Unless you have more than 15 cows, it is not worth the cost of buying expensive milking machines. Milking cows by hand seems difficult at first, only because you haven’t mastered the technique. Once you know what to do, and how to do it, then milking cows is something that you could probably do in your sleep. But until you get to that stage there are a couple of things you need to get right first. Cows will have milk in their udders when they are calving, and so it is a natural process anyway when her teats are stimulated for the milk to start to flow from the udder to the teats.
Place a milking stool on the right side of the cow and place the bucket firmly between your knees so that the bucket is stable and cannot be accidentally knocked over by any movement of the cow. You should try and get under the cow as much as possible so that the distance between the teat and the bucket is minimized. The technique of milking cows by hand all comes down to how you hold the teat. The teat should always be grasped by the whole hand with your thumb and forefinger around the top of the teat. By doing this you are preventing the milk from going back into the udder. Then, enclose the rest of the teat with your other fingers, one by one.
This then presses the milk out. In order to gets good flow of milk going you then release the grip of your thumb and forefinger on the teat to allow the milk to flow down the teat again from the udder, and repeat the process of enclosing and squeezing the teat with the rest of your fingers as seen in the diagram. When you start milking your cows start with the front teats first, and try milking them with the above technique with both hands on the two front teats. When they are nearly empty, then start on the back two teats. When they are nearly empty, you can then come back to the front teats and finish off your milking by seeing if you can a little bit of whatever is left in these front teats. Once you have the technique mastered your milking will go much better once you have a rhythm going and using both hands.
