Anybody need a couple hundred liters of milk?

No one came to buy milk on this bright sunny morning---the buyers are still working out who is buying our milk when, it seems. The lady who was going to come after lunch did show up and took away all the milk on hand. That’s her yellow van in the picture- if you look closely you can see the milk cans inside. She spoke English and Garry found out that she goes to the market and sells in the morning and then she makes cottage cheese to sell from whatever is left, plus the milk they pick up on the way back. Victor is learning what the buyers want done for milk selling.
The ladies were busy milking when she came, they strain the milk through cloth into the cans, and the cans are placed in water to cool them the old-fashioned way. Garry is anxious to get a refrigerated milk tank, as you can imagine, so he feels like a real dairy farmer. We were supposed to be getting one to use from DANONE, who were interested in buying our milk, but they can only set this up if we are a registered business, and Victor does not have that done yet.
Victor is in charge of getting and collecting the piles of official stamped paperwork involved in the project. He has been standing in lines ever since we arrived, it seems -starting with the electrical upgrade last year, raising the gas line for trucks to go in the “new” second driveway, to getting the tractors registered (interestingly- our 2nd tractor was not a tractor because it has a loader attached to it- took a while to get the right documents) and getting the paperwork for the cows transferred – yesterday he got a pile of official government plastic ID tags for the cows who have lost their tags- very similar to the bar code tags recently phased out in Canada, you can see the yellow tag in the ear of a cow who has not lost it in one of the photos. We were told that cows here are tested yearly for a range of diseases and cows that test positive are banned from community pasturing. Of course our cows will be leading a different life, barn and barnyard now, with all that good food brought right to them.