Old Barns and Jersey Cows---

It has been a beauty of a week here on the windy Plains of Kansas and I have traveled alot of miles and have had the chance to take some nice photos too. Not only do I like old cars, trucks, gas stations, and ghost towns...I also like old barns and farm livestock.

This week I passed by a big barn that sits on a nice old river bottom farm and stopped to take a photo. The owner of the place was just driving away and told me to help myself.
It is one of those combination style barns big stalls for draft horses on the near side of this photo and a long row of wooden stanchions for milk cows on the other side. You can see the milkhouse addition on the left. The hay mow or loft can be accessed by driving right in with your hay wagon and team of horses. That makes it very similar to my buddy Larry's barn in Illinois which is one of my all time favorite barns.

 The foundation is built of native limestone blocks that would have been quarried nearby...

And more than likely in this part of the world, the cows were housed loose and only brought into the stanchion barn to be milked twice a day...

The silo was for storing and feeding corn silage or ensilage and it is not really leaning to one side like it appears in my photo...
I tried to get an inside photo of the cow barn but it was just too dark for my small flash. Just picture in your mind a nice flat concrete floor with a gutter running the whole length for manure and the head locks or stanchions made of wood with a feedbunk for grain in front of them. These cows would have been milked by hand into a bucket and that milk would have been poured into 10 gallon cans and placed into a can cooler which had an "ice bank" that refrigerated the milk. Some of you may recall the best watermelons ever eaten in your life were cooled in these coolers.....
I did manage to get a couple of shots of the horse stalls.

 They were well built and in nice shape. I loved the worn look of the wood where huge horses were kept. They were the true work horse variety not some fancy show animal for pleasure. Still, they were loved and considered part of the family for most folks...
Before I left this nice farm I took a photos of the nostalgic rope swing hanging from a tall tree in the yard. Simple fun for kids then and now...

Later that same day I was driving down the highway and saw a herd of purebred Jersey dairy cows on pasture. They were enjoying the lush spring grass and I just had to have a photo of them...

Unlike modern dairy farmers, this particular man is of the old fashioned type. His life's work is to preserve the original type and beauty of the Jersey breed. He has resisted bringing in modern bloodlines and uses his own bulls in an intensely line bred and inbred manner in order to put an emphasis on the traits he is striving for. His cows are milked in a flat tie stall barn instead of a parlor. They stay indoors in bad weather. His cows are not as milky as a modern Jersey cow but they have the look and beauty of the original cows that were imported here from Jersey Island in the British Channels so long ago. Only his cows are much taller than those...

The collars are for tying them inside their stall in the barn. The horns with the chain and locket are for decorative purposes and were used on the Island to tether cows to a long rope and stake in the ground for daily grazing instead of a wire fence as we use here...
Jerseys can be of many colors and the ones that catch my eye are the spotted ones like this one...

Since I grew up on my grandparents small Jersey dairy in the Missouri Ozarks, and it is from this background that I learned so much in my formative years of youth. Some of the top breeders and handlers of the breed took my under their wing and taught me an education in showing cattle and were kind enough to haul me along with their own families to national shows and sales because I was interested and wanted to learn. I am very fond of these smaller and more gentle cows. They are easy to work with and very tame...Pleasant memories for sure.

It sure was fun to relive the past on this wonderful spring day of April and I hope you enjoyed it too. I will revisit this farm someday and show you the baby calves that are hand raised by humans and fed from bottles. You will love them. But there was not enough time for that this time. Stay tuned my friends....see you down the road.