🧑‍🌾 Farm jobs

Farm jobs are the jobs on a dairy farm: caring for the herd, feeding and milking. Farm jobs revolve around caring for dairy animals and producing milk. A livestock specialist is responsible for feeding, housing and breeding the herd, a veterinarian for animal health and disease prevention, and a milking operator for milking and keeping udders and equipment clean. On small farms the same people do almost all the work, including making feed.

The quality of raw milk depends on how the farm is run. Udder health, clean milking and rapid cooling of milk after milking determine how many bacteria and somatic cells it will contain. Animal health matters for people too: pasteurization, as defined by the FAO and WHO, is designed to destroy the pathogens of tuberculosis and Q fever, which can pass from animals through milk.

The world still has many herders and nomadic pastoralists who milk goats, sheep, camels, yaks and mares by hand. Large farms, by contrast, use milking parlors, milking robots and sensors that track each cow’s health and yield, so specialists in machinery and data are increasingly in demand.