Country Calendar - Jersey Cow

There’s much to ruminate upon in this 1977 Country Calendar report. It follows a day in the life of a Jersey cow, in a stud herd on a Wairarapa dairy farm. The 15-minute item opens with the rearing of five-day-old calves, when life is shaped by instinct rather than the social order that will soon prevail on and off the paddock. The focus soon switches to a champion cow whose breeding success isn’t matched by her position in the herd hierarchy. The tracking of her daily routine covers everything from chewing her cud for eight hours (about 25,000 times) and her relationships with other bovines, to mucky cowshed politics.

Being a dairy farmer, there’s little time for just standing around. But being a dairy cow, there’s a lot of time to just stand and chew.

– The narrator, early in this report