Brian:  June is dairy month here in Oklahoma.   Approximately, three hundred Oklahoma dairy farms provide milk, cheese, yogurt, and other dairy products to consumers all around the world.  Ninety-eight percent of these farms are family-owned and while the days of milking by hand are a thing of the past, as I found out when I visited a dairy farm in central Oklahoma, it’s still a full-time job.
Brian:  Brett Morris of Morrisland Dairy, just south of Chickasha, Oklahoma, cleans and prepares his Holstein cows for their second milking of the day.
Brett Morris:  It’s twice a day; it’s every day of the week.  The cows don’t get a vacation, so we hardly ever get one.
Brian:  Morris is a third generation dairy farmer and has seen his family-run operation go from 120 cows to 50.  And what used to be an all day milking process is now reduced and more efficient.  
Morris:  It takes about 15 minutes to do a group of six, so fifty head takes just about two hours and fifteen minutes.
Brian:  Something he credits to technology.  It’s gone from milking with your hands, to doing machines now.
Morris:  Absolutely, it’s a long way from milking by hand, the automatic milkers, in fact, if I had to milk by hand I probably wouldn’t be in the dairy business.  But we’ve bred the cows up so much now, we’ve got cows that can milk, you know, a hundred pounds a day which is close to 12 gallons.  We’ve got a low-line pipe system here.  We have to maintain the equipment; keep it clean; and it’s just so much easier to flip the machine on. 
Brian:  Well but still, I mean, like you said, if you’re doing 80 percent of the work, it’s nice to have this technology here.
Morris:  Absolutely.  Four years ago when we remodeled, we had it setup to where the cows came in the parlor here; they were faced head to tail; and we can only put three in at a time.  Well, since we’ve done this change over, we can milk six at a time, and we can actually do our milking time about twice as fast as what we normally could.  Come on, let’s go.
Brian:  And it’s a routine the cows have figured out, once at 6 in the morning, and again at 4 in the afternoon.  Morris’s operation is typical for much of the state.  He keeps records of each cow to measure performance.  And his dairy is on a routine stop where his 1000 gallon tank is emptied and then shipped to the Norman Highland Milk Plant.
Terrol Koehn:  We have anywhere from 25 cow herds, which would be 2500 pounds up to, actually, we pick up some loads that are tanker loads at one dairy, but the average would be five stops per load.
Brian:  Terrol Koehn with Western Dairy Transportation says the number of stops has gone down due to fewer dairies in the state, yet the industry is still strong in production, with a number of plants in key locations.
Terrol:  All our milk that we pick up, in Oklahoma, is all staying in Oklahoma. 
Brian:  Which means key jobs for the state’s economy, and proof that the industry affects all aspects of the state.
Morris:  Well, I feel like it’s very important, because, even locally, it produces jobs for, like, machinery dealerships and veterinarians, bankers, retailers.  It’s a vital part of the Oklahoma economy, I feel like.
Brian:  So while milk does a body good, it also keeps Oklahoma’s economy healthy and strong.
One down, seven more to go.