Go Retire Psychiatrist

So, it’s the first day of National Dairy Month and Mike Waters started his KOKZ 105.7 radio show right on time. He chronicled his morning at New Day Dairy Guest Barn in Clarksville, Iowa, including milking cows as Dairy Man Dan and his wife Lynn coached him about life on a dairy farm. Sena and I learned a lot about dairy farming too.

Mike and his wife, as he put it, spent their first night at the Guest Barn sleeping with the cows—don’t think too hard about it. The Guest Barn is right above where the cows moo, so I guess they lowed them to sleep.

Dan & Lynn have 120 cows which have to be milked up to 3-4 times a day. Who does that? Glad you asked! They have Rita the Robot and it surprised Sena and I to learn that milking cows has been more or less automated for decades.

Early on in the morning program we heard that some cattle farmers in Africa started painting eyes on the butts of cows in Africa to prevent lions from attacking them. We thought that was a joke, but it turns out the story is real. Go ahead, google search “fake eyes on cow butts.” I’m pretty sure the Billy Idol sound-alike song about it was fake, though.

There’s a dairy farmer in Donahue, Iowa who feeds his cows coffee creamer. He’s John Maxwell and he runs the Cinnamon Ridge Dairy Farm. It sounds “udderly” weird, but it boosts the cows’ energy and they give richer milk.

Dan is a busy guy. His days can start at 2:30 a.m. and he goes for 10 hours and he’s always on call. Before I retired from psychiatry, I could at least sign off to somebody else after I was on night call.

Sometimes the jokes came really fast and we didn’t catch them all. At one point Mike mentioned something about a cow-nado (think shark-nado) and maybe that had something to do with his noting for the record that no cows attacked him. So that might go back to what I mentioned in a previous post about how more people are killed by cows than by sharks. Mike also got the impression that all the cows were looking at him last night, which led to him not getting any sleep.  

I don’t know how to spell the name of one of the cows Mike milked, but it sounded something like Maalax and I think when you say the name, it sort of sounds like Maalox. Maybe it has something to do with the chalky taste of Maalox, which can be countered by drinking milk with it. But maybe I’m overthinking it.

But I’m not overthinking the part of today’s show that made a big difference to Sena. It came on the same time as her exercise routine. So, she exercised in her leopard skin pattern exercise clothes on the leopard skin pattern front entrance hallway runner rug. A full gallon jug of milk and a container of powdered milk were involved. Yes, we filmed it. Hurray for Cow Week!