MILKING HAS COME A LONG WAY

Albert Schabbing, a retired dairyman, remembers milking by hand, placing milk in 10-gallon cans in a refrigerated area and waiting for dairy trucks to pick them up.

"I started milking when I was seven years old," said Schabbing, who retired after 46 years in the business.

"Before we had electricity, we had to milk by hand," said Schabbing, of rural Cape Girardeau County.

Schabbing, who milked as many as 100 cows at one time, had as few as 20 to 25 cows during the hand-milking era.

"Everybody in the family was involved in the dairy," he said. "We had five children -- a boy and four girls -- and all were involved.

Dairying, said Schabbing, is a seven-day-a-week job.

"You're in the barn at 4 a.m. and worked into the late hours at night."

Cape Girardeau County was dotted with dairy farms then, said Schabbing. "And we had several processing dairies in the area -- Midwest, Sunny Hill, Siemers, Collins, Schonhoff..."

When Schabbing went modern -- to milking machines -- he increased his herd to about 100 cows and used refrigerated bulk tanks to store milk. Tanker dairy trucks then picked up the milk.

At one time in Missouri dairy history, as many as 1.1 million milk cows were in the state. A record number of milk cows, 1,145,000, were reported in 1946. That compares to the record low of last year, at 185,000.

A record of 4.6 billion pounds of milk was produced in 1954.