Students meet Jackie the Cow

The kids at Golden View Elementary School are used to working with geese, sheep and goats.

But this was another animal entirely.

Although the school’s students help operate its small on-site farm and garden, they were treated to something new Tuesday, when Jackie the Cow made an appearance courtesy of the Dairy Council of California’s Mobile Dairy Classroom.

As a cow’s udder is by far its most exciting element (at least to an elementary school student), instructor Steve Miller spent the majority of his discussion teaching how to milk a cow, including a kid-scaled cost/benefit analysis of milking by hand vs. by machine.

“It takes one person 30 to 40 minutes to milk one cow,” he said, while Jackie comfortably ate hay in the back of her custom trailer. In contrast, a farm can milk 4,800 cows in less than four hours using machinery.

He also taught kids that every container of milk sold in grocery stores has gone through three processes: pasteurization, homogenization and fortification with vitamins.

One observant student asked about rBST, or recombinant bovine somatotropin, an artificial protein hormone administered to cows to increase their milk production.

The hormone is controversial due to its potential (yet unproven) effects on health, Miller said; although its use is not illegal in California, most dairies and stores have stopped using it or selling products that contain it.

Miller also described how milk ends up in homes, after its journey from the farm.

When the students’ attention started to lag, Miller brought them right back to the topic at hand with a stream of milk from an obliging Jackie the Cow’s udder.

Miller advised kids, should they ever milk a cow, to “treat her like a lady,” saying that if they didn’t, “it’s gonna kick the living snot out of you.”

Titters ensued.

But when Miller opened up the back of his mobile milking parlor to reveal a 19-day-old Holstein calf named Rusty, the kids were in a virtual flurry.

Already 120 pounds at less than 3 weeks old, Rusty was led to the side of the trailer, where each child got the opportunity to pet him.

Noon duty supervisor Sharmaine Gendreau said the session reminded her of the taste of warm milk straight from the cow, which she used to have when she was a child.

She now buys organic milk, but said nothing compares to the taste of fresh milk.

The Mobile Dairy Classroom program began in the 1930s, when dairyman Clarence Michel joined with the Dairy Council to present a live cow to a different Southland school to teach kids.

The program now has several full-time instructors who drive their trailers throughout the state, providing the program at no cost to schools.

A former feed salesman, Miller joined the small group of mobile instructors six years ago.

Miller, who lives in South Orange County, picks up dairy-donated Jackie and Rusty each morning in Mission Viejo to travel throughout Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties.

“They have a good life,” he said. When Rusty grows up, Miller expects he will become a “baby maker” rather than a steak dinner.

“I’m jealous,” he laughed.

For more information, visit dairycouncilofca.org.

CANDICE BAKER can be reached at (714) 966-4631 or at candice.baker@latimes.com.