4:35 AM

That's the time we all woke up to head to the Rosa Brothers Dairy Farm. 

Because I was getting to cross off one of my bucket list items!!! Hand-milking a cow! :)

We met Mr. Rolland Rosa at the milking barn at 5am. Several milkers were leaving because they had done most of the milking by then. Did you get that? Most of the milking by then.

They have to milk their 1,000 cow herd every single day, twice a day. That means each cow is milked via machine for 8 minutes. The two Rosa brothers are third generation farmers and still see over each milking as well as the other process to care for the cows.

Mr. Rolland gave me a quick lesson in hand-milking.

Then he let me go to town for as long as I wanted. :)

Hand-milking was so much harder than I had expected!! Mr. Rolland's dad and siblings had to milk 11 cows each by hand twice a day when they were growing up. I can not even imagine. Especially based on the five minutes I actually milked. After awhile my hand cramped so then he let me put on the pump machine to see how it works. Quite similar to a human pump, but more vacuum power and has two extra covers.

 I liked having some background knowledge already about how this whole thing works. ;) There are so many similarities between both Mamas. And much like what I've experienced from nursing, feeding time provides relief. You could tell some of these cows were antsy to get things going! I also noticed that after being milked, the cows got anti-bacterial dips {that dark orange-yellow-ish liquid on the floor you may have noticed in the above pictures} so nothing could re-enter at the site. No mastitis for these cows. ;)

 W got in on the milking too.

The whole experience was amazing. Our entire gang had a blast and learned so much. You could tell the farm take great pride in caring for their herd {we learned later on the farm tour just how well they do that}. It truly is an amazing operation to gather the 8,000 gallons of milk these cows produce.