The Cow on the Weigh Scale
A Jersey wandered onto the truck scale at my dairy and was weighed, logged and certified before anyone noticed she was not a milk tanker.
At the edge of my plant I keep a truck scale for weighing the milk tankers. It is a flat steel platform about the size of a tennis court, and it has a little office with a window where a clerk named Delia watches the numbers. Delia is a careful person. She has never made an error in sixteen years.
One morning a cow named Marigold walked through a gap in the fence and onto the scale while Delia was on the phone. Marigold stood in the exact center and began to chew. The display flashed 1,184 pounds, and the system, which does not understand context, issued a ticket. Delia looked up, saw the number and said, "That's the lightest tanker I ever weighed."
She stepped outside and found Marigold, calm as a bank teller, standing on the platform and looking in the window. Delia said she had never in her life been so embarrassed. She went to pick up the ticket, and then she did something I will not forget. She stamped it, dated it and handed it to me, with the words, "Official weight of one cow."
I framed it. It hangs in the break room between a calendar and a map of the county. People ask about it, and the story always runs long. A visiting inspector once read it very carefully and asked whether Marigold had been certified. I said she had, and he wrote that down on his clipboard, I think to be polite.
Marigold still wanders by about once a month. She walks up, stands in the middle, and waits for her ticket. Delia has a small stack of them now in a drawer, and we compare them over coffee. Her weight is up two pounds from last year, which she says is a good sign for a cow of her age. I told the story on farm.FM and also in a dairy herd guide newsletter, and I hear Marigold has fans in Nebraska.
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