We were SO excited for this field trip. We had heard lots of great things from public school groups and homeschool groups. It did not disappoint. Dairy Discovery is the educational side of Swiss Lane Farms. Swiss Lane is a commercial dairy in Alto MI that supplies milk (and other things) locally. Dairy Discovery does many different educational group things throughout the year.
In the play area, they had a cow set up to milk. It was (obviously) a wooden cow but it did have udders and water came out of the udders. Joelle's face just cracks me up.
Then we got to tour the farm. This was the chute the cows walk down to the milking area.
Our group. We had one or two random homeschool families join us and some random people did too. We ended up being quite the group.
Bebe and I. We had to make some random side walks so someone didn't disrupt the tour.
We got to (attempt) to feed the cows. Some were more skittish than others, so some of us succeeded and some did not. At this point they showed us how the cows were fed and also showed us the automatic poop cleaner. It runs on a chain throughout the building. I need one for my house.
B-diddy succeeded :)
We got to go on a hay ride. We learned a fun fact right away. Hay is green, straw is yellow. We were actually going on a straw ride.
Another fun fact. They use a big dump truck to mix all the cows food. They have different bins of different things and it all gets dumped in a dump truck which has a big monstrous kitchen-aid type mixer in it. This is ground feed corn. I also did not realize when they do feed corn for animals they grind everything. The stalk, the leaves, the husk and the corn.
The milking area. Each cow gets it's own washcloth that they wipe the udders down with, they test each cows milk once a month and they have a vet that comes to the farm every day.
Then we got to bottle feed calves. Oh my word. Sooooo fun. They were so cute. I want a baby cow.
This was one of my favorite tours....and our last tour of the year! So informative about where our food really comes from.
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