Milking by Hand

On Tuesday I found out that about 5 students in my class had actually milked a cow by hand. This came up in a discussion of Milk dumping during the early Depression in Wisconsin. Although it was clear that my students’ hand milking experiences were not daily chores, the number of them was a vivid reminded of just how rural much of western and northern Wisconsin is. I mentioned the fact to my wife, and she told me that milking by hand was verboten now, unless you are willing to forgo state approval.

My students’ experiences and Sue’s comment sent me off in search of more information about the history of milking. I found I was deeply ignorant. (Darn. I hate that.) I knew that a pivotal moment in Wisconsin Agricultural history was the development of the Babcock Test in 1889 at the University of Wisconsin. I did not know that milking machines predated that. (I had thought it a 20th century innovation.) This About.com site shows patents for them dating back to the Civil War Era, with viable machines beginning to emerge in the 1870s.

This site, which seems to be Wiki-like in its authorship, provides an overview of the current technology that agrees with the little that I do know about it. This 2005 article from TimesOnline shows a new innovation: cows using machines to milk themselves. (“Oh brave new world”). To my knowledge, that has not made it to Wisconsin yet.

The one thing that I have not found so far is clear confirmation that one cannot milk by hand in Wisconsin and have that milk certified. The Wisconsin Ag Department regulations, (scroll down to 60.10) clearly assume that a dairy farmer is using machines, but if a ban on hand-milking is there, I’m missing it.

I’ll bring some of this into class tomorrow. I think it will interest the students, even those who have never had to squeeze a cow’s teat to get milk.