A friend gave me this poem out of the Daily Express recently, author unknown so I dedicate today's picture to all dairy farmers world wide.
A five day cow !
I long for a cow of modern make
that milks five days for leisure's sake,
That sleeps on Saturdays, snores on Sunday,
And starts afresh again on Monday.
I wish for a herd that knows the way
To wash each other everyday,
That never bothers to excite us
With chills or fever or mastitis.
I sigh for a new & better bread
That takes less grooming & less feed,
That has the reason, wit & wisdom
To use the seat & flushing system.
I pray each weekend long & clear
Less work to do from year to year
And cows that reach production's peak,
All in a five day working week.
Oh why don't the scientific bods,
Firmly entrenched in their cushy jobs,
Show these ignorant breeders how
To propagate a five day cow.
Brilliant expression!! It reminds me actually of my lab days when we used to have to go in every Sunday evening to start off bacterial cultures for the next day's experiments. Quite often we worked on Saturdays as well so it was a real chore after a relaxing Sunday to have to cycle off to a cold lab just to set up a few tubes of culture. Imagine our joy when somebody invented a programmable incubator that would be chilled over the weekend and turn itself on to warm up and shake on a Sunday night which meant we could put our cultures in on Friday and they'd be all ready for us on Monday morning! Heaven - but the cow situation isn't so easily solved!! Rubbish never having a morning off!
For some reason, I think she takes offense to the poem!!! I love it though!! My husband's grandfather was a dairy farmer and would hire someone to cover for him for one week a year and would take off and go on a binge. No wonder!
Things are a lot easier with all the modern milking parlours ,When I left agriculture collage I had a job as a herds woman in Hertfordshire . I only had about 30 cows to milk , but it was very old fashioned , the cows stood in the stalls. Then had milking units that had to be taken to the dairy to be cooled . The worst job was rolling the churns of milk to be collected . I love the close up of this cow in your picture Pat
@judithg Liberated by an incubator & what a relief too !! In actual fact you do just take the seven day week part of miking & was never really too much of a chore !!
@snowy I had ne idea you were involve with farming Diana !! I remember the milk churn days myself & they had to be carted to the end of the road to be collected !! You used to take the milking machine to the cow & move clusters, milk bucket etc along the lie of cows ! Good old days in a way Diana & much less complicated than farming now !
Love, Love, this, Pat! That gorgeous and curious face .. beautiful eyes! And that poem is icing on the cake! Thank you for the smile. That would be every farmer's dream, wouldn't it?!!
great shot and great poem. Having worked in the UK's biggest dairy processing unit, this also made me laugh...if cows only produce milk Mon-Fri then us as comsumers have to stop buying masses of milk on a Thursday too, then the dairy can have a rest at the weekend too!
@bradfordp Thank you for your comment Bradford.....this is indeed an old poem then.......I love it & it's still pretty relevant today too even with the modern robot milking system.
July 6th, 2015
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