History of dairy farming
From VASATWiki
erpascon caolor Retrieved from wikipedia::http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_farming
Dairying has been part of agriculture for thousands of years, but historically it was usually done on a small scale on mixed farms. Specialist scale dairy farming is only viable where either a large amount of milk is required for production of more durable dairy products such as cheese, or there is a substantial market of people with cash to buy milk, but no cows of their own.
Centralized dairy farming as we understand it primarily developed around villages and cities, where residents were unable to have cows of their own due to a lack of grazing lands. Near the town, farmers could make some extra money on the side by having additional animals and selling the milk in town. The dairy farmers would fill barrels with milk in the morning and bring it to market on a wagon.
Before electrification most cows were still milked by hand, one after the other, each morning and night at milking time. This was feasible when a farm had up to about six cows but took too long as the herd size increased. Electrification brought the vacuum pump, and the automatic milking machine.
The first milking machines were an extension of the traditional milk pail. The early milker device fit on top of a regular milk pail and sat on the floor under the cow. Following each cow being milked, the bucket would be dumped into a holding tank.
This developed into the Surge hanging milker. Prior to milking a cow, a large wide leather strap called a surcingle was put around the cow, across the cow's lower back. The milker device and collection tank hung underneath the cow from the strap. This innovation allowed the cow to move around naturally during the milking process rather than having to stand perfectly still over a bucket on the floor.
Surge later developed a vacuum milk-return system known as the Step-Saver, to save the farmer the trouble of carrying the heavy steel buckets of milk all the way back to the storage tank in the milkhouse. The system used a very long vacuum hose coiled around a receiver cart, and connected to a vacuum-breaker device in the milkhouse. Following milking each cow, the hanging milk bucket would be dumped into the receiver cart, which filtered debris from the milk and allowed it to be slowly sucked through the long hose to the milkhouse. As the farmer milked the cows in series, the cart would be rolled further down the center aisle, the long milk hose unwrapped from the cart, and hung on hooks along the ceiling of the aisle.
The next innovation in automatic milking was the milk pipeline. This uses a permanent milk-return pipe and a second vacuum pipe that encircles the barn or milking parlor above the rows of cows, with quick-seal entry ports above each cow. By eliminating the need for the milk container, the milking device shrank in size and weight to the point where it could hang under the cow, held up only by the sucking force of the milker nipples on the cow's udder. The milk is pulled up into the milk-return pipe by the vacuum system, and then flows by gravity to the milkhouse vacuum-breaker that puts the milk in the storage tank. The pipeline system greatly reduced the physical labor of milking since the farmer no longer needed to carry around huge heavy buckets of milk from each cow.
The final innovation in automatic milking was the milking parlor , which streamlined the milking process to permit cows to be milked as if on an assembly line, and to reduce physical stresses on the farmer by putting the cows on a platform slightly above the person milking the cows to eliminate having to constantly bend over. Milking parlors allowed a large concentration of technical equipment to gather in one place, which permitted automatic milk take-off devices. Before this, milking was not entirely automatic, and each cow needed to be monitored so that the milker could be removed when the cows were almost done lactating. Leaving the milker on too long following lactation could lead to health problems such as mastitis.
