pickup.
What was the first thing Emily did when she was back on solid ground at our place? She pulled up a big clump of grass. I still have the image in my head of that grass hanging from her lips.
I think she’ll like it here.
Oh my…I feel so sorry for those poor dairy cows, being held in place day after day, and never seeing the green grass…at least you were able to rescue Emily from a life of total boredom : )
Making any money at all in the commodity milk business is a real challenge, Diane. There are no frills. The only thing that matters is “getting the milk in the bucket.”