Modern milk parlours don't look like in the old movies, that has changed entirely over the past 50 years, A milk parlour is on two levels, the cows are up and the crew is down, in a pit that allows easy access to the cows' udders. The place is clean, although we are talking cows here, still each teat is carefully cleaned. the milk is extracted, and the cow goes on its merry way.
The concrete part was finished almost three weeks ago now, and the specialized crew start building this morning. The building will take about 10 days to be finished, and installing and calibrating the milking equipment will take another two weeks, so the new milking parlour should be running by March 1, 2024. The total cost of the building is about 300,000 more or less. We sold the old equipment for about 20,000 and the building will be repurposed for goats. For some reason, our goats don't get along with the cows.
Tomorrow morning we have a heavy loading day, it happens from time to time, but this month the craziness will be reduced because the meat and vegetable sides are now segregated. Meat lorries are all in the new farm and all vegetables and fruits, also cheese and butter are loaded from the old farm.
In other news, the daycare issue will just not go away. We now have 175 staff members (most still part timers), and 70% are women. As Jennifer said, the countryside is not exactly awash with daycare facilities. We may have an exemption if the daycare staff are family members of our workers. Its not treated the same, inspection and certain first aid courses are necessary. The building itself is the same as for a "real" daycare centre. What seems to have happened is that among these 130 women, nearly a quarter rely on family members for childcare. That means there are more 50 grandmothers, sisters or cousins that take care of our staff's children. As Jennifer said, that's a workforce! Jennifer told us this last night, as we were moving the cattle to a new pasture. Jennifer said they formed a committee to figure this all out, it will be fully baked before they show it to us.
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