Dairy

Miles and miles of calf hutches at the Boardman dairy, which maintains about 20,000 head of cattle. They have four rotary milking machines in two different parlors milking twice a day. They have about 30 calves a day. All the heifers are kept for replacement and the holstein bull calves are sold to the neighboring feedlot.
My face doens't show it, but I'm pretty excited. This group of calves are about 3 days old, 60-70lbs. and we are getting about 12cc of blood from each calf, weight and temperature

This is all for a research project, which entails sampling about 1,000 Jersey calves to assess passive immune transfer by measuring total protein. Studies have been done with Holstein calves but not Jerseys. Sounds fancy but acquiring all these samples requires one to jump into a lot of 4x4 huts filled with calf scours (poop) which smells like rancid milk and has a strange orange glow. So the picture below is what happens when you flank a calf covered in its own feces, it gets all over you in very inconvenient locations. Good times