Milk Churns.

Hi,

Does anyone here in the US still use milk churns they have to haul behind their tractor from their farm to a dairy or to the road to be picked up ?


Bill

do you mean milk cans?

Sounds like milk cans, and I believe those were discontinued many years ago. Milk companies stopped picking them up, I believe, in the 1950's, as they were unsanitary to say the least. The old hand-milking done in the barn yard, into pails, then cooling the milk off in the stock tank beside the windmill, then hauling the cans to the highway after they were cooled, stopped mid-1950's.

Back in '70 we were the last folks to use cans at the local dairy.
Fast forward 35 years and they were using them again at Amish places. Kinda weird to see a can truck on the road.
I do believe they are trying to phase out the cans again though...

We were still shipping milk in cans in the 70's. At that time it was based on if someone was willing to haul cans. I am not sure if cans are still used by the Amish here in Wisconsin, but if they are it would be grade B milk and I recently read that Wisconsin had about 400 farmers producing grade B milk and they were required to start producing Grade A milk or get out of producing milk.

There's an Amish cheese plant just north of me,near Lakeview Michigan that still takes cans. I hauled cans in to Carnation in Sheridan Michigan until July of 1975 when the plant closed.

We used to ship cans till about 1975. Changed when we put the parlor in and went to bulk. We had a can cooler for 14 cans with water and an ice bank. When we had to have more than that we did the bulk tank and never looked back. Dad still has all the old cans in the attic with newspaper in them to keep them dry.

My dad still took his cans to the corner in the mid 1960's.....

I had milk cans until 1979 and hauled my own milk and neighbors milk to dairy 10 miles away, then went bulk.

Pete

I went through a small valley near the Utah-Wyoming border about 15 years ago which still had Grade B dairies. I think one of the towns was Afton, IIRC. There was an unusual concentration of older Allis Chalmers tractors, and sure enough, the next town I went through had a boarded-up AC dealership, and no other tractor dealer in the area.

(quoted from post at 23:14:25 08/27/17) do you mean milk cans?

Click to expand...

I am sorry about the milk churns. You see, I am from Norway, and I am a member of an English Ferguson tractor club and we talked about it there. And a fellow who knows I now live in California asked if the milk churns were still used here. So, I thought I better ask.

In England they call them milk churns, and I did not think more of it. In Norway they are called "melkespann", and you call them milk cans. Language can sometimes be a little tricky.

So, fair is fair, since you guys here have told me about how it is in the US, in England as we talked about they seems to be long gone. In addition the people there say they were not owned by the farmers, but the dairy owned them.

And, for me who is from Norway, I remember we had two cows in the mid 1960ties, and year or two later only one before my parents quit with the cows and we only had sheeps after that. I remember we had the milk cans then, but we had only small ones. Probably only 10 liter cans (2.5 gallons or so), or maybe they could be 20 liter.
And, when I was in the truck with my dad we always saw these small "huts" along the road, a platform raised up to the same height as the truck bed, and with 3 walls on and a roof. All the farms had them, and brought the milk there with the tractor. Then the truck from the dairy came and picked it up. But, at some point during the 1970ties this changed and the milk trucks had now become a tank truck.

The reason for my question in the English club forum was that Ferguson had a link transport box that was more or less made for 6 milk cans to fit on the lower link arms on the Grey Ferguson tractor and people used that box to haul the milk cans to this platform. I assume you guys also had those platforms. I have seen it in farm movies in England too, so it must have been a common thing.

Thank you everyone who responded to my question.

Bill