*Please note: This post is originally from March 2010
Probably the last thing you think about, when you really stop to think about where your milk comes from, is a Milk Truck.
Sometimes it is easy for even Dairy farmers to forget how important our milk hauler/truck is....until they don't show up on time!
And such was the case yesterday afternoon.
SwissLane has 2 big stainless steel bulk tanks that store and cool the milk until the milk hauler comes to pick it up. The plan is for one to be filled in the morning and the other to be filled at night.
However, not only do we have some over-achieving cows... we have a lot of them and they produce more milk than the tanks can even hold! So, the milk hauler picks up our milk 2 times everyday and about every 3 days they need to pick up 3 times.
Well, yesterday afternoon there must have been some complications with the hauler's schedule or maybe a truck broke down- but they didn't show up for the afternoon pick up. This creates quite a bit of tension at the farm.
The tanks are full. The cows need to be milked.
What to do?
We could stop milking and wait- but who knows how long it will be before a truck finally shows up. Or, we could just continue to milk and dump it- so the cows don't get upset and we don't mess up the milking schedule.
We chose to slow the milking down (you know the saying "don't cry over spilled milk" well I'm sorry, but when you are a dairy farmer that is exactly what we do!). We only ended up waiting on the truck for about 20 minutes.
And all the world was right again.....ahhhh!
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