Here on my sleepy ideal paradise island, I am actually surrounded by extremely hard working folk.  The type of people that your grandparents told you about how life was 60 years ago.  To live off of a few acres of land and decrease your dependency on outsiders being in control of what you put in your body; one must be willing to work.  Being a photographer on a sailboat, I feel very removed from this lifestyle, yet intrigued and respectful of my neighboring clodhoppers and cowpokes.

Take the dairy cow, for example, while it may seem like a self tending field ornament that asks for nothing yet can provide 6 or more  gallons of milk a day for its keeper. There are actually many, many facets to keeping a dairy cow healthy, happy and producing. I love a new challenge and overcoming fears, so I jumped at the opportunity to join my friend Table for the morning to milk her gorgeous friend LaBelle.

Notice I said “her friend.”  Table doesn’t even hardly drink milk and she doesn’t get paid. She, along with a handful of other islanders take turns making sure that LaBelle and her girlfriends all get milked twice a day.  If they don’t, bad things happen.  Words like “pain,” “engorgement,” ” infections,” and “going  dry” were used.  Yikes.

Back to my story…

As for me, after overcoming the fear of getting trampled to death, I was overly fascinated by the sounds of the four stomach working so hard.  Eventually, I did my best to milk a cow.  Apparently, its an acquired skill and takes lots of practice.  I sucked at it pretty bad.  If you are good it takes 300-400 quality squeezes to get a gallon. I realized quickly that I had nowhere near the forearm stamina required to consider adopting a dairy cow.  I was smoked after a quart.  (I’m being generous to say I got a quart out of her.)

Besides from the act of milking itself, there’s at least 20 minutes of prep and 20 minutes of stuff to do afterwards as well. There are definitely worse work environments than this quiet family homestead, but we are talking serious work if you want it done right and sanitarily . Follow along with my visual story to see how much love goes into a milking.

Love, I believe, is the most important ingredient.

At the end of the process, I got to go home with a half gallon of the creamiest and sweetest milk I’ve ever slipped between my teeth.  I paraded it around town like a newborn child. I tried to pass off sips to anyone willing to imbibe.  The next day, I was told that with a full milk mustache I was hanging off the top of my mast yelling about “cream on top” and that I would only answer to being called Lactron, King of Lactavia, the Harbinger of Moo Juice for the Masses.

It was that good.