Other parts of the state fair were less overwhelming but more interesting. The arts and crafts building was really interesting as a lot of the crafts being demonstrated where things I grew up with – quilting, hooking (rugs, folks, rug hooking…), needlework, tatting and preserves. The testing was going on for the food, too – fun to watch.
After the crafts building, we headed to the heifer judging – again, it is way too similar to the dog show scene. These cows are bathed, blow dried and coiffed to within an inch of their lives. The handlers use the exact same slicker brush we used with the Bear Dogs - bigger of course but the exact same concept. Weird! And the forced air blow dryers, again, bigger but exactly the same concept although I can’t imagine how long it would take to hand dry a cow…a Bear Dog in full coat could take up to an hour and a half so what would a full-grown cow take to dry? Hours!
From there we headed to the milking parlor. The milking parlor had to be one of the most interesting things for this little city slicker. I can’t remember ever seeing a cow being milked before and I have to say it was a lot less stressful then the time I visited the meat cattle ranch in Alberta – that was nightmare! First watching a calf being ‘pulled’ from its mom was bad and the way the rancher then put the less then one minute old calf over a partial wall to ‘drain’ its lungs was really nice. Poor thing! The worst, however, was walking down this aisle made between these huge rows of hay while the rancher’s coyote hounds ran back and forth along the top of the hay, then, sensing me a newbie to all this excitement, they dropped a hind leg of recently demised bull on me! Perfectly aimed shot so there is not way it was an accident – no way! Darn dogs! Normally I love dogs but those coyote hounds (coyote hunting in Alberta is a topic for another post – it is horrific in its own right!) where something else. The worst of course was the rancher and my friend Kyla where out in front so did not see the incident – they only heard my scream and assumed I was being a city-slicker. It wasn’t until one of them turned to make sure I was still walking that they saw that I was holding a severed leg crawling in maggots did they have any sympathy. Ranchers…definitely a breed apart.
Back to the milking parlor – it was cool! The cows are smaller and hand-raised so they are less intimidating right off the bat. They are also clean – nice change there too. The process is quite fascinating from start to finish. There was a little blond Dairy Farmer representative who explained everything that was going on and why they were doing what they were doing. For example, cows are bred and have a nine month gestation. Once the calf is born, it is taken away from the mother and the hand-raised so everything the cow produces from then on is for human consumption. About three months later, they are bred again so they continually produce milk. Smaller cows produce around five gallons of milk a day and the big Holsteins can produce up to twelve which is why they are the most common of dairy cows (97% of milk in Texas comes from Holsteins while the other five breeds of dairy cattle make up the other 3%). Cows are either on a twice a day or three times a day milking schedule so the farmers must go through this whole thing at least twice a day and some even three times a day. The cow’s teats are disinfected before and after each milking and the machine is disinfected after each cow. So if your parlor holds twelve to sixteen cows at a time, this means that a good portion of the time is spent cleaning. Twice a day, every day, the dairy farmer has to go through this huge amount of work and I cannot understand how they do it! My hat goes off to them and I sure look differently at the milk when I put it on my cereal each morning.
The train museum was a bit of a disappointment but one of the neatest things was the Women’s Building. The display was not so good but the building itself was spectacular! After taking a ton of photos, I spotted the sign saying ‘No Photography’ so these are limited edition images, folks, no one else has the gall to photograph a building where photography is not allowed!
We headed home without too much fuss although the crowds were just as insane as the game had gotten out. Crazy amount of people!
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