Dairy Industry @museum.de

M: The Ammerland region didn't just specialise in poultry farming and ham production. In the old days, dairy cattle also had a place in everyday rural life.

F: Until the 1950s, the milk carters who drove from farm to farm to collect the milk churns, were a regular sight in Ammerland villages. The son of a former carter remembers:

Zitat:

“Early in the morning, the first milk churns were loaded up in Hollwegerfeld [...]. My father used to walk alongside, because he was constantly having to lift the churns on to the wagon, so it wasn't worth getting on in the meantime. As a rule, the team wouldn't stop for the churns to be loaded. Nor did it stop if they weren't by the roadside when the wagon passed by. All this sometimes happened as early as six a.m.. So the farmer had to have finished milking all the cows and deposited the churns by the roadside by that time. The vehicle picked up as many as 200 milk churns a day. [...] All the churns [...] had to be slung onto the wagon with such force that they immediately landed in the right place and didn't tip over. For a carter who'd been doing the job for years, what was essentially hard labour eventually became routine. [...]

For the return trip [from the dairy] the churns [...] were filled with skimmed milk or buttermilk and then dropped off at the respective farms."

F: In the early days, the milk man carried out this hard work with a horse-drawn cart, then with a tractor. In the late 1970s, he and his son had to make way for modern milk tankers.