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A Day at the Dairy Farm: A Visit to Leary Farm in Saco, Maine

The farm sign on Flag Pond Rd.

Tim Leary starts milking the cows

Cows await milking at their stalls

Across the road to the pasture

Grazing on some fresh grass

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by Scott Baker
editor, aroundmaine.com

It's easy to take milk for granted. We can pick up a pint, quart, or gallon at virtually any corner store or gas station in the country. We're even told not to cry over it when it's spilled.

The reality is, there is a legion of dedicated dairy farmers nationwide working 365 days a year to make sure there's fresh milk in our refrigerators. It is a thankless and often exhausting job that doesn't rest for holidays or bad weather.

Saco's Leary Farm is the last surviving dairy farm in a town once populated by dozens of milk-suppliers. The acreage off Flag Pond Road is home to fifty milking cows, their calves, and three generations of Learys. It's been over sixty years since the family started selling milk, and the more things change, the more they remain the same.

In the beginning

In 1943, Jim Leary was a thirteen-year-old living in Scarborough when his uncle died and left behind a farm that needed attention and dedication. Jim and his father soon took over the family responsibilities and purchased the farm. After graduating from nearby Thornton Academy in 1947, Jim "hit the ground running," as he puts it, and ran the operation while his father continued to work full-time for the Maine Highway Department.

"It was a typical diversified operation, they had hens, they had cows, a little of this and a little of that," explains Tim Leary, Jim's son and current owner of the farm.

"At some point they needed to decide, do we go into the hen business or the cow business? The hen business was having problems, so they went into the cow business."

The Learys began with ten cows and shipped milk locally in small quantities. They also started to purchase parcels of nearby land for pasture, allowing them to grow the herd over time. In the next ten years, the barn was expanded with several additions to accommodate 50 cows -- roughly the number of milking cows on the Leary farm at any given time for the last fifty years.

"This is pretty much what they call a closed herd," Tim Leary says. "In other words, everything that we have was born here, we raise it, and either milk it or sell it."

Twice a day, every day

"They've been milked twice a day, every day since back in the 1940s, without exception and without fail," Leary says.

Tim Leary's day begins just after 5am when he heads to the barn to clean-out the stalls, sterilize and run the vacuum pumping system, and prepare the cows for milking and feeding. He's able to milk five cows at a time and compares the process to juggling.
"Of all the creatures you can work with, I don't know how you can get any better than a cow." - Tim Leary "I can keep five balls in the air, but I can't keep six."

Once a cow has been milked, Leary moves the equipment to the next cow. It takes roughly two hours to milk the herd. Once all the cows have been milked, they're moved out to pasture until the evening, when the process starts all over again.

With a smile on his face, Leary explains matter-of-factly, "It's not the hours either, it's relentless, that's the thing. It's every single day...it's one thing to get up early every day and sleep-in on the weekend, but on this operation, it's every day. And if you start late, you finish late and it just pushes the whole thing back."

Every other day--no matter what day it is--Oakhurst sends out a truck for pickup. The driver measures the quantity of milk, attaches a hose to the holding tank and pumps the milk into the delivery truck.

Cows are athletes too

As the dairy industry evolved throughout the last century, artificial insemination of cows has played a key role in creating better herds of milking cows. They are generally stronger, healthier and capable of producing more milk as a result of selective breeding.

Leary uses a catalog to choose an appropriate bull to compliment one of his cows. He picks up the phone, places an order, and someone comes to the farm to inseminate the cow when she's in heat.

"So instead of having one bull on a farm and just hoping he's a good bull, I have a catalog of 100 of the best bulls in the world. Over generations, you make incremental progress. If you look at what the production was when my father started milking cows, versus what our production is now, it's an order of magnitude greater," Leary explains.

Since the Leary family began dairy farming, they have more than doubled their average pounds of milk per cow, per day. The cows now average over 60 pounds of milk each day. "The best cow I ever had made a 170 pounds in a day -- which is no where near a record, but it was our personal best," Leary says.

Dairy cows are athletes in Tim Leary's eyes, and his job is to train them for greatness.

"You're really asking a lot of them all time. We try to get as much feed as we can into them so we can get out as much milk as we can...we're trying to keep them as healthy as we can. It's a game you play, all the time."

November 3rd, 2004