Visiting a Dairy Farm in Iowa
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Our week has just been jam-packed with fun! I have to admit – I wish we could do this every day, but then I guess I wouldn’t have a blog would I? 🙂 Not to mention that I pretty much wouldn’t get anything done at all! We had the opportunity today to go to a heifer and dairy farm. The dairy farm alone had over 4000 cows!
There were quite a few barns full of hungry cows eating hay!!!
We got to go into the baby cow area – they were SO cute!! On the yellow tag on this cow’s ear you’ll see that it was born 9/26/2012 – just over a week old! There were hundreds and hundreds of baby cows! They said they have about 4-6 cows born PER day!
And since these baby cows are still nursing if you stick your hand up near the baby’s mouth it would suck on your hand!!! It was quite hilarious!
I was shocked at how little these cow barns smelled believe it or not! They are kept very clean! I also took photos inside of the milking stations but don’t want to post them as I didn’t get permission from the company. It was very neat though. The cows would walk down to their milking stations, the mechanical udders (I’m not sure of the technical name!) would be attached to the cows and you wouldn’t BELIEVE the milk coming out of those cows! They even had one very very old cow who produced 90 gallons of milk PER DAY! They couldn’t believe and I barely could either! How crazy is that?
The last part of our day was in the back of the property where we got to watch the crane picking up the hay bales and dropping them in the shredder. You can’t tell because of all of the dust but there is a HUGE barn behind that crane and it just shoots the shredded hay right into the barn!
Living here in Iowa and experiencing all of the different aspects of farm life has really made me fall in love out here! I LOVE the tractors, the cow farms, the corn fields, the veggie gardens. It’s amazing how productive farmers are and life out here is. It has really made me appreciate life more as I have been thoroughly enjoying all of our new experiences!
