Day 94 - When in Rome…

A very early start today as we’d agreed to visit a dairy farm to learn some of the workings of these places – dairy being a massive part of Taranaki and New Zealand.

We were picked up at 06:20 by one of Judy’s friends, Karen, who then drove us the short way to her neighbour’s farm and supplied us with overalls and gum boots (wellington boots.) We then met Murray and Judy and Murray began to tell us about the workings of the farm.

We learnt a surprising amount about dairy farming, coming to realise that there’s quite a lot of quality control and close monitoring that goes on to allow good quality milk gets out to the shops.

We also watched the cows being milked, by machine, and even had a go at attaching the milking tubes ourselves – a surprisingly easy task though we were helped by Murray who’d picked out two of the very easy going cows for us. We then chatted a lot more about the ins and outs of the farm, learning much about the medical aspects of it; the logging and admin of the cows’ health care along with what happens when the milk isn’t up to scratch (normally a fault with the equipment which cools the milk.)

This was a really different and interesting visit, though we both feel we should have done more as we did talk poor Murray half to death!

We were then dropped back at Paul and Judy’s gaff where we thought about packing and continuing through the north island… then thought better of it due to all the things we’d yet to sort out and so set about doing those so we’d be good to go first thing tomorrow.