It doesn't take children long to realize that the milk in cardboard cartons and plastic jugs comes from cows. It's a little more difficult, though, to fathom how that happens.
"Cows are ruminoids that have a 4-chambered stomach," said Peter Noll, the program coordinator at the 1880s Volkening Heritage Farm. "They will chew the hay and start digesting it and then regurgitate it and chew and swallow it again to break down the plant matter that human digestive systems can't."
Gross? Maybe. But kids can find that cool.
A first-hand look reveals the milk-making process at the farm's "Mooing & Mowing" event. It starts from the beginning; a team of horses will pull an old-fashioned mower out to the fields to cut the hay which will be raked and brought back to the barn to feed the cows. And cows have that perfect design for turning it into milk.
"Kids are often more enamoured with the cow itself than with its digestive system," said Noll. That's especially true when they get a try their hand at milking a cow, whether it be at the Volkening Heritage Farm or at the "Dairy Days" event at Kline Creek Farm. It takes some practice and some prowess.
"Most people pull on the teat, but that doesn't do any good," said Bob Barrett, an agricultural assistant at Kline Creek Farm. "You have to grab the teat and draw the milk down as though you're squeezing something out of a tube and hold it so the milk doesn't go back up."
Milk might be good to drink, but there are better things in store. At both events the kids can churn the cream from the milk into butter. "If you get a group of kids, they take turns churning like mad, so it's not too tiresome," said Barrett. The reward for work well done is to taste the butter on crackers or buttermilk biscuits.
At the Volkening Farm kids can also turn the cream into ice cream, which was a special treat for kids long ago. "Ice cream was not something you had every day because you needed ice to make it and ice was hard to come by," said Noll.
Free time for kids to have fun back then was scarce too. "Children were the economic means of the family and had to do the chores around the farm," Barrett said.
Luckily, today's children often have time for other things--such as looking for cows around town. Here are a few places:
KLINE CREEK FARM: "Dairy Days," 12:30 p.m.-4 p.m. Sat.-Sun. and June 14-15. County Farm Rd., 1/2 mile south of North Ave., Winfield; free; 630-876-5900.
VOLKENING HERITAGE FARM: "Mooing & Mowing," noon-4 p.m. June 19. Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary, 201 S. Plum Grove Rd., Schaumburg; free; 847-985-2100.
LINCOLN PARK ZOO: Farm-in-the-Zoo, milking demonstrations 10 a.m., noon and 2 p.m. daily; feeding the cows and butter churning 1:30 p.m. daily; 2200 N. Cannon Drive; free; 312-742-2000.