Wanch Dairy Temporarily Closing

Darlin is about 8 months pregnant, so we need to dry her up before she delivers her new calf. We will have to buy milk from the store for a month or two. The boys will rake out all the old flooring of straw and pine chips, wait a few days to air dry the ground, then put down new bedding. Looks like Jimmy the cat will lose one of his favorite napping spots when we use some of his straw.

K8 is adding a teaspoon of sanitizing powder to 4 gallons of hot water. We run this through the milk machine system before bottle feeding the 5 calves. The tank hangs upside down from the ceiling and air dries, and is ready to be used for milking when boys are finished with calves.

After the boys are done milking Darlin, they have three steps in the clean-up process. First is to run 4 gallons of hot soapy water through the system and tank...

...then 4 gallons of clean rinse water...

...followed by 4 hot gallons of the sanitizing solution. They have to empty the stainless steel tank after each load of water, which means they have to first carry the water buckets from the house, then carry the tank out of the barn to dump it. Let's see, that comes up to be four separate 4-gallon buckets in, and four more 4-gallon tanks out. Do the math on how much 4 gallons of water weighs, and you can see that K7 and K8 will be building lots of muscle over the years. 

The boys don't know it, but after they leave home in several years, I'm going to install a tankless water heater in the barn and put a drain in the floor! Hee hee hee

After all that rinsing and dumping, we hang the tank and claws upside down from the ceiling to air dry for 12 hours before doing it all over again. And you thought our delicious farm fresh milk was free! It is paid for with dedicated farm boy muscle. Why all the sanitizing? Because if you don't, your fresh milk will sour in a day or two, as we found out this spring when the temperatures warmed up and the bacteria started to grow in the system. Winter time milking was so much easier when the barn stayed cold for 6 months,