Yay, cows!

The girls had a field trip to the MTSU dairy farm today. It was fun and educational. I found out that diary farms are much stinkier than I thought they would be. It wasn't cow smell or poop smell. The barn where they milked the cows and stored the milk before transport smelled like rotten milk. Yummy! I also discovered that cows are expensive to feed. They eat 30+ lbs of grain a day at a cost of about $5 a day. No wonder milk is so expensive.

Furthermore, I think that there is something really wrong with the world when it is more cost effective for a dairy farmer to not allow calves to nurse at all and feed them from a bottle. WTF? They loose money when the cow is out of production because she is nursing her calf, and apparently bovine milk replacer is cheaper than bovine milk. So they pump off the colostrum for the calf (humans don't get that yummy bit) and give it to them by bottle, along with every other feeding until they are eating hay and grain. It's a strange, strange world.

We got to pet a cow, and that one obliged us by pooping just as we were walking up. All the kids had great fun yelling "EEEEEEWWWWWW!!!!!! POOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPP!"

And we got to drink some chocolate milk, which was very appetizing after smelling the rotten milk smell in the barn.

The barn cats seemed to steal the show with our class, though. The kids were more interested in petting them than learning about cows. It was a fun trip, though. And now I want ice cream.