Visiting Rawl's Cows

One of the chapters in The Have-More Plan was on keeping a family cow.  As a young child, I found myself going back to that chapter repeatedly.  I read the descriptions of the different breeds of cows, including how much milk they gave daily, the butterfat content, and their respective temperments.  I recall asking my Mom what docile meant.  Holsteins were the breed that gave the most milk, with the lowest butterfat content, and a temperment listed as, "docile."  What did that mean?  Was it good or bad?  My Mom was able to help me understand that it meant "calm."  I was fascinated by the idea of a dairy cow, fresh milk, cream that rises that can be made into butter...  There was so much to learn that was beyond the scope of a six page chapter.

We moved to Farmington when I was six.  Down the hill and across the street and a little to the south was Rawl's dairy farm.  Rawl had those black and white Holstein cows.

Over time, I became more and more interested in Rawl's cows.  I wanted to go see them, but I was too afraid, as a child, to go ask Rawl if I could come see his cows.  Rumors amongst the children in the neighborhood were that Rawl didn't like kids.  That made him even more scary.  Eventually, after talking about it over and over again, my Mom called Rawl and asked if I could come see his cows.  Much to my delight, he said, "Yes."

It was late Winter when I went down to see Rawl's cows.  I was nine, almost ten years old.  I recall wearing a jacket because it was chilly.  I went down at 5:00, because that was milking time and I would be able to see the cows up close.  I excitedly walked down the hill to Rawl's barn.  The door was closed, so I knocked on the door, oblivious to the fact that Rawl really couldn't hear my timid knocks.  Eventually, I knocked hard enough that he opened the door.  I walked into the warm barn, heated by all of those cows.  It was amazing.

The smell was actually rather pleasant.  The cows were big.  Rawl told me that the milking barn held 18 cows.  He had a milking machine with three milkers so he could milk three cows at a time.  I was fascinated to see the milkers hanging from the cows udders.  He took me into the milk room where I could see the fresh milk surging into a large glass jar.  I could also see when a pump would click on and move the milk from the jar to the refrigerated tank.  The tank looked huge.  It held 500 gallons, which seemed gigantic to me at the time.

As cows do, some of them pooped and pee'd into the dairy gutter behind them.  I was intrigued by the dairy gutter since there was a picture of a dairy gutter in the dairy goat section of The Have-More Plan.  It held the manure in place, but the urine drained out and disappeared under the wall.  I later learned that it moved the urine out to a pasture.  It was a dream come true.  I got to read about something, then I got to see it first hand.  This became a normal patterm for me over the course of my life.  Read, see, learn.

Sheepishly, as a nine year old, I asked Rawl how he could tell the difference between a cow and a bull.  At that point, somehow I hadn't grasped the concept that in the cow world, only the females lactated and produced milk.  In my mind, I presumed that roughly half of the cows in the barn were females and half were males.  Rawl's response was indicitive of his simple, straight forward answers.  He asked in return, "How do you tell the difference between a boy and a girl?"  I cogitated on that for a minute, and decided it was better not to ask any further questions.  I looked at the cows in the barn and they all looked anatomically similar.  That is because they were.

That visit to see Rawl's cows was a thrilling experience in my young life.  I recall it vividly.  It opened many doors both future experiences and doors in my mind to explore possibilities.  Life was good.