Our thermometer on the back fence said 16 degrees early this morning.
Although we have no snow on the ground, this morning we had frost aplenty, and I was reminded of times when I was very young when I would go to the barn with my dad for the milking on a cold, frosty, windy winter morning in the 1940s. It might be 10 degrees outside, and the icy snow crunched under our feet as we tromped our way to the barn. It was tough if the wind was strong. We needed that good warm cap with ear flaps, and a muffler wrapped around our necks. Just getting to the barn made us appreciate our long johns, flannel shirts, sweater, our good wool coat, double layers of socks and galoshes over our work shoes.
Actually, once we got into the barn, it wasn’t too bad.
The barn was tight enoughthat it protected us from the wind, and when we got the cows inside into the six milking stanchions, being there among them was almost like having a heater beside us. Once we came in from the outside it felt pretty cozy as we fed and milked the cows. Even the warm streams of milk as we hand-milked the cows made everything seem warmer.
I wasn’t able to do much of the work in those days, being under 10 years old, but I liked to work with my dad, and there were things I could do. I could put out feed for the cows, I could fix the strainer pad and set the strainer atop the milk can to strain the milk as each cow was finished, andI could let the cows in and out of the barn. So I felt like I was “helping.” When I was 6 years old, I was learning to milk and for quite a while I used to milk Ole Red, our tamest and gentlest and easiest-to-milk cow. A little later, when my brother Ben was old enough, Old Red became his job, and I graduated to milking two or three other cows. I can’t remember if Ole Red was also the learner cow for my younger brother John.
My dad talked about the days when he was young when the farmers sold cream, rather than milk.
They used to use a cream separator to separate the cream from the skim milk.
Dad said they took their cans of cream to Avoca to put them on the train for shipping to the milk plant.
But, in the ’40s and early ’50s the milk truck always came to our farm to pick up our milk in 10-gallon milkcans.
It was always fascinating to me that back in the ’20s and ’30s the valuable and marketable part of the milk was the cream, the butterfat. The main products from the milk plants were butter and cheese. So cows which produced milk rich in butterfat were much desired. In those days, Jersey cows tended to be the most prized. Jerseys usually produced milk with a butterfat content of 8 percent or so, very rich. Milk from Guernsey cows was a little lower in butterfat, but their milk was a rich creamy color, very beautiful. As the years passed, the fashion in milk changed. Health-conscious households cut back on fatty foods, using less butter and other high-fat dairy products.
By the 1950s, Holstein cows were coming into favor. The larger black and white Holsteins wereprized because of their rugged build, and high milk production; but also because their milk was low in butterfat, often less than 4 percent. The downside was that milk from Holstein cows looks pale, even bluish. So, we dairy farmers used to keep a few Guernsey and Brown Swiss cows in our herds, along with the Holsteins. That mix kept the milk looking yellow and rich, and kept the fat measurements low.
Sometimes I am amazed by the variety of ways milk is offered in today’s stores.
Often you find Vitamin D enriched whole milk, 2 percent milk, 1 percent milk and skim milk. All of them, I take it, are pasteurized and homogenized. In the earlier days on the farm, our options were unprocessed whole milk or skim milk. Some would call it raw milk. Strangely, today it sounds uncouth, even abit dangerous, that idea of drinking raw milk. But I remember that it was pretty good to take it to the breakfast table before it cooled from the milking.
Back in 1947 my city cousin and her parents from Illinois were visiting us. At breakfast one morning, my mother asked her, “Alma, would you like to have a glass of milk?” She replied, “No, thank you, I only drink pasteurized.”
To that her father said, “Why, Alma, just look at all those cows out there on the pasture! Wouldn’t you say this milk is ‘pastureized’?’”
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 6 on 01/23/2013