( Note to self: Always check the milk vat valve is closed!!! )

There are so many things to remember when starting up, operating, shutting down and cleaning a milking system that sooner or later you're bound to forget something if you're new to the job. Unfortunately that happended to me today... the result... about 200 litres of milk going to waste!

Since the tanker came and collected our milk for the first time today I had to clean the milk vat afterwards. I remembered to close the vat door before milking in the afternoon and had all the pipes set up to allow milk to flow into the vat but there was one critical thing that I forgot to do - I didn't close the valve at the bottom of the vat where the tanker connects his hose and sucks milk out of the vat!

So basically we had the following milk flow:

cows > milking cups > milk line > filter > cooler > milk vat > GROUND

Not a good thing...

Well, maybe it is a good thing that this happened to me now - we only have about 30 cows supplying the vat and I noticed the problem before they were all done so it's better for us to lose 200 litres of milk now than to lose 3000 litres of milk in a few weeks time.

Please let me learn from my mistake!

cowshed problems | milking | spilt milk | mistakes