Alan Emery on Milk

Well first of all it was all in churns of course from the old milking parlour and the lorry used to come in every morning.

The milking parlour was just outside my office about I suppose 40 yards. The churns had to go down on a trolley, eight at a time, and they stood on the ramp so the chap had just to lorry height and he took off the empty churns and put the full churns on and that went on for some years.

One year though we had some snow … what year would that have been? ’63, he didn’t come through anyway and we had to battle our way into Newport ourselves. I had a farm lorry by this time.

Anyway, and then when we put in this new milking parlour we had a bulk tank, a refrigerated tank and the tank used to come and suck it out every morning.

We always had two in the dairy, sometimes three.

When we had the old system it was quite laborious and we had two men and a boy. And then the last few years with 150 cows we had just the two men, a Head Cowman and a Second Cowman and we didn’t have a relief milker then, we didn’t need it.