Brady Miller, Erica Hoover, Abigail Brown, and Anna Riordan wrote about a day in their lives as students who participate in the Cooperative for Real Education in Agricultural Management or CREAM program, where students care for the dairy herd and perform all of the barn chores.
Its 2:30 in the morning and the alarm is ringing. You stumble out of bed and head to the farm for morning milkings. You are greeted by your fellow CREAMers as you begin the breakfast chore for the day, with some people milking around 56 cows and the others feeding babies and mucking stalls.
After the chore is finished, you go get breakfast together (almost always bagels) and shower before going back to the barn for class. In class you laugh with Dr. Wadsworth as he lifts the groups spirits with inspirational quotes and jokes while teaching us as much as he can about cows and the dairy industry.
After a nap and another round of chores, you regroup at the barn for a twice-weekly meeting with everyone. The meeting opens with positive moments, where you get to share any uplifts throughout the day (big or small). After that the group moves into discussing the herd and any plans surrounding the barn, and some days gets demonstrations on things such as cow moving, dissections, or physical exams. After meeting you drive home with a smile on your face after the beautiful day you’ve had as a CREAMer at UVM.
No visit to the farm is complete without a visit to the new maternity barn. Currently were raising five calves, the oldest being only about a month and a half old. We are looking forward to several more calvings this summer. Our most recent calving is the first Holstein calf born in our summer CREAM group, so we have the task of picking a permanent name for her: serious business as this baby will grow up on the farm!
It is a pleasure watching the calves grow up, as they do so quite quickly. It doesn’t take long before you are reminiscing about the times that you had to feed them from a bottle. We are also involved in many other aspects of baby care besides just feeding. For example, a highlight during the warm summer months is being able to take calves outside on walks! This both helps them get used to being led on a halter and get used to the great outdoors: quite a different environment than the pen that they are used to.
Most of them are filled with a sort of nervous bewilderment when they first step foot outside, and it is precious to watch. Some enjoy it more than others; a few calves need a lot of convincing to leave the safety of their pen and are very spooked at all the sights, smells and sounds of outside. But learning is part of growing, and it is an honor to help our youngest members of the herd transform into brave, well-trained cows.
For the dairy herd, we handle anything and everything that has to do with milk, and we couldn’t do it without our constantly evolving herd of Holsteins. Our cows are specially bred for optimal body conformation (which is essential to longevity) and maximum production, so that our milk can reliably make its way to your table in the form of cheese and other dairy products. However, not every cow makes the same amount of milk. Joy is our highest producing cow in all of CREAMs years of operation, having made 265,000 pounds of milk in her ten years of life, and she is still with us today.
For its many achievements over the years, CREAM is routinely recognized in the form of various awards and honors. The cows are evaluated (classified) biannually for their physical conformation by the US Holstein Association. For nine years straight, we have won the Progressive Genetics Herd Award, given to registered Holstein herds to honor their genetic merit. We are also consistently deemed a top BAA university herd (BAA refers to the classification scores in a herd as they relate to their ages), ranking third in 2022.
More specific to individual cows, seven are currently classified as excellent cows, meaning they have achieved a high classification score that takes into account factors such as their udder and dairy strength. Overall, when it comes to cows, we pride ourselves on our amazing animals, and feel blessed to receive the chance to care for them each day.
As part of the university, the CREAM program is dedicated to connecting with and giving back to our community. CREAM is supported by Cabot’s co-op, so half of our milk is used in Cabot’s various dairy products (including butter and cheese). The other half is used to make ice cream at UVM!
After learning strategies on engaging with and educating the public on the dairy industry, we are looking forward to several community outreach events this summer. We have three upcoming farm visits from the local DREAM summer camp, in which we will take kids on tours of the UVM barn and they will get the chance to learn about cows and dairy production in a hands-on way. We are also looking forward to visiting the DREAM overnight summer camp in Fletcher, Vermont, in which we will take a cow and provide hands-on educational programming to the kids about cows.