We had career day at our elementary school today.  Although I’m the music teacher, I did have to take a class to see one presentation, by the Southwest Dairy Farmers, which consisted of one representative dairy farmer, and one representative cow, a Jersey named Maggie.

“That’s my mother’s name,” one of the kids I was in charge of told me as Maggie was introduced.

The man who ran the show, Farmer Dave, wore a huge straw cowboy hat, sunglasses (he took them off for a second so, he said, we could “check out his eyeballs”) and a long, long handlebar moustache. He looked like a cross between a biker dude and a country western dancer. 

Maggie stood in the trailer, which opened so you could see her whole body, with only two metal bars holding her inside. She was pulling down hay from a net hanging in front of her, and looked as us out of the corner of her eye with an expression less friendly than that of Daisy the milkbottle cow, but of course not malevolent. She was, after all, a cow.

Dave told us a little bit about the importance of drinking milk — three glasses a day — and then demonstrated the milking process using a milking machine, all installed neatly in the trailer, with a door opened so you could see the fresh white milk splash into the collection bottle. It was really quite impressive. 

Before he started this job,  he said, he used to milk 600 cattle three times a day — they give more milk that way than if you milk them twice — and even with the machine that got a bit fatiquing. So travelling for the Dairy Farmers with Maggie was actually less work. He nows farms, we might say, public relations opportunities.

The presentation, for first grade and kintergarden, was short and sweet, emphasizing that milk comes from cows and it is good for you. “Take care of your body,” Farmer Dave said at the end. “Your body is going to be the most valuable thing you have until you have your own children.”

That was a fine way to end a fine presentation, and I gave Farmer Dave and the Southwest Dairy Farmers an A.