old mr. nicholson had a farm

Mr. Nicholson's Dairy Farm 

      I officially ran out of funds and couldn’t secure a loan to continue my education at ATI and was facing financial doom and decided to take a position as herdsman at a125 cow dairy outside of Wooster I will refer to as Nicholson farms. Mr. Nicholson was having a hard time keeping milkers at his dairy farm and after working there I could easily understand why. He just plain took a vacation and left you with everything to do that he didn’t want to bother with, and it was turning out to be an eighteen hour /day job with 2 days off once every two weeks depending on whether he had anything going on, in which case you needed to postpone accommodating his schedule.

       The wages were basically 125 / week salary and a house and utilities paid. The house was a single story four room 20x20 house, or approximately 400 sq. ft. by myself it wasn’t bad as I didn’t have any furniture except what the last milk man had. Basically a recliner and an old bed with mattress that had a hole or sagged just were your butt fit on it. Everything was clean and the owners wife came by before I moved in and cleaned for me, to help me get in there. It wasn’t much but I didn’t need much. They knew I was single so they would fix dinner and invite me over, or would send stuff home with me and I never wanted for food or milk to say the least. Also they knew I would be spending little time there, since Mr. Nicholson laid awake at night figuring how he could get the most out of me for his money.

      My main problem with working for Mr. Nicholson was I never was able to get any time off to take a break. Even on the Sundays I would milk, I was still expected to work the same amount of time as I did through the week. It was literally sun up to sun down and then I would turn on the lights in the garage and do a couple more hours of work. Most of the time I worked unsupervised except when we were working together for a project involving us both and then he would take the lead. He did this work all his life his and had built up a fairly good size operation involving milking Holstein dairy cows on a merry go round milking parlor. It was neat and top of the line in 1977. The parlor was all automated and set so that one guy could stand in the middle of the merry go round and place milkers on cows as it actually revolved around. They timed the average time it took to milk a cow dry and set the speed and the diameter of the milking parlor to those specifications so that the merry go round parlor would go slow enough, so you had time to place the milkers on a cow on one side of the parlor, and to check on other cows in the process of milking, wash a cow’s bag and teats after it went through a teat washing station to soften the manure on the bag. You would just get her bag cleaned up on one side of the parlor when another cow would become dry while milking. You could listen to the air sucking the through the valves on the milkers and tell if she was still milking to determine when to pull the milkers off. You would pull the milkers off and dip her teats in iodine solution to prevent mastitis, and by this time the door on her side of the merry go round would open and let her go, freshly milked. Thirteen cows fit on the merry go round and 10 would be milking at any one time. Cows would be crowded up to the milk house door by a crank with an electric fence wire attached goading them on.

    Most of the time we wouldn’t even have the electric on but the cows still would crowd in the barn as they hated to get shocked. We had a prep stall where the cows, when they passed an electric eye, a door would shut behind them and the stall was only long and wide enough for one cow. This is where we had pressure nozzles that sprayed water at their teats and softened the hair and crap from underneath the cow. After her teats were soaked and the merry go round was in positon then another door would open automatically based on the position of the merry go round. At this time an apportion of grain would automatically dump into a feed trough in front of the cow which was starting to get on the merry go round, this would encourage the cow to climb on as it was moving and take her positon as the door would close behind her. All the time the merry go round is moving at barely a slow walk. At the outside edges of the merry go round it could have been no more than 40 feet in diameter, but still that is a pretty large round milking parlor. After learning the sequence of how to milk the cows, and all the cows quirks I was capable of milking all 125 head alone in 2 hrs. Morning cleanup and evening cleanup were substantially longer in retrospect to the amount of cleaning that needed done. Usually morning cleaning was the most time consuming for a grade A dairy such as this.

      The milk was all pipelined to the milk house and you hardly ever touched the milk except when you were putting on the milkers or taking them off, or cleaning the filters in the milk line. We would rotate cleaning so one day you may clean two walls of the milk house and next it may be to wipe pipelines down. Cleaning and maintenance of the milking parlor was real significant to improving the quality of the milk overall. We would get reports back all the time about the quality of the milk and it would show amount of organic material and various bacteria’s, or smells or odors that may be a result of feeding hay with wild onions in it as this will odorize the milk to where someone experienced can smell the odor in the milk sample. A farmer depended very much on these reports to see if you had a high medication presence. This could in effect make the dairy that received your milk, discard all your milk or use it for something else except human consumption, in which case I guessed it would be fed to pigs somewhere. But the problem was that the farmer didn’t get paid for bad milk, just the good milk delivered to the dairy. Mr. Nicholson was always going over the milk report and then sharing with me his thoughts on how we could improve things. Our bacteria count was up, so we needed to cut down on the mastitis and also reduce the amount of manure making its way into the milk through dirty teats or improper handling of milking equipment.  Mastitis is an infection of the udder, or teat, or tit, as we know it.

      We started a massive cleanup effort involving cleaning manure week after week. After milking cows I would climb on a tractor and haul manure to the fields in the snow and spread great green gobs of gooey, slimy shit, all over the place. I lost count of how many loads I hauled that one Spring. In some places the cows were standing in shit four feet dip. They were lying in it also as it ended up spilling into the free stalls as they were called. Like Oxbow farms the cows never saw a pasture, instead they had a loafing pasture or open area where they would stand on concrete, or they had cattle stalls where they could lay down, also a feed room where they could have as much feed as they wanted as feeding cows well pays off in milk, and here like most farmers it paid to be nice to your cattle. The less stress the better they do. I was able to bring the organic content of the milk down to half of what it was when I started working there, just by cleaning things up. The owner was impressed and began making travel plans as this would be the first time in his life when he could leave the cows, and know they were in good hands in 13 years. At times I wouldn’t have known he was around there anyhow, so if a vacation is what he wanted. Who was I to neglect him, besides it may give me a well-deserved break?

     I would be up at 4:30 am before that damn rooster even thought about crowing, and by 5:00 am I was milking in the parlor, the first of the girls would start to fill up the rotary milking parlor.  At about 5:30 am, if I lifted the cow’s bag up right and looked through her dangling teats, I could see the sun coming up through the window of the milking parlor I always kept the window clean just for this momentous event every day. This only occurred at certain times of the year, so I learned to track the sun that way. By 7:30 I was finishing the cleanup on the milking parlor and usually somewhere in there the milk truck would arrive and take the milk away allowing me the chance to clean the bulk holding tank. Then it was out to haul manure, until around 9 was breakfast, and then we would work at other jobs till 3, and it was time to start milking again. Sometimes I would get some help milking in the evening, but there was no guarantee of that. Then around seven we would eat again and then I would be able to go home and rest for the next day. It was slave wages for all the work I had to do. I tried my best, but like other farmers, even if you do good work they couldn’t afford to pay you anymore.

       Day in, day out I struggled to keep up with the pace Mr. Nicholson had laid out for me. As soon as I would finish one job, another project he had been waiting ten years to finish appeared. At the same time I was milking about 125 head of cattle and beginning to remember each and every cow personally, as to which one had problems and so forth, as it was part of the process of milking and important to remember which teat you treated for mastitis, as you didn’t want that milk to get in the line to be sold to the dairy. To give you an idea of how hard it is to keep up with all that. You simply multiply 125 head x 4 teats per cow and that gives you 600 teats you have to remember in each milking, and 2 milkings a day equals over 1200 individual teats per day. I could immediately assess the old girls and identify them, based on their bag profile, as they were elevated on a platform and their bags were at eye level. Some cows I never had to see the tag as I knew them right off the by just looking at their teats alone as some were huge and some small and some were scarred and knobby, you learn them all after a while.

     Being the young man I was, and the lack of female companionship began to take its toll on me though , as soon I just wanted to have the freedom to take off and do as I pleased and just enjoy life . I was beginning to look at women’s breasts and also sizing them up for their milking potential and that is where I shook my head and decided it was time for something else. So I started looking for other work but I told myself I would wait till this man had a chance at his vacation as that was all he talked about. I hated breaking the word to him that I was leaving his employment before then. It was going to be just a short time, so I figured I could tough it out.

     Somewhere while I was working I had gashed my finger, and normally I am a quick healer but in this case and my hands always being in water at least 6 hrs. Per day, I was forever trying to get this cut to heal, and eventually it turned into an ugly lump on my finger and this caused me enough alarm that  I sought out a friend who quickly advised me to see a doctor and get it checked out, and so I did. Dr. Graves I am sure was his name, as I kinda kidded myself about being in grave condition, so I needed to see old Dr. Graves. Well Dr. Graves looked at it a second and noticed the red streaks running up my arm and asked what kind of work I did, and I told him I was a herdsman on a dairy farm and he asked if I was milking cows. Of course I replied, and he told me that he felt I had cow pox, and the next thing to gang green going on. He said the red streaks were blood poisoning and that I needed to keep my hands out of dirty water and to quit milking immediately.

     I explained to Dr. Graves that this was my job, and he replied with, those are your arms too. And if you don’t do as I say then I could be taking a little piece of skin off your cut as I am doing, or I could be taking your arm off at your shoulder. That is your choice.

      I appreciated his candor but it didn’t make the job of telling Mr. Nicholson that I would not be able to milk that night, or possibly for a month and his trip on his vacation started a week from the day I was to see the Dr.. To say the least Mr. Nicholson had a fit. I explained to him it was his cows that caused me to get cow pox. I wasn’t milking my own cows or the neighbors, I was cleaning his cows and immersing my hands in his crappy water and trying to take care of his cows. There was no way with my big hands that gloves were going to work and I still ended up getting my bandage soaked if I  tried to help out. He was positive that I had intentionally done this to get workmen’s compensation, and that I had full intent to ruin his vacation. He suggested I find other employment and that I needed to be moved out of the house in a month. He never paid my doctor’s bill and cut my pay short to that very day we talked. To say the least he was a real ass about it, but in some ways no different than a lot of farmers.

     I was glad to be gone from his employment and felt little remorse for that since he suggested it. It took a load off my mind to just be able to get back on my feet again and have a life. I surely had known my quality of life sucked while working for this task master. Instead of filing for workmen’s compensation I ended up finding a job within two days, and was moved out in a week leaving, Mr. Nicholson and his 1200 teats behind.

     Another incident happened while under his employ I will go into in more detail tomorrow. It almost killed me.