Dairy retrospection

Finally a chance to sit down and update you all on the dairy progress. It has been a few weeks since my last post (something that seems to be turning into a bit of a pattern...), so the progress is quite substantial since we last caught up! The physical building and concrete works are pretty much done, and the final touches are getting rounded off this week. All that's left is to install all the new milking equipment and wire everything up! (Pffffft...is that ALL??) We've hit the home stretch and everyone is highly anticipating the day that we can move back onto Kildare and embrace the 21st century!

Staying with the 21st century; all of this building and knocking down old sheds to make room for all the upgrades has put me into a very retrospective mood. Yesterday, Pops and I were supervising the demolition of the old vacuum-pump room, when we came across a hidden passageway and a bricked off hidey-hole. The beauty of old-school DIY farmer building! This got me thinking about what the old dairy was like - how it worked, and how far we've come to reach the point where we are now. This got good old poparoo reminiscing about them good old days of pre-mechanised dairy farming. I thought it would be whimsical to share this with you all as it really tickled me...

The original Kildare dairy was established in the late 1950's, and a grand total of 155 head of cattle made up the entire herd by February 1962. My grandfather, John Raymond Torr, introduced dairy cattle to Kildare - his father, Neville Torr, bought Kildare in 1952 and originally ran sheep on the farm, and dabbled in horse breeding and racing. The original dairy consisted of six side-by-side stalls, similar to the picture on the left, (unfortunately I cannot find any originals in the family albums, so google will have to suffice).

Granddad would religiously sit behind an old wooden desk and record the milk from each individual cow every morning in a ledger, after which it would travel through an old-fashioned steel plate cooler, and then be stored in milk cans (the kind that everyone loves to acquire nowadays as vintage accessories for their houses). These cans were then immersed in an ice bath for cooling (pictured right...) before being stored in the large walk-in Frigidaire, ready for transportation. (This Fridge, apart from the shed, is the only original structure that still stands today).

From here, the milk cans would be loaded by the staff onto a horse-drawn cart, faithfully pulled by my Grandmother's gardening cart horse duo, Rocket and Lightening. The cart would then head off to meet up with the milk transport lorry at the main road, whereby all the full cans would be loaded onto the milk truck, and the empty ones from previous trips returned. The lorry would then take the cans through to Nottingham Road station to be loaded on the train and railed to Durban! Quite an undertaking...

Reading through old farm journals, there is an entry for the 12 July 1962 which states that alterations to the old original dairy were started, and these were completed in December that year. This was mainly an extension to the milking parlour. A new milk machine was installed in January 1963, and cattle numbers were recorded as 160 head in total. In October 1964, a new C model pump was installed for the milking machine, seriously modern technology for those days!

I'm going to dig through some more journals and find out some further history of the dairy alterations through the decades. I hope you enjoyed this little peek into our farm history, I find it all rather fascinating!