Jack at home in the dairy
17/5/2018
At 24 Stockdale postal assistant manager, Jack Day comes across as a hard worker, a little rough around the edges. But underneath the long hair and the scrappy beard lies a man with a lot of love for people and the animals he works with. Watching Jack in a Bustleton paddock working with the dairy cows, or "his girls", you really get to understand the care he puts into his job and his motto is "you only work as fast as the animals you are working with."
At 24 Stockdale postal assistant manager, Jack Day comes across as a hard worker, a little rough around the edges. But underneath the long hair and the scrappy beard lies a man with a lot of love for people and the animals he works with. Watching Jack in a Bustleton paddock working with the dairy cows, or "his girls", you really get to understand the care he puts into his job and his motto is "you only work as fast as the animals you are working with."It was in Victoria on his grandparent's farm that he first found experience on a dairy farm. Jack moved around a lot as a kid but came back to help his grandparents whenever he had the chance. After 10 years in Darwin, Jack left to board at Aquinas College Perth in his teens finishing the last three years of his education before graduating in 2010.
It was while boarding with all the farmers that Jack found himself travelling around the state from farm to farm on the long weekends. He got to experience a lot of different farming from crops to cattle but always took time during the summer holidays to return to the dairy farm in Victoria.
His plans to move to Scotland to do a harvest season changed when one of his friends, a vet student, invited him to help out at the Westland Acres dairy farm in Northcliffe.
“The farm wanted someone to give them a hand, so I was planning on going down for just six or seven weeks and I ended up staying three and a half years,” he said.
“I fell in with the family and it all went well down there, I loved it and I am still part of the family.”
Although the work was fulfilling, Northcliffe offers very little to a 24-year-old so Jack left the isolation last year and moved to Bunbury where he found work on another dairy farm. He has been employed full-time at Stockdale Pastoral since February after working part-time from his arrival in November. Jack milks every morning as part of his responsibilities at Stockdale. He's diary routine starts at around 3 a.m. and he will work up until lunchtime, before taking care of the computer work and winding down for the day.
“My grandparents milk 150 cows, which is very small on their 140 hectares and at this farm we are milking 663 cows, so this is a big job,” he said.
Computers are an integral part of any modern dairy farm and Jack has taken to the data analysis side of the job. The computer systems are quite complex and monitor each cow's production individually. Milking times are analyzed and feed is measured out to each cow based on its production. However, the computers cannot automatially analyse all aspects of the dairy and part of Jack's responsibilities is to walk the paddock taking stock of the nearly 700 cows and entering into the computer his observations. Having an understanding of the cow's behaviours allow him to identify which members of the herd will need attention or medication next time they come in for milking.
Jack attributes his understanding and drive for the industry to his grandfather, his return trips to the family farm in Victoria kept that alive.
He loves dairy cows because they are like having pets and were so friendly.
Jack said the work was still labour-intensive – milking cows for three and a half hours, running up and down the pit, cupping cows and keeping an eye out for anything that may be going wrong with the cows and the machines.
Read the full article as it originally appeared here
