Day 7 (part 1) - Maddi

We all had to be “bright eyed and bushy tailed”, as Mr.Hamilton says, at 7:00 am today and once we were all done eating breakfast and figured out seating we turned up the tunes and hit the road once again to head to the beautiful Cornell Dairy teaching unit. Once we met our tour guide Dr. Blake Nguyen and took one of our group pictures before we went to meet the animals. Once we were inside we got to get a close up look of their milking parlor. They told us that they milk three times a day. I found that to be very interesting. He explained some of the technology that goes into their parlor, like how they can track things like pounds of milk each cow produces to the amount of fat in the milk from that cow. 

Once we were done at the parlor we all went back to look at the animals. They all looked so relaxed and really happy in their environment. I thought the cows were super cute and so friendly. A couple of them even made me laugh with how they were using the brush to not only relax but to get those hard to reach itchy spots they have every once in a while. After looking at the big girls (cows) for a little while we later went out to see the babies and they were just the cutest things I have ever seen. After we finished with all the cows we went back inside and learned about their manure disposal. The campus has a no long term manure storage practice. 

The cows really enjoyed the brush.

One of the machines they showed us was a sand separator which basically takes sand, which is the cow’s bedding, and when it goes through the machine the machine keeps the dirty sand or the bad sand and spits out the clean so that they can reuse it. The machine is able to collect 93% of the sand. After he talked about that for a while we went back up to the front of the building where he lead us to a bathroom to wash our hands if we touched the animals and then he told us a little bit about himself and where he came from. What I found interesting about him is that he combined two things he really loves and that’s being a vet and working with cows. After this we all said our goodbyes, shook his hand and thanked him for the amazing tour he gave. I learned so much that I hope to use in my future with the dairy industry.

 

The sand separator.

 To hear about our second stop go check out Jenn’s blog where we visited a beef cattle ranch.