Coo poo

Just to show I'm an equal-opportunities provider, this is a blog about cows, not art or flowers.

For you city-dwellers, this is a cow.

 There's a small dairy farm a few hundred metres along the road and just around the corner from it an orchard that has hens free-ranging under the trees. Benjy loves both places and sometimes goes twice a day. The farmers have got to know him well and they are really good about taking him to see what's going on out the back. The cows are fed and milked in the barn.

For a two year old, poo is extremely interesting (as well as being a great word to shriek at any sign of the offending matter). You will be fascinated to learn about what happens at the back end of the cows. The poo falls into a shallow trough that's a sort of bovine excreta travellator. It releases arms that collect the poo and straw and pull it along, then it reverses and does it all again, several times.

It goes from the end of the travellator into an underground cow sewage system where it's pumped a short distance until, voila, it urgently thrusts up through a pipe until it exits into the (not so) fresh air. Up up up it goes, released from the confines of the pipe until it topples, pflopp into a poo pile that presumably is used as manure. It is very exciting waiting for the topple to happen and much yahooing when it does.

The cows produce 30 litres of milk a day each in the summer. It's sold raw from the farm

There's a huge 1200kg bull who bellows impressively but always seems fairly docile as he's always in with the ladies.

At the moment there's a calf too. Come here...!

What more could a boy want. Flynn occasionally gets a trip down to the farm, but Benjy is the animal freak.

After that, it's round the corner to see the hens (chichens chichens)