Day 7 (part 2) - Jenn

  

  Dr. Nguyen, from the Cornell Dairy Teaching unit, pointed us in the direction of a dairy bar that had ice cream made from the milk of the cows at the Teaching Barn. It was genuinely some of the best ice cream I’ve had. We went into the Stocking Hall and got to watch some cheese being made. We got to see all the different machines and holding containers that are used during the process. From there we walked down to the bookstore and shopped for a little bit. 

    

  When we left Cornell, we went to Hepler Beef cattle to learn about how they do things at their facility. On one side they had the cattle that they were fattening up for production and on the other side they had their bulls and more free space which is used for when it is cold. During the winter months all of the cows on pasture are brought into the barns to stay warm. The Dairy Ambassadors, a local group came out to teach us about the dairy industry and how to care for cows. They provided us with yogurt and ice cream sandwiches as a special treat as well as coloring books, pencils, keychains, and erasers. 

A special thanks to Hepler Beef, the Susquehanna County Farm Bureau and the many folks that made this stop possible.

After Mr. John Benscoter taught us about water witching, we all got to try our hand at it. 

  

We also met a water witch, which was a completely new concept to me and it was really cool to watch. Water witching is a method used to find underground water sources using a metal wire. The magnetic fields in the water pulls the wire towards the water giving the witch an exact spot of where the water is. 

   This was a truly amazing day. I learned so much about dairy, milk processing, beef cattle, soils in New York, and water witching. I will always remember this trip because of visits like these.

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.