Cold spell brought out the best in us
We think of the sunny days with the cows happily grazing on luscious green grass. We recall a particular high yielding cow with the same affection that another fellow might recall a Manchester United legend. But most important, we remember the milk cheque at the end of every month. Sometimes we even question why we ever stopped milking.
Conveniently, we forget the hardships of dairy farming. The milk fever, the grass tetany, the tying down element of the business and, of course, the weather.
If you milk cows, you milk them regardless of the weather. In rain, hail, sleet, frost and snow, the cows must be marched in and out. Milking is a job that cannot be postponed until a brighter day.
The cold snap which gripped Ireland this month brought trouble to all, causing many problems on farms, particularly on dairy farms.
It was the worst Tom Wilson has witnessed in his time as a dairy farmer. He is a dairy and beef farmer at Belrose, Enniskeane, Co Cork. Recently appointed chairman of ICMSA in west Cork, he has been milking cows more than 30 years.
“Last winter’s freezing conditions, while they were severe, were easier to deal with, because it occurred after Christmas, and many dairy farmers had the choice of drying off their cows. This winter, it arrived a month earlier, and for many, drying off was not an option, we simply had to carry on.
“We woke up on a Monday to find our farms under a complete blanket of snow.”
While the snow caught us all off guard, it was on the next day that difficulties arose. “On Tuesday morning, the parlour was frozen. The vacuum pump and milk lines were all clogged up. It was with kettles of hot water that I tried to free the lines. And with the cows lined up in the parlour providing an extra bit of warmth, eventually it thawed enough for milking.
“From then on, after every milking, I finished the washing with a salt mix, and I would drain all the water I could out of the system.
“To prevent the parlour from freezing overnight, I closed every door and sealed it up as much as possible. Also, I had a heater in the pit and thankfully, from then on, I managed to prevent the parlour from freezing.
“A few days into the freeze, with conditions deteriorating further, our water supply to the milking parlour stopped.”
Rolling out a new line from the pump, Tom managed to restore water to the parlour. After milking was complete, he would drain the new water line.
The extra hours spent working in freezing conditions trying to keep the business up and running didn’t seem to bother the Enniskeane man. He was just relieved to be able to keep the milk flowing and the cows content. “I was lucky too,” Tom continues, “in that this farm is fairly accessible, and the milk lorry, with the assistance of snow chains on the wheels, was able to make the collection. Milk collections, to give credit to Bandon Co-Op, ran pretty much as normal.
“In many areas of the county, such as Murragh, which isn’t too far from us here, dairy farmers along more inaccessible routes had to take the milk to a location where the lorry was parked. With farmers taking their own milk to a centralised location, in a way I suppose it was like a return to the creamery.”
With many rural roads in a perilous state, appeals were made to county councils to allow farmers collect and spread grit. Cork County Council were slow off the mark, citing health and safety reasons for their refusal. In the end it took persuasion from organisations like the IFA and ICMSA to finally get them to change their tune.
* Around here, with stories abounding of co-operation and help given by farmers, the older generation have been talking about how the cold snap bought back a feeling of the ‘meitheal’.
I asked historian and farmer Colum Cronin to define this for us youngsters.
“The Irish word ‘meitheal’ denotes the rural Irish co-operative labour system whereby neighbours in times past helped one another with labour-intensive farm work.
“Mechanisation, prosperity and consequent independence, had caused the function of and indeed the need for the meitheal to fade away The threshing in olden times would have been a prime example of the meitheal in action. “With the work complete, everybody settled down in the farmer’s kitchen. Songs were sung, stories spun and words of wisdom and advice exchanged, all encouraged with porter of course.
With talk of a return of such co-operation, perhaps the cold snap wasn’t all bad news.
