Chocolate Milk-A true story

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Let me start by saying that my brother was 8 years old, and I was 4 years old and made quite the team. At that age we were also pretty naive, so when our grandfather told us we could get chocolate milk out of our dairy cow, well we were impressed.

Now at those ages you can only do two things, use what you love and know, and use what you got. Now friends, I can stand here and tell you with no sense of dishonesty that getting a Jersey cow to eat an entire Hershey Chocolate bar is not easy. We tried disguising it in hay, in grass silage, even in hay dripping with molasses, and still she would not eat it. With failure not being an option, we had one more trick up our sleeves. Knowing that cows are vegetarians, and that they have flat teeth for pulverizing grass stems but teeth that cannot bite you, my brother shoved his fist into the cows mouth and pryed it open, so we could SHOVE a Hershey chocolate bar into a cows mouth. Oh yeah, even with that plan we had some difficulty. Now that poor girl did not really like the force feeding, but she finally took the candy bar and was happy again.

Well that is until we decided that if she had chocolate in her stomach we concluded that we needed to mix her new diet up. So we grabbed this poor cow by the bridle and took her for a good stomping good time.

Now friends, that is an out right lie. Neither her, nor us had a very good time. The pasture was filled with rocks, brambles and yes a plethora of what Roscoe P Cotrain of the Dukes of Hazard would call Meadow Muffins. Avoiding them while holding onto a lazy dairy cow and trying to get her to jive to a dangerous exercise routine was not easy. In fact it was nearly impossible, but I am sure my Grandmother and Grandfather watched it all from the window of the house, probably rolling in hysterics as we ran, fell, pulled and cussed that poor battered bovine.

Well in case you are wondering, the whole ordeal ended rather sadly. Old Beatrice managed to live out the ordeal, but man was my brother and I some sad when we watched my Grandfather milk her that night and nothing but white milk came out of her. I guess you just can't get choclate milk out of a cow no matter what you feed her! :)

(Sorry guys, probably a let down since this tale was not a joke, but all joking aside, some of my fondest memories was growing up on a farm. Unfortunately only 2% of Americans will ever know what that was like. It was hard work, but fun at times too. Thanks for letting me share one of my many farm stories.)
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No one person here is smarter than all of us put together!!
 
Travis......great story!

Some of my fondest memories come from the farm.

When I was 4 we lived temporarily with my maternal grandparents. My Grandpa got up at 0430 and went out and milked the cows. I cried and whined until Grandma took me to the barn in the dark. "Robert" she said..."Kenny wants to help milk"....."Okay" says this sawed off little tough little runt of a man as he bent the teat and squirted me in the face with a warm stream of milk.

I remember him putting me up on the bed of an old Ford (model A or T, I'm not sure what model) truck and I climbed aboard one of his draft horses already harnessed up. I rode and he led the draft team a mile and a half where he and one of my uncles tried to use a large shovel behind the team and dig a basement for my aunt and uncle's new house. Too much limestone in that southern Indiana soil. A man with dynamite and a tractor with shovel and backhoe were hired in the end.

I remember "driving the team" while Grandpa and 3 uncles each shucked 2 rows of corn and tossed them into the wagon equiped with sideboards/bankboards as they harvested corn. Years later I figured out.. it was Grandpa's voice commands and not my small hands on the reins that controlled that team.

I can remember spending one summer "haying" working for a contractor hauling hay from the field to the barn. Laying on top of 7 tiers of stacked hay being driven across a makeshift bridge where the river had changed it's course and created an island. The two trees that were made into the bridge weren't level with each other. When the load shifted those of us on top with sweaty bodies couldn't crawl fast enough to keep from ending up in the river.

Live snakes bailed into a bale of hay .....You hoist the bale up chest high.....go to use your legs to throw in up on the stack on the truck and you are staring one angry snake in the face......I was on top of the truck stacking when the bale cleared my head .......as the scared throwee experienced a real adrenaline rush........

Lots of farm memories....I wouldn't trade for anything!
 
another farm raised fellar

i ken definatly relate to both of theses stories the live snakes and the chocale milk but i never went as far as travis did,, that was darn funny,, did convince my brother to water a electric fence once:eek: had little spark in me then too,, i agree fullheartly with travis that the hard work had just as much hard fun.. and the best darn milk i ever had.... and when we got older the milk cooler made for a supreme beer cooler:thumb: seen the transition from milkun by hand and puttin it in cans to the modern day pipeline system.. been there done that and support every farmer i can,,, they get to little pay for the products they produce.
 
Around here its all Dairy Farming and they really have taken a double hit. They have to pay high prices for their fuel, and yet because fuel is so precious these days, a lot of the grain is being diverted to make ethonol. That has driven up the cost of grain to feed the cows by three times what it used to be. It really has put a lot of farms over the edge around here. It really is a shame there are less than 400 dairy farms in the state of Maine now. We used to be teeming with them.

They just said on the radio that the price of milk was going to hit 5 bucks a gallon. Overnight it was at 4.99. That is great but the farmer is not getting that. I think the farm price is around 14 dollars per hundred pounds. If I did the math right, they get around a buck 75 per gallon...sort of. I know the creameries cut the milk with water before they sell it to the consumer. I am not sure how much, but I heard once that it was 25 % but who knows. Its not a figure they would want anyone to know. That is part of the reason why milk off the farm actually has flavor.

In fact, if you make real chocolate milk using Hershey's Syrup right out of the milk tank, you get a lot of the butter fat and other good stuff and it will be the BEST choclate milk you ever tasted. We always keps a bottle of Hershey's Choclate Syrup in the milk parlor for that reason.

(By the way, on my Uncles small farm we had to lug milk in cans before he got his milk line installed. I am only 33 years old so that tells you how far behind the times we were. Yeah I knew what work was...but the thing was, we never considered it work, it was just the way it was.)
 
Travis.....I'm 58..... It was amazing during my 8 years in the Navy. I had to defend "dumb" farmers constantly. The city boys would get to hammering farmers...I'd say " if you have a sick dog what do you do?"....Their answer " take it to the vet"....I'd say if you 120 cows to milk you probably can't afford to...so you doctor it"....I'd say "If you need a new light placed somewhere in your house what do you do?" They'd say " Call an electrician"....I'd say because you live 14 miles out in the country you can't afford to pay the driving time so you wire your barn yourself"... and so on....carpentry, mechanicing....and so on....Not knocking folks who live in the city....but defending the average good hard working farmer.....At the same time I'll tell you that I lived in the 'burbs and commuted and worked in Chicago for 4 1/2 years........longest 4 1/2 years of my life.......You can take this boy out of the country but not for long......Moved to Idaho 25 years ago.....Love it!

Most of my family and my wife's family are farmers. It's a way of life that is fast disappearing. Today farms are either large or out of business.
 
not exactly milk, but.....

I had a show steer that was unmanageable....heck of a good steer but I just couldn't completely break him to lead....he was a bit wild.

Remember in Michigan at the time the legal drinking age was 18, so I had an idea that if I gave him a few beers he'd become more lax. I'd get a six pack, put a funnel down his throat and force 5 beers down him...the sixth was for me.

It apparently worked, I won grand Champion at the State Fair in '76 with him...he was a docile as could be. The money I got when I sold him paid for my first year of college at Michigan State University.
 
Travis.....I'm 58..... It was amazing during my 8 years in the Navy. I had to defend "dumb" farmers constantly. The city boys would get to hammering farmers...I'd say " if you have a sick dog what do you do?"....Their answer " take it to the vet"....I'd say if you 120 cows to milk you probably can't afford to...so you doctor it"....I'd say "If you need a new light placed somewhere in your house what do you do?" They'd say " Call an electrician"....I'd say because you live 14 miles out in the country you can't afford to pay the driving time so you wire your barn yourself"... and so on....carpentry, mechanicing....and so on....Not knocking folks who live in the city....but defending the average good hard working farmer.....At the same time I'll tell you that I lived in the 'burbs and commuted and worked in Chicago for 4 1/2 years........longest 4 1/2 years of my life.......You can take this boy out of the country but not for long......Moved to Idaho 25 years ago.....Love it!

Most of my family and my wife's family are farmers. It's a way of life that is fast disappearing. Today farms are either large or out of business.

Ken, Thanks for "defending us dumb farm boys" and more importantly serving our country.....someday I got to buy you a cold one.:thumb:
 
Great stories, all you guys.

Even though I've spent most of my life in mid-sized to large cities, there was a stretch of years growing up when we lived on a small ranch, so I got a taste of a lot of things like shoeing horses, mowing and baling alfalfa, irrigating with a ditch and a shovel, all things chickens, doctoring our horses and dogs ourselves, sitting in fruit trees in the orchard and eating until we were sick, and having a fishing pond just on the other side of the pasture from the back porch. Things a lot of city kids never see or do. My parents were not well off financially, but those were some of the richest years of my life.
 
one summer a city cousin came for a visit and while showing him the garden i convinced him to try one of the "green carrots" growing on a short bushy plant........jalapenos......i too grew up on a farm and wouldn`t trade the country life for an entire block of city livin`;)
 
well mr ash now i know where you got your drinkun skills:rofl: :huh: that was goodun... and fer you travis i am only twenty one and it was just yesterday that we hauled cans:D sounds like great place to visit the state of main that is..
 
i convinced him to try one of the "green carrots" growing on a short bushy plant........jalapenos......

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: Good One.....:thumb:

I convinced my city cousin that bunny droppings were chocolate covered "smart pills"......it worked, he was smarter after eating a couple...smart enough not to fall for that trick again.
 
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