A cow must have her first calf before she can start producing milk. Cows are milked on average for about 3 – 4 years. Dairying has come along way over the years. Today, one cow can produce the milk it once took ten cows to produce.
The average cow can produce 10 gallons of milk a day. A cow can produce over 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime. Cows milk is a concentrated food that is full of vitamins, especially calcium and is very good for you although Goats milk is known to be better..
An 8 ounce glass of milk contains the following nutrients:
17% Protein
29% Calcium
23% Phosphorus
23% Riboflavin
25% Vitamin D
15% Vitamin B-12
Refrigeration came into use in 1880 and the first pasteurizing machine was introduced in 1895. The milk bottle was invented in 1884. Plastic milk containers were introduced in 1964.
Before milking machines were invented in 1894, farmers could only hand milk about 6 cows per hour. Today, farmers use automated machines to milk more than 100 cows per hour.
It takes 12 pounds of whole milk to make one gallon of ice cream. A dairy cow can produce five gallons of ice cream in one day. It takes 21.2 pounds of whole milk to make one pound of butter. The natural yellow colour in butter comes from the beta-carotene present in the grass that the cow grazes on.
It takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. Cheese was first made more than 5,000 years ago. There are more than 1,500 different kinds of cheese made from the milk of cows, goats, sheep, and other animals.
Milking History
Until the late 1800s, the milking of the cow was done by hand. In the United States, there were several large dairy operations in some northeastern states and in the west, that involved as many as several hundred cows, but an individual milker could not be expected to milk more than a dozen cows a day.
Milking took place indoors in a barn with the cattle tied by the neck with ropes or held in place by stanchions (metal stalls in dairy barns that lock the cows in place while they are milked). Feeding could occur simultaneously with milking in the barn, although most dairy cattle were pastured during the day between milkings.
With the availability of electric power and suction milking machines, the production levels that were possible in stanchion barns increased but the scale of the operations continued to be limited by the labours intensive nature of the milking process. Attaching and removing milking machines involved repeated heavy lifting of the machinery and its contents several times per cow and the pouring of the milk into milk cans. As a result, it was rare to find single-farmer operations of more than 50 head of cattle.
Cold milk – among the healthiest drinks.