WAUSEON - The Fulton County Fair's cow-milking contest, an annual part of a light-hearted Labor Day evening, draws all sorts of contestants who have no experience drawing milk by hand from a cow's udder - including some area agricultural experts.
The county's agricultural extension agent, Greg LaBarge, milked a cow by hand for the first time in the contest several years ago. So did county 4-H agent Jill Stechschulte.
"There were a lot of them who struggled. Perhaps dampening the pail was all that happened," said State Rep. Steve Buehrer (R., Delta), a lawyer who remembers most adults being showed up by a young dairy princess when he competed.
Sixty to 70 years ago, such a lack of skill would have been laughable for country folk. Until the early 1940s, when almost every farm had some dairy cows, many boys over 10 in rural Fulton County would have milked a cow or two before school each morning - by hand.
But in the years since, milking a cow by hand has become almost a lost art among people under 60.
Today, many of the county's dairy farmers say they can't remember when they last completely milked a cow by hand, stripping the last drops from its udder. The few who can say for sure are among the youngest local dairy farmers: Clark Emmons, who's 37, and Karel Van de Kolk, who's 40. And for them the answer is easy. It's never.
It's not that they don't know how. Mr. Emmons, who milks about 250 cows, and Mr. Van de Kolk, who milks just under 700 and plans to expand his Chesterfield Dairy LLC to 1,750 next year, use their hands often to get a few squirts of milk to test.
But to squeeze out 5 to 6 gallons of milk by working four teats in one sitting? Well, that would take about 15 minutes, tire their hands and forearms, and still not do as well as a milking machine, which would be finished in half the time.
That's partly because today's cows have been bred to be milked by machine.
When milking by hand, it's easiest to work with a cow whose teats are at least 3 inches long. Many cows had teats that measured 4 inches when most farmers milked by hand.
But those long teats also carried considerable risk. Cows were more likely to step on them as they got to their feet after lying down. And when teats were cut with a hoof, the injuries were often permanent.
With the advent of milking machines, farmers selected cows with shorter teats. Today, many measure less than 2 inches, which fits well in a milking machine but isn't much for farmers to get their hands around. Likewise, cows whose teats extended at a slight angle, which was desirable when milking by hand, have been replaced by cows whose teats are completely perpendicular, which is better for machines.
Many cows produce 10 to 12 gallons of milk a day, compared to 1 to 2 gallons in 1950.
"With today's cow, I don't know anybody who can milk those cows by hand," said Normand St-Pierre, a dairy management expert at Ohio State University.
Chuck Riegsecker, who retired from dairy farming in 2004 after milking cows for 41 years in Fulton County's Pike Township, can attest to that. Before he bought a generator in 1978, there was a power outage at milking time and he decided to milk his 30 cows by hand. It didn't go well, and he was far from done when the power came back on.
Today, even the smallest farming operations typically own generators that can power their milking machines during an electrical outage.
And almost all of the Amish, including those who are so conservative they don't use electricity or drive tractors, use milking machines powered by diesel.
In Fulton County, almost all dairy farmers had acquired milking machines by 1950.
Lowell Geringer, a retired York Township dairy farmer who's 87, remembers a neighbor who had an early milking machine in the 1920s. Mr. Geringer bought a milking machine in 1941, and he considered himself one of the last full-time farmers in the community to do so.
But for decades after that, there were retirees, hobbyists, and back-to-the-earth enthusiasts who milked a cow or two by hand. Pettisville FFA adviser John Poulson did so until the mid 1970s in Defiance County.
Roger Crossgrove, who's 62, had such a neighbor when he was 8 or 10 years old. And when the neighbor went on vacation, it was up to a young Crossgrove to milk the cow.
"That's when I decided if I had to milk cows by hand, I'd never milk cows," said Mr. Crossgrove, who is executive director of the Ohio Farmers Union. "It just took too long."
He went on to milk cows -though always by machine - for 35 years, keeping a herd of 45 to 50 in Henry County, just south of Archbold, until his daughter took over several years ago and reduced the herd to 24.
There are still probably a few hundred people scattered around Ohio who keep one or two cows that they milk by hand for their own consumption, Mr. St-Pierre said.
But many of the Fulton County residents who are most practiced at milking by hand are local dairy farm employees who grew up in Mexico, where hand milking is still common.
Locally, there aren't nearly as many opportunities for young people to learn to milk a cow by hand as there were for their grandparents and great-grandparents. Fulton County has 13 dairy farms today, according to the Ohio Agricultural Statistics Service.
Contact Jane Schmucker at: jschmucker@theblade.com or 419-337-7780.
First Published September 3, 2006, 4:20 p.m.