komet. - 2015-03-02 12:03 PM You are quite right Scott... The first 7 years I spent on cattle dairies were in Missouri on small 100-250 cow farms where, as I said above, every life counted. The life of every cow, the life of every calf born mattered to the farmer trying to raise a family on his farm income. In in fact, I was coaxed out to Idaho by a big farmer in Idaho that used to come to our area every year to buy new springers. (bred heifers) I worked 6 day weeks on those farms and did both milkings, freeing up the farmer to do the rest of the work like feeding and crop-work, A.I. work on most farms was done by those farmers but the first man I worked for sent me to a Select Sires 3-day class to learn to do this and I've done some since. Part of my job on most of those places was to sit and watch the cows twice a day to spot the cows in heat so they could be bred in a timely fashion. My first boss told me my most important job was to keep the state health inspector off his back. This entailed keeping the bacteria and the somatic cell counts down.as well as keeping the barn nice and clean. The somatic cell count in a tank usually starts coming up when cows with mastitis are milked into the tank so I had to watch close for those cows and pull them out to be treated. It was sometimes hard to keep it down tho because any sick cow would send it up, so I had to learn to spot sick animals just by looking at them. (not hard to do once you learn what to look for) But any undue stress would send a count up as well. We got into a heat wave once that sent the counts through the roof but those never brought the inspector out because everyone else was having the same problem. Also, cows late or very early in their lactation would jump the count too. My boss told me to avoid the inspector when he would show up but I had other ideas .His name was Stanley Wilson and he had a large area to cover. He was a by-the-book sort of person and was not very popular among the farmers. After a few of his visits where we got poor reviews (even tho our counts were within guidelines, he thought them to be too high) I caught him one day and told him I was new to this and asked if he had any ideas on ways to lower the counts. He seemed quite taken aback but he began to walk me through the barn pointing out little things that needed to be taken apart and hand cleaned on a regular basis. I started doing everything he advised and his next visit was to find out why our counts had dropped into the negative range suddenly. This was something he had only seen when farmers started pouring chlorine into the tank to kill bacteria. I told him I was simply doing what he had advised but I don't think he believed me because he kept coming back and pulling samples at random times and sniffing the inside of the tank, trying to catch the odor of chlorine. Finally he stopped showing up. I guess he finally decided to believe me because after I moved on to another farm and the bacteria counts dropped into the negative range he showed up and was checking things out when I walked into the barn. He spotted me and smiled and asked if I was working there now. I said yes. He never came back. So yes.... Small farms like that are where I got my training. Every life counted!!