we buy a pipe line

 As much as we love our cows, we were not going to be milking 20+ cows by hand!

We needed a pipe line. Those things are expensive, but then again so is starting a dairy farm. But how we got this gem is great.
My husband grew up in this town. He knows all the dairy farmers, and most everyone who lives in town. But I guess when your family has lived in town for 8 generations, you get to be known. Anyways...
We ran into a fellow local dairy farmer, and he was asking how things were going. He knew we had just bought a farm, and were working to get it up and running. They talked for... a while. You know how it is. LOL. In the conversation Matthew said we were looking for a pipe line. Well the farmer looked at him and said his dad had one in his old dairy barn that was fully intact, and wanted to get rid of it! Whoa! OK! The dairy cows had been sold off a long time ago, and the owners just kept young stalk at the barn now.
Matthew contacted the owners and asked about the pipe line. He said come look at it, and see what you think. Now this is really cool. It's a glass pipe line! Really cool to watch the milk slug through during milking!  We needed to measure the pipe line and our barn to see if it would fit. There is more to this pipe line stuff then I knew. Never had used one before. Well as it goes, the pipe line would fit in our barn perfectly! The dairy barns are about the same size. So we paid for it, and a week or so later my husband and his brother went and took it out of the barn and brought it home! On a trailer no less. Wrapped in blankets and strapped down and ever so carefully it made it's way across town. Yup. This pipe line was just a few miles up the road from our farm! Pretty cool eh?
Well I think so.

 This is the set up in the old dairy barn, not ours.

 Again, the old dairy barn and pipe line. But this barn looks a lot like ours!
We had one huge part of the puzzle to begin.
We still had a ways to go, but we were happy where we were at. Things were looking good!