One of the challenges of having milking cows is that you need to milk them everyday and most often twice a day. That makes going away a bit of a challenge. If you are lucky like we are you have friends who are enthusiastic about helping you out. When we went away to visit Alison’s family over the Christmas holidays this year we were lucky to have Sarah and Dan Swan take over our farm duties. At that time we were milking by hand in the middle of a paddock. It was simple and effective but not the most pleasant experience in poor weather. Since then we have got all fancy and moved our milking facilities under a roof and have added a single milking machine. Operating a milking machine is on par in difficulty in my opinion with hand milking. Darn machines have a mind of their own just like cows sometimes. In a few weeks we are going to be calling on Dan and Sarah again, but this time we will not even be here to give them basic training. To help their baptism by fire we are making some home videos to cover off some of the trickier bits as well as training up our young girls. Here is a clip that covers off disconnecting the milking machine. As you will see and hear our middle daughter Morley is very keen to know everything she can about milking. One small correction about striping and the last bit of milk. At the end I say the last bit that comes out is cream. That is not exactly correct: the last bit of milk that comes out contains a very high percentage of cream. After we took this video I was able to hand milk about another 500 ml from Ebby and we stored this separately to see what percentage of it was cream. We confirmed that the last bit of milk is mostly cream is not an urban myth and half of it was indeed cream.