The fanciest milking parlor of all has a machine in it called a Rotolactor. It is really a quiet, slow merry-go-round. Cows amble up a ramp and step into stalls on the gently moving platform. A man attaches milking machines to them, one after the other. By the time each cow has been carried halfway around the big circle, her milk has been pumped out into a glass tank that sits on a rack above her. A man takes off the rubber cups, a
gate opens in front of the cow, and she steps off onto another ramp that goes from the center of the merry-go-round, underneath it and out to the barnyard. Twenty-five cows at a time can be milked on the Rotolactor.
Automatic gadgets empty the milk from the glass tanks, wash them, sterilize them and get them ready for the next round. All the time men are busy keeping the stalls clean and tending to the machinery. Most dairies milk the cows twice a day, but the Rotolactor milks three times.
MACHINES FOR EVERY JOB
The Rotolactor was invented for one particular kind of huge dairy. But farmers everywhere like to have good machinery to do special jobs.
For hilly country, there’s a plow that has one of its blades higher than the other so it can work on a slope. There are chisel plows that dig up hard soil by clawing at it with strong steel fingers.
One farmer in Texas decided to make his tractor do the plowing all by itself, after he had driven it once around the field to give it a start. He invented a guide