No milking on wedding day

Although still settling into the dairy-farming lifestyle, Julia McInnis says she was aware of what it’s all about.

“It’s an every-day-of-the-year commitment,” she says.

But having said that, she has already made it clear that she’s taking Oct. 14 off from milking. That’s the day she marries farm owner, Alex MacDonald.

Milky Way Farm might be in Alex’s name, but he’s quick to point out: “What’s hers is mine and what’s mine is hers.”

So is Alex taking the wedding day off from the farm, too?

“Want me to answer that?” Julia turns to her husband-to-be.

“You go ahead, dear,” he replies. “He wants to milk himself, so we planned the wedding so he could milk.”

The ceremony is at 2 p.m. The reception’s not until 7 p.m.

There will be lots of time to get wedding photos, shift into the coveralls and still get back to the banquet hall on time, he reasons.

He admits there are a lot of bets out on whether he will follow through with that plan.

There have been offers of replacement milkers, Julia said.

Having just started their own dairy farm on Sept. 1, the couple is OK with putting off their honeymoon for a while and concentrate on the farm.

“That he’s home every day, I like the lifestyle of it,” says Julia of her early impressions of dairy farming. “There’s always people around. You know it’s always scheduled, every morning and every night.”

Her impression reminded Alex of something a dairy farmer once shared with him about the business: “Milking cows is all overtime work: it’s all before 8 o’clock in the morning and after 5 at night.”