It would take a lot of work to milk all of Al’s cows. So he uses milking machines. When a man milks a cow, he squeezes with his fingers. Instead of fingers, the milking machine has four soft rubber funnels that fit over the cow’s teats. A pump squeezes the funnels, presses the milk out and sends it through hoses to the milk can.

A farmer has only two hands. His milking machine has four funnels with hoses. So it can work much faster, and he can have several machines going at once.

You’d never guess it, but a cow is a nervous, fussy animal. She lets down her milk easily if the same person or the same machine squeezes on her teats with the same rhythm every day, but any kind of change or hurry upsets her. Then she’s hard to milk. And so Al’s machine is built with a very accurate timer which makes the funnels squeeze exactly forty-eight times a minute.

A good farmer tries to make life calm and comfortable for his cows. Even the names for some things in Al’s barn have a comfortable sound. The place where the cows wait to be milked is called the loafing pen. The room where they stand for milking is kept perfectly clean, and it’s called the milking parlor.

Before the machine is attached, the cows’ udders and teats must be washed clean. Al has fixed an upside-down shower bath for his cows. He built a concrete pen with sprays coming up through the floor. The showers clean the cows and make them feel so calm that he never has any trouble milking them.

The fanciest milking parlor of all has a machine in it called a Rotolactor. It is really a quiet, slow merry-go-round. Cows amble up a ramp and step into stalls on the gently moving platform. A man attaches milking machines to them, one after the other. By the time each cow has been carried halfway around the big circle, her milk has been pumped out into a glass tank that sits on a rack above her. A man takes off the rubber cups, a

gate opens in front of the cow, and she steps off onto another ramp that goes from the center of the merry-go-round, underneath it and out to the barnyard. Twenty-five cows at a time can be milked on the Rotolactor.

Automatic gadgets empty the milk from the glass tanks, wash them, sterilize them and get them ready for the next round. All the time men are busy keeping the stalls clean and tending to the machinery. Most dairies milk the cows twice a day, but the Rotolactor milks three times.