Olsztyn-Budry Family: Field Trip and Fun

I have been meaning to post these for a while, but just haven't had the chance. So here we go. We went to Cook's dairy farm with Anna's school for a field trip. It was great and quite funny. We had a guided tour by one of the farmers. He was telling us and all 16 plus kids that they are one of like three dairy farms in Michigan that milk the cows and process the milk all at the same farm. He was telling us that they don't use hormones to stimulate milk production in the cows. That they impregnate the cows for natural milk production. He said that the cows calf once a year and that after about 5 -8 years the cows don't produce milk anymore so they take 'em to get "ground up" and they sell the meat at the farm... at that point the teacher leaned over to Ken and said "I haven't taught them that part yet!" Thankfully the "ground up" part went right over their little heads... we did however buy some of the meat and it was pretty good!

Anna wasn't too thrilled about touching the cows!

This is funny... part of the tour took us through the milking house. The farmer kept saying that the kids had to be very quiet because the cows just got finished being milked and were napping... he kept stressing that the kids had to be quiet so as not to wake the cows... well here is a picture of the milking house. The concrete walk way is only about 3 feet wide.

Come to find out, if the kids were loud, it would wake the cows, get them excited and they would all start pooping and peeing! There are little metal pokers that hang down above each cow because when they go to do their business, the arch their backs, shooting it outwards across the walkway. So the pokers keep them from arching their backs directing their #1 and #2 downwards! This was just about the scariest thing I have ever experienced. To make it worse, I had Emma-Grace strapped to the front of me and she was getting restless. To make matters even worse, one of the moms I was next to told me that she got caught in the cross fire of excited cows on a field trip when she was in elementary school and smelled like poop and pee for the rest of the day thereby scaring her for life! Thankfully, we made it through the gauntlet... I was however, ready to pick up the teacher (who is quite tiny) and use her as a shield for me and Emma- Grace if things got serious.