A Year on a Dairy Farm · February: Inside the Barn

February: Inside the Barn, part 2

The smell is not what people expect. People who have never been in a well-run dairy barn expect it to smell like manure, and there is manure — there is always manure, it is the by-product of the entire operation and a dairy farm is a manure-management business that happens to also produce milk — but a clean barn does not smell bad. It smells like grass that has been turned into another thing. It smells, faintly, sweet. There is the musk of the cows themselves, which is its own warm animal smell, and the diesel of the skid steer parked near the door, and the ammonia note that rises when fresh manure hits old straw, but underneath all of it is the grass, fermented and broken down and passing slowly through the ninety-four enormous four-chambered stomachs that surround you in the dark.

The lights are on, but only the work lights — long fluorescent tubes down the center alley, leaving the stalls in a softer half-dark. The cows do not need the brightness, and Tom does not want to startle the ones who are still lying down. They will get up in their own time, when the parlor calls them.

He walks the length of the barn. He does this every morning and he is doing it now: a slow walk down the feed alley, looking at each cow he passes, not in any deliberate way but in the way a person looks at the rooms of his own house when he comes home at night. He is checking, without quite knowing he is checking, that everything is the same as it was. A cow lying down with her head turned around against her flank: normal, she is sleeping. A cow standing alone at the back of a stall, not eating, ears low: not normal, look again. A cow with her tail lifted: about to do one of two things, both of which Tom has seen ten thousand times.

He passes the milking string — the cows currently in production, the ones who will go into the parlor in twenty minutes — and continues to the back of the barn, to a smaller pen separated by a metal gate.

This is the dry pen. There are eleven cows in it. They are the cows who are pregnant and close to calving, who have been taken off milking for the last two months so their bodies can rest and put their energy into the calf instead of into the bucket. They are fed differently from the milking cows — less rich, more roughage — and they are watched more carefully, because this is when things go wrong, and when things go right.

In the back corner, lying down, is a Jersey-Holstein cross with a black-and-white face and a soft brown muzzle, ear tag number 47. Her name is Hazel. She is six years old. She has had five calves already and she is three weeks from her sixth. Her belly, even lying down, is enormous; you can see, if you stand still long enough, the calf inside her shifting. Tom leans on the gate and watches her for a minute. She watches him back, calmly, the way she has watched him every morning of her life.

This is where the year begins. Not in March, when the calf will come. Here, in the dark of a February barn, with a pregnant cow and a man leaning on a gate and the vacuum pump humming through the wall and a worker in the next room rinsing a pipeline and a farm and a family and a small economy of milk and grass and labor and weather all waiting, quietly, for the thing that is about to happen.

It is four-twelve in the morning. The first cows are getting up.

The first group of twelve comes in on their own. The parlor has a return lane that loops around behind the milking pit, and the cows know the route the way you know the route from your bedroom to the bathroom in the dark. They walk in, find their stanchions, lower their heads to the small pile of grain in front of each one — the only bribe the system requires — and stand still. Tom and Marcelino move down the line. A spray of pre-dip on each teat, a wipe with a clean towel, attach the milking unit, move to the next cow. The unit pulses and pulls; the milk runs through clear lines into the bulk tank in the next room, where it is chilled within seconds to thirty-eight degrees. Twelve cows take about eight minutes, start to finish. There are seventy-six cows in the milking string this morning. Six and a half rounds. They will be done by seven-thirty.

This is the compressed version. Another chapter will tell it slowly. For now: it is a rhythm, and the rhythm is the same as it was yesterday and the same as it will be tomorrow, and there is a kind of comfort in this even when your back hurts, which Tom’s does, in the same place it always hurts, just below the right shoulder blade, where he tore something thirty years ago lifting a hay bale he should not have lifted alone.

By eight he is back in the kitchen. The light is up now, the kind of February light that doesn’t commit to being daylight — gray, low, indirect, like the sky is making a half-effort. Sarah is at the stove. Anna is at the table in pajama pants and one of Tom’s old flannel shirts, drinking coffee and looking at her laptop. Jess is under the table.

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