Milking by hand was hard work
A few days ago my son Jeff and I got into a conversation about hand milking, and the transition we went through on the farm when we began using machine milkers to milk the cows. That was indeed quite a transition for our own family in the early 1950s, and in a real sense it marked the passing of an era in northwest Arkansas farming.
Electricity is so widely available today, and so universally relied on at almost every level of life, that it is probably hard for some people to imagine living without it. When our electric power goes off, it is an immediate crisis. When an electrical outage is widespread, it is considered an emergency, in the news, in relief agencies, and in state and federal government agencies. Many homes and public buildings are basically unusable without electric power for lighting, for ventilation, for climate control, and for operating essential equipment in a business. Since electric power is so taken for granted today, and is considered almost an absolute essential to the functioning of cities, homes and farms everywhere, it is interesting to me to remember the times not so many years ago, when electricity on the farm was almost nonexistent everywhere in rural America. Our country is struggling now with the idea that health insurance should be available to everyone, not just to people who are well off. We might remember that the effort to bring electricity to rural areas of our country back in the 1930s and 1940s met with the same kind of resistance now being faced in the efforts to make health insurance available to the whole nation and to people at every level of society.
Before farm electricity, farm people milked their cows by hand. I remember that in my early years, the farm magazines in general, and dairy magazines like Hoard’s Dairyman, often published debates about whether the moves to machine milking by dairies was a good thing, or if it was a harbinger of doom to the dairy industry. Some were convinced that machine milking was the wave of the future, providing relief to the burdens carried by men and women of countless generations in the past. Others were convinced that machines could never protect the health of dairy cows or produce the quality milk that had always been possible through hand milking.
In our experience, most of the early dairy herds of Benton County were relatively small milking herds, many not numbering more than 12 to 20 cows producing milk at any one time. Of course, part of the herd was always “off ” from milk production, as when cows were “turned dry” and when they were waiting to give birth to calves. Although I tend to think about men who are dairymen, I am well aware that dairying is not just a men thing. In our family, especially before we kids grew up enough to help, the milking was done by my Mom and Dad, working together. Farther back in time, the sizable dairies of the past often relied on large numbers of women to milk the cows. I notice that in the song, “Twelve Days of Christmas,” one of the lines goes, “Eight maids a’milkin’!” The term “milkmaid” was rather widely used in earlier times. This pattern evidently didn’t originate in our United States, but came over with immigrants from several of the old countries from which our population was formed.
When my mother’s children turned out to be three boys, then a girl, she started planning her retirement from the milking. And, she never seemed to have wanted our sister to be part of the milking crew. So we boys learned at an early age to milk cows by hand, and by the time I was 8 years old, Mom let us boys take over her part of the milking. We had one old cow, “Ole Red” as we called her, who became our learning cow. I have no idea what breed Ole Red was. She was red and white and black and shades between, a fairly big cow, but very gentle and tolerant. Some cows are quick to kick when an unfamiliar person starts messing with them, and some startle easily when one clangs a milk pail or bumps them unexpectedly. This was not true of Ole Red. She was steady and patient with us young boys as we were learning to milk.
I was to learn a couple of years later, however, that even Ole Red would only put up with so much guff ! I remember that in the late 1940s some of the breakfast cereals were offering to send us a secret decoder ring if we sent in so many boxtops. I sent in my boxtops to get my secret decoder ring. After a wait of several weeks, the exciting ring arrived. It was a flat piece of metal which you bent around your finger to fit. I think the secret code which it cracked turned out to say, “Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions!” I wore my new ring that first day, and overnight, and on the second morning I was wearing it when I started milking Ole Red! Evidently I pinched her pretty painfully with that ring on my finger. It wasn’t like Ole Red to kick, but this time she kicked in a way that scraped that ring off my finger and slammed my milk bucket back against the wall of the barn! I still have a little scar on the third finger of my left hand, where Ole Red made me feel the pain of that ring like I had made her feel it. That was the last of my secret code ring! To be continued ….
••• Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.