Within farming most of the jobs can be quite repetitive. On a daily basis the cows are milked twice a day, once in the morning between 5-9am. The milking time taken changes continuously throughout the calving period due to more cows giving birth and beginning to produce milk and therefore being able to join the herd. Before the milking begins the cows need to be collected from the field that they are in. This takes roughly an hour to complete depending on how far the field is from the milking parlor. At around 11am a milk tanker arrives to collect the milk. The milk that is in the tanks are from the previous afternoon milking and that morning milking. The tanks roughly hold 5000 litres each . While we wait for the milk tanker to collect the milk we contain it in a tank that continuously stirs the milk and maintains it at a temperature of 4 degrees C. This is to retain the freshness of the milk. A manufacturing company called First Milk collects our farms milk. They purchase the milk from us on a contract basis. The milk is then transported to their factory and made into Pembrokeshire Cheese, which is sold in most leading supermarkets.
Up to this point 168 cows have calved. There are no weekends off for farmers during calving time as there is no telling when a cow might calve. Sometimes we have to stay up past midnight due to a cow calving in the early hours of the morning and then get up the next day to continue with the days work. It’s important to have someone continuously watching the calving cows just in case something happens and the cows need assistance. These things could range from a calf becoming stuck or being born breached. On our farm we tend to share out the calving nightshift so that everyone get a fair amount of sleep.
Bryony Petty 