🪣 Milking pail

A milking pail is a bucket used for milking by hand. Until the end of the 19th century, hand milking was the only way to get milk. Cows were usually milked twice a day, tied up in a stall. One person could milk no more than a dozen cows a day.

You milk sitting beside the cow, holding the pail between your knees or on the ground. The first squirts are milked out separately and checked: this shows whether the udder is healthy. Then two opposite quarters of the udder are milked, and then the other two. From the pail, the milk is strained straight away through a sieve or filter into a 30–50 litre churn and cooled to 4 °C as fast as possible.

The first milking machines of the early 20th century also worked with a bucket: the machine was set on an ordinary pail, and after each cow the milk was poured into a shared tank. Later, milk pipelines made buckets unnecessary on large farms. But on small farms, especially where there is little machinery, the milking pail and hand milking are still common.