Day 142-Alex's dairy experience

   May 25-Sígrun Lilja picked up Þorgeður and Alex from Norður-Reykir this evening and drove them back to Bifröst.  Both girls had a fantastic time on the dairy farm.

Kolla and Bjarmar own and operate the dairy.
They are the parents of Þóra, who is Alex's and Þorgeður's teacher at Varmaland. 

These are most of the buildings of Norður-Reykir. Kolla and Bjarmar's house is on the left. They let Þorgeður and Alex have their son's old bedroom during their stay. The dairy operation is contained in the buildings on the right.  Across the valley behind Norður-Reykir is the goat ranch that we visited a few weeks ago.



Each of the girls selected a cow and then kept track of the amount of milk that she produced while they were visiting. All of the cows had names and Alex picked Penny, their oldest cow at 7 years old.



The dairy cows spend most of their time in these stalls. The water and feed are provided in the containers in front of them and the grates behind them allow excrement to fall into the basement where it is formulated into a slurry to be spread back onto the hay fields. By law, the cows must spend at least two months outside of the barn. These will be outside later this summer.

Kolla, Bjarmar, and the girls donned these special coveralls at milking time (twice per day). 

To begin the process, the cows were led into the milking room.  The lowered section in the middle allows Kolla and Bjarmar to do the milking without bending over as much. Penny is in front on the left.

The girs were responsible for cleaning the teets of their cows and then attaching the automatic suckers.



The machines kept a running tally of each cow's production.
When no more milk was flowing, the girls disconnected their cows and took them back to their stalls.

There is a creek and a thermal spring at Norður-Reykir as well. Prior to the construction of permanent swimming pools at Varmaland and Húsafell, this location was used as a temporary swimming pool, where the local kids learned how to swim. Each spring an earthen dam was built here and the water from the creek and the thermal spring would combine to make a pool with a comfortable water temperature for swimming. Kolla uses the thermal spring for cooking; she and the girls made rye bread one evening and put the dough into a concrete oven built atop a thermal spring.  By the next evening, the bread had been completely baked. The girls had to cross the these hot spring each day to go to the more remote building on the ridge, which housed the non-dairy animals and dairy cattle that were not actively being milked. 

The girls had to help Bjarmar feed the beef cattle in these buildings.

Bjarmar told Alex that the dairy operation was more profitable than the beef operation, so she asked why they did not convert everything to dairy. Bjarmar explained that there is a nation-wide quota system on milk production to maintain prices at a level that will allow dairies to remain profitable. Unless they purchase higher quotas, any extra milk they produce cannot be sold.

Alex (and Spencer) can't get over the size and flexibility of bovine tongues.

Breeding also takes place in these remote buildings.  Heifers are bred "naturally," but then are impregnated using artificially inseminated yearly afterwards.  This is the bull in front of his current harem of heifers.

This is also the building in which the bucket calves are kept. The girls got to feed them their milk. Not surprisingly, this was a highlight for them. A recently passed law requires that cattle now have tags in each ear and that the tags state the animal's number and the farm and country to which it belongs. Exasperated local farmers joke that this way the cow will know that it is Icelandic if it manages to swim to England.......

Alex was thrilled that they had a farm cat, Tína, which strongly resembles our Frisky.
She only would have been happier if Tína had already given birth to her kittens.

As much as it flies in the face of the romantic view of the farm, the reality is that computer work comprises a large part of work time on the farm, as Kolla demonstrates here.