THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508230052
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
HEIGHT HAS its advantages. Sometimes it brings a man face to face with his job.
In this case, being 5-foot-3 puts Buon Keosavang eyeball to udder.
Keosavang is a milker, as in milking cows. A three-hour shift in the milking parlor means he's in a waist-deep pit, flanked by eight dairy cows at a time, all craving lactation relief. Before his shift is over, he and a co-worker will drain about 300 gallons of milk from 126 cows.
``I've been around farms all my life,'' he says, reaching out to latch a vacuum tube onto a cow. Farm work he likes. Milking he considers a time-consuming chore. But after five years of working cheek to stomach with the bovines at Bergey's Dairy Farm in Chesapeake, he's gotten to know this herd pretty well.
He likes cows.
``I mean, I don't have one who's like a friend,'' Keosavang says, his face breaking into a grin. ``But they're not that troublesome.'' Herds have boss animals. Cows are individuals, like people, and can get lazy, stubborn or scared of new situations. He remembers a recent purchase of 30 cows who were all afraid to be milked in a parlor they'd never seen before.
``They didn't want to come in,'' he says, laughing.
These cows wait patiently at the doors of the milking house when they're shooed in just before 4:30 a.m. or p.m., twice each day. Then, four plod to the right, four more to the left and Keosavang picks up a hose filled with water mixed with iodine and sprays down their udders. He rinses their feet and dries each udder with a fistful of paper towels. Holsteins take a little more rinsing than the more calm-natured brown and white Guernseys that make up most of the herd, he says. For some reason, the black and white Holsteins get themselves dirtier in between milkings.
He attaches the milking machine, four teat cups or vacuum tubes per cow, one for each teat, and stands back. He's always on the lookout for lifted tails - cows relieve themselves whenever and wherever they feel like it. For that reason a yellow plastic apron covers him from waist to ankles and a water hose hangs at the ready.
A pulsating chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a fills the room as the tubes slurp milk from each cow. The building smells richly of warm milk, iodine and manure. It's hot in here, heated by the panting bodies of a four-hour parade of cows. No wonder, says Keosavang, that the Amish kept cows under their homes as a sort of natural heating system.
Keosavang, 21, was born into farm work. Before he and his family emigrated to the United States from Laos when he was 5, he remembers playing on his father's and grandfather's rice farms. Water buffalo pulled the plows. Keosavang can remember riding them.
When the family came here and moved to rural Chesapeake, Keosavang sought out neighboring farms to play on and offered to help out. When he was 13, he started at Bergey's, helping feed the calves. He graduated from Great Bridge High School in 1994. Now he's an all-around farm hand and milker.
Dairy farming takes dedication, he says. Cows have to be milked twice a day, regardless of weather, season or holiday.
``I want a crop farm,'' he says, thinking about the future. ``But you've got to have livestock to keep in business.''
The milking machine stops when a cow's udder is empty. Keosavang reaches under each one again, cupping each teat into brownish red iodine that's left to drip dry. It wards off infection. Then he opens a gate and the eight move on while eight more cows plod in and line up.
The job looks easy, even monotonous. But without milkers, there'd be no dairy. Keosavang knows that and works carefully. A loosely attached cup can give a cow mastitis, an infection of the udder. Milking a cow on antibiotics can contaminate the shift's work.
Milk, and thinking about producing milk, makes up a big part of Keosavang's day. When he's not in the milking parlor, he's out in the herd's pastures on a tractor, or mixing exact measures of chopped corn, hay and soybean meal for the herd's feed.
But off the job, he pays little attention to the fruits of his labor.
``I drink it sometimes,'' he says, smiling sheepishly before going on, ``. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
L. TODD SPENCER
Buon Keosavang started working at Bergey's Dairy Farm at age 13.
Today, at 21, he's an all-around farm hand and milker.
by CNB