A renovated milking area drawing big crowds
GEDDES -- 'I think people think milk comes out of a carton,' says milking parlor superintendent Teri Martin, and the revamped milking parlor is designed to show the milk process.
It's in the Dairy Building, and includes stadium style seating to watch cows being brought in to be milked.
There's live commentary, by people who are also giving out Cabot cheese (no, it's not Vermont's now, it's owned by AgriMark, a New York company that also uses New York-produced milk.)
When there's no live commentary, video loops on wide screen tv give a closeup look at the milking process.
Martin was full of milk trivia for us: One cow milked 110 pounds during the show (8.6 pounds=1 gallon of milk), and because these are the best, they're averaging higher than the usual 30 gallons of milk a day from a cow.
We were surprised to see an attendant leaving the milking parlor with a fluffy piece of cow tail, but it turns out that the combed out tails are often supplemented with falls for the show ring--call them cow wigs.
And the real message of the exhibit, that dairy people love their animals, even the big farms are usually family-run, with an emotional as well as business involvement in their 'big pets.'
There are fewer cows at the fair in the first part of the dairy show, which ends Tuesday (Wednesday is changeover day, with the 'colored breeds' coming in through Labor Day.) Martin says it costs about a thousand dollars a cow to show at the Fair, and even though dairymen are getting more for their milk products now, the economy is still a struggle. There are also some downstate farms affected by Irene: some farms showing now have had catastrophic losses (barns down, livestock killed by the flooding) and some who were scheduled to come the second part of the fair have cancelled because of damages at home.
The milking parlor may be educational, but it's also become a 'Fair Memory' destination: the big barn door for the cow entrance is painted to look like a row of cows inside a working dairy barn. As we watched, lots of fair goers lined up their children and friends, to take a souvenir picture.
