I forgot to post about one more adventure with Mckay's parents. This happened between the beach day and the downtown Indianapolis day. We took a trip to Fair Oaks Farms. It's located about 45 minutes away and it a BIG dairy farm.
You can look around at displays and exhibits inside, and then hop on a bus for a tour outside around the facility. They show you where the dairy cows live and where they are milked. It really makes you think about all the work (from both humans and cows) that goes into each cup of milk.
Being a milk making facility, they only keep girl cows that make milk. So they keep them on a constant schedule of pregnancy and lactation. With so many pregnant cows, it's almost guaranteed that there will be several calf births on the day of your visit. You can view them in the birthing barn.
They bring a live, laboring cow into a "theater" of sorts. The cow is protected from onlookers by a glass wall. You sit quietly in the darkened room, wait and watch. It really is fascinating to see.
It's amazing watching the momma cows work all by themselves with almost no intervention.
The baby boy calves are shipped off to facilities for "other" uses, and the girls are kept there to be raised and to make more cows/milk. And the circle of life starts over!
A new addition to the farm is the Pig adventure.
Similar to the cows, you get to see how the pigs live and are cared for, and where they birth new pigs.
This is really just a pig raising, inseminating and birthing facility. All the babies born here are sent to different farms. And I guess there's not a big market for pig milk....?
Needless to say, the two boys loved seeing all the animals. After the tours, we had a delicious lunch of gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches and paninis, made from cheese produced right there at the dairy.
Dallin and Connor shared a quesadilla and got most of the sour cream on their faces.
Then we played outside for a bit. There was a huge trampoline-balloon-pillow thing.
We all jumped on it for a while.
It was a fun day at the farm.
1 comment:
That looks really cool! Especially the live births.
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