Rehoboth Farm

In August of 1999 and we had only four months to prepare for Y2K. Probably the one thing that we wanted most for our homestead, even more than pigs, was a milk cow. I had read Dirk Van LoonÂ’s "The Family Cow", and felt that we were now ready to take the plunge. We knew we wanted a Jersey, and so I began looking on the internet for a breeder. The price that the breeders wanted was cost-prohibitive, so I began calling dairy farms looking for cull-cows. I finally found a gentleman about 100 miles from us who said that we could come over and look at what he had. The manÂ’s name was Nathan, and he said that he might have something that would suit us.

This was a joyous day; taking a day off of work to ride through the countryside in search of a family milk cow. We had never been to a real dairy farm before, and the children were all very excited. We arrived at a small white barn, with a line of cows forming outside of the door. Inside there was a room about twenty five feet wide and forty feet long. The walls were painted white and the floor was all concrete. In the middle of the floor was a concrete pit about three feet deep than ran the length of the room. On both sides of the pit, at floor level, there was a row of stanchions and milking machines, six on each side.

Standing in the pit were three men who were hooking and un-hooking milkers from the cows. Big clear glass globes with DeLaval marked on them hung at each station, and frothy white milk was pulsing into them at intervals. The noise was great, but the cows didnÂ’t seem to mind. Each one was calmly standing in her row, leisurely munching on grain from a bin that was in front of her at mouth level. The bins were fed from an overhead auger that dumped it into a container above the cows head. By pulling a string attached to the container, grain would dump into the bin. The cows had figured this out, and once the grain was all gone each one would curl its big red tongue around the string and pull, dumping more grain into the bin.

Kim and I and our (four children at the time) stood and watched this for a while, it was a very interesting sight. Finally one of the men walked out of the pit and came over to us. "You the one I talked to about wantinÂ’ to buy a cow?", he said. "Yes, thatÂ’s me, are you Nathan?" "Yep", he said. Nathan is a country man, about 5 foot nine, and is usually wearing overalls that somehow are uniquely shaped to account for his extra large middle section. He usually looks like he just woke up.

His father had started the dairy decades before on a different piece of land to the south. Nathan told us about how their land had been perfectly suited for dairy farming and all of the investment that his Dad had made in the property. Then came the interstate. One day they told his Dad that I-75 would cut directly through their farm. He protested, but was unable to sway the government to change their plans. Un-yielding, he forced them to come up with a way to accomodate both. The highway department built a large culvert to run the cows under the interstate from one side of the farm to the other. For several years they struggled with the loss of pasture, combined with cows finding their way onto the interstate and getting killed and causing accidents. They finally sold the farm and bought another smaller piece of land where they currently lived, but I got the impression that things had never been the same. Nathan and his two brothers now ran the dairy.

We walked outside. "You ready?", he said. He walked over to an old extended-cab pickup truck. "Um, okay", I said. We all piled in and he cranked it up. The truck was loud, smoky and dirty. We drove up the road a short way and then turned and went through a pasture gate. As we bumped through pastures full of cows, Nathan would point at some and say things. But between the noise of the truck, NathanÂ’s thick southern accent, and him honking the horn and yelling for cows to get out of his way, we didnÂ’t understand a lot of what he said. We just kind of sat there and grinned, and as Nathan would point at a cow, Kim said things like, "Oh, sheÂ’s pretty". The children were in the back seat laughing and bouncing off of the ceiling, literally.

We finally stopped and he pointed at a cow and started talking. After I had said "Huh?" for about the third time, he shut off the engine and all was quiet. "Now that one right there might do", he said. "Why is that?", I asked. He told us about how she had tried to jump a fence a while back and caught her udder. As a result she now only had three of her four quarters working. I should have picked up on the phrase "tried to jump a fence" as a bad sign, but we were in milk-cow-mode and our senses were deadened. "And", he said, "SheÂ’s due to calve in December". That settled it. "How much?", I asked. "Ummm...", Nathan thought about it for a second. "Let me think about it a while", he said. He then started the truck again and we went bouncing off across more pastures.

He showed us the calf-barn, which I know he really did for the children, and several other aspects of the farm and then we returned to the milk barn. His brothers were grumbling at him from a distance about how there was still work to do as he pretended not to hear them. As we were standing there a woman drove up in a car and got out. "Do you ever sell cows?", she asked. "Um, yeh", he replied. She was there for the same reason we were, to get a milk cow in preparation for Y2K. I could see the wheels in NathanÂ’s head starting to turn as he suddenly saw himself in a unique position. "Well, I may have to start advertisinÂ’", he laughed. "How much?", I asked him again, before he started a bidding war on my cow. He hesitated, weighing the situation, and then gave me a price. We agreed and shook hands. On the check to Nathan I wrote #706, the ear-tag number of our cow, to make sure that the lady who came after us didnÂ’t try to top our price on her. We agreed on a date for Nathan to deliver our cow to us and then we went on our way.

We got home and spent a few weeks re-enforcing fences and building a lean-to shelter for milking. There was a perfect small pasture near the house about an acre in size where we were going to put her. We had images in our minds of walking out to her pasture each morning and calling her. She would follow us over to her shelter where we would give her a nice bucket of oats. While she munched on her breakfast I would quickly fill a bucket full of fresh warm milk. From there I would take it to the kitchen and put it into a couple of gallon jugs for the refrigerator. Our family would enjoy fresh raw milk and cheese even if the world was shut down by Y2K. Yes, that was a good plan...