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Cow's Life : Testing milk – and attitudes

In our first season of dairying, we were short of Jersey heifer calves and were offered some four-day-olds from a couple, Tom and Mollie, who lived three kilometres away. We had been warned to allow two to three hours for the visit as this delightful couple were never in a hurry, loved to chat and would ply you with delicious homemade cooking, cuppas and stories from the past.
During one of these visits, Mollie told me how during World War II many women had to turn their hands to jobs mainly done by men, and herd testing was such a case. Having come from a remote sheep farm near Gisborne, Mollie said the thought of all those weights and measures frightened her as she had never liked maths. But she was assured maths didn't matter, and so on 25 July 1941, she came to Whakatane as the first female herd tester in the Waimana area.
With only one week's training she started at a local farm one kilometre away from where she would spend the next 58 happy years. She was given 24 herds in the area, six or seven days off and then told to start again on the first of the month.
Mollie stayed with the families she was testing for but, if there were no other females or no accommodation available, she stayed at another farm nearby.
Sometimes the accommodation left a lot to be desired. She recalled how once she was directed to a sleepout where it took most of the night to find the bed under the rubbish. There were no sheets and dinner at night consisted of dates, nuts and lettuce leaves.
The female herdtesters were expected to help with the housework, and one farmer's wife would save her ironing for a month. Mollie soon found a way of spending extra time at that dairy! But most of the farmer's wives were great and she made lifelong friends with many of them.
Mollie would get up at 4.30 or 5am and often have to read the milk weights by torchlight. She would arrive at the dairy by 2.30pm and set out the herd testing equipment. This consisted of six lidded metal buckets, rubber rings and milk rubbers, boxes of bottles and acid, a spinning jenny to which hot water was added so the butterfat would rise and she could read the fat content.
There were books to write the cows' names, ages and calving dates in.
Mollie conveyed all of this around the district by horse and cart, which unfortunately had no brakes.
But to Mollie, who could ride a packhorse at four years old, this wasn't a problem. She simply used the horse to hold the cart back when going downhill.
Horseshoeing day had to be worked in when testing was near the blacksmith. In the spring, there was mud everywhere and in summer the roads were hot and dusty as there was no tarseal.
At one farm, female testers were forbidden to go into the dairy, so the men brought the buckets to her in the milk room where she wrote up the weights. She remembered this as a real "cruisy'' dairy.
The work for Mollie was really hard at first, as she had never seen electric milking machines before. But for her it was great pay, and she had many a laugh. It was her war effort and she made a lot of great friends including Tom Doran, whom she married.
I remember Tom saying to me once: "Do you get your cows introduced?"
Of course he meant induced and I had visions of saying: "Now then Daisy Cow this is Ferdinand Bull - please be cooperative."
He also asked us if we gave our cows Mooo-lasses. He thought salt for the cows was a good idea as it would make them thirsty, they would drink more and so make more milk.
Tom and Mollie have gone to the great dairy farm in the sky and are remembered with affection in our area. I, for one, greatly admire Mollie, who forged a path for women in agriculture. D

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