Al Kuehnert rises well before sunrise, retires well after sunset.

During the long hours between getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed at 10 or 11 p.m., he will drive a tractor, deftly operate a backhoe, be a nutritionist, maybe serve as a midwife, do some electrical and mechanical repair, and spend time at a computer keyboard.

He’s a farmer. A dairy farmer.

The dairy farm on West Cook Road has been in the Kuehnert family for 107 years.

Al Kuehnert, who has lived on or near the farm all his 49 years, says it started with his father Melvin’s great-grandfather. He adds, with fatherly pride, that his own sons, Nathan, 24, and Andrew, 20, are the fifth generation.

For keeping the farm in the family for a century the Kuehnerts received a Hoosier Homestead award presented by the state’s office of the commissioner of agriculture.

After more than a century, Al Kuehnert’s great-great-grandfather would be a stranger on the new world dairy farm. Gone are the milking stool and pail and the hands-on method of milking. The modern dairy farm is mechanized and high-tech, not to mention 21st-century scientific.

Or, as Al sums up, the dairy farmer’s day embraces “a lot of science and technology and physical and mental labor.”

He forgot to add “long.” The day is long.

When Al Kuehnert graduated from Carroll High School in 1975, the family dairy herd numbered 30 milk cows and 20 young stock. Today the number has escalated to 490 – baby calves to mature black-and-white Holsteins “and one baby Brown Swiss.”

Dairy herd management is Al’s job; his brother, Stan, 52, is the crop and equipment specialist. The brothers cross job description lines in helping each another every day.

Cows, with the exception of the “hospital group,” are milked three times a day: 4:30 a.m. and 1 and 9 p.m. Hospital cows are milked at 4:30 a.m. and 9 p.m.

A year ago, the Kuehnerts hired two Hispanic brothers to do “most of the milking. My brother and I,” Al says, “did it all for 30 years ... gave up vacations, holidays ... it’s a 365-day-a-year operation.”

At 4:10 a.m., Al Kuehnert is out of bed. He needs no alarm to rouse him. He dresses and in 10 steps is at the first stop on his day-long tour of duty: a small office building with four desks, computers and walls displaying numerous 4-H and State Fair awards banners. And one huge picture of Al’s favorite cow: K-Hurst Rudolph Pam. That’s her registered name. On the farm she’s just plain Pam. The reason for the photograph and pride in Pam, Al explains, is the award she won two years in a row at the prestigious World Dairy Expo in Madison, Wis.: first in her age group class.

During the brief stop in the office, the dairy farmer checks the weather on one computer and on another, then determines what has to be done with the cow herd. He also takes note of the milk futures.

The office is one of 10 structures that collectively are the heart of the dairy farm. The largest is a 35,000-square-foot pole barn that accommodates 266 cows. Al refers to it as “the cow palace.” Other facilities are the milking parlor, holding pen for cows waiting to be milked, hospital/maternity building, three barns for young stock of different age groups, the commodities shed for feed ingredients and equipment maintenance barn. There also are three Harvestor silos and a bunker silo that will hold 2,800 tons of silage. The milking parlor, built in 1965, is a modern high-tech facility where heifers can be milked 12 at a time. It replaced an older-style operation that allowed for milking two cows at a time.

The cow palace, built three years ago, “was a big decision for our families – a huge capital expenditure,” Al says, adding, “The barn has been a blessing. It’s worked well for us.”

On a nippy spring morning when Al Kuehnert leaves the office, slivers of shimmering silver dot the dark sky.

Dressed in rubber boots, dark work pants, flannel shirt and a light jacket, he strides purposely toward the hospital barn. Lights automatically go on at 4:30 a.m., so he is not totally in the dark.

Inside the barn he waves his arms and shouts for the 12 cows housed there to “Come on, ladies, move! Come on! Move, move! Hey! Hey! Hey! Come on girls. Come on, girls!” He punctuates the shouted orders with shrill whistles.

The Holsteins lumber awkwardly to their feet and form a line for the walk to the milking parlor. Two of the cows are on antibiotics – one for a sore foot, the other, Al says, has “a little mastitis.” The others recently calved and for four days their milk does not go into the bulk tank because “it’s high in antibodies and colostrum.”

In the milking parlor, the cows stand side by side – six on each side of an elevated platform about 4 feet above a lower level area where Al and one of the milking hands go about the milking routine in a wordless professional manner.

They make it look so easy.

Wearing latex gloves, the two men sanitize the cows’ teats with a foam tipper before milking begins. “We stress safety and cleanliness. Bare hands,” Al says, “never come in contact with the milk.”

After the sanitizing procedure the cows are “pre-stripped” – milked by hand for one-two-three squirts. This stimulates the animal and also allows a visual check for any abnormal milk. Abnormal milk, Al says, would have the presence of small flakes. If any cow gives abnormal milk, she is sent to the hospital group.

When pre-stripping is completed, the cows’ teats are wiped with terry cloth before the automated milking claw (a hose with four individual suction units) is attached to the teats. The 12 hospital cows’ milk goes into steel pails and is fed to calves. Milk from all other herd members goes directly into a stainless steel pipeline which feeds into a 3,000-gallon stainless-steel bulk tank and almost immediately is cooled to 36 degrees.

Milk never is exposed to air. “It’s totally enclosed from cow to tank,” Al says.

Currently, 240 cows are being milked three times a day on the Kuehnert farm. They produce 2,200 pounds, or 2,560 gallons, of milk each day. The bulk tank is washed once a day after the milk is picked up by Graft Milk Hauling. Graft transports the milk to Prairie Farms Dairy.

After the hospital cows have been milked and returned to their barn, the same milking procedure begins for the 240 Holsteins in the cow palace. It takes five to six minutes to milk a cow.

While the Hispanic brothers tend to most of the milking, working alone on alternating shifts, Al has other chores to do: coaxing cows from the “palace” to the milking parlor, driving a four-wheeler with a front end blade to “push up” leftover feed in front of the 226-cow palace headlocks, mixing fresh feed, assisting in calving.

Preparing fresh feed is a job done in the commodities shed where huge mounds of the various ingredients in the herds’ daily diet is stored.

Driving a Bobcat, Al scoops up the TMR (total mixed ration) ingredients one by one and unloads them into the TMR mixer wagon. Two augers in the wagon, hitched to a tractor, do the blending and a digital scale on the mixer posts a readout on the weight of each added ingredient that, when blended, will be feed for the Holsteins.

Cows are fed the blend twice a day, and in one day one cow will eat 16 pounds of corn, 6 pounds of soybean meal, 6 pounds of special formulated mix, 20 pounds alfalfa haylage, 5 pounds alfalfa hay, 11 pounds water, 5 1/2 pounds whole fuzzy cotton seed and 40 pounds corn silage.

“We encourage them to eat,” Al says, adding with a grin, “The more they eat the more milk they give.” During the summer he will make about 10 different batches of feed twice a day for the diets of various herd groups. During cool weather, he mixes the 10 batches once a day.

A little before 6 a.m., a batch of feed for the cow palace heifers is done. Al drives the tractor with mixer wagon in tow to the palace and the feed is conveyed from the mixer into neat ridges in front of headlocks on both sides of the barn.

And the munching begins.

About 8 a.m., Al’s wife, Cindy, goes to the barn housing the youngest members of the herd. She is accompanied by the family’s three Labrador retrievers. Inside the barn, loud, persistent drawn out “Mooooooos” greet her. She bottle feeds calves not yet weaned and pours milk from large buckets into smaller buckets from which older calves drink. She also dispenses grain into buckets.

The calves, Cindy says while holding a bottle for a hungry calf, “are weaned at two months. They start eating grain within a week of birth and gradually work up to at least 2 pounds of mixed grain a day.”

While feeding the young Holsteins, Cindy does not forget the almost two dozen barn cats of varying ages who seem to sense they too are about to receive a morning treat. She splashes fresh milk into a huge bowl and the cats maneuver for a lapping spot.

The calves’ pen, with its sand floor and straw for winter bedding, sawdust for summer, is completely cleaned four times a year.

With the couple dozen calves and cats fed, Cindy returns to the house to prepare breakfast. It’s shortly after 9 a.m.

Much of the remainder of the morning and afternoon is a repeat of work done in the hours before daylight: get cows to the milking parlor, mix feed, feed the herd.

Al also will scan the pages of the more than a dozen dairy publications he receives each month. “They’re filled with new technologies – ways to do things. This year,” he says, “we’re going to experiment with a new way of drying our hay in the field – as a result of reading one of the magazines.”

As dairy herd manager, Al is responsible for monitoring the health of the herd – including cows that are calving. (Ideally, cows are ready to calve at age 2.) Every two weeks he accompanies veterinarian Wayne Byerley as the vet does a total herd health checkup. The medical – and milk – record of each cow is entered into a computer under the cow’s registered name.

In the late 1960s, the Kuehnert Dairy Farm became involved in artificial insemination using four or five major bull studs “from all over the country. I know the sires, the dames – pedigrees on all (the herd),” Al says.

Unfortunately, for the dairy farmer, science can’t predict the sex of calves produced through artificial insemination. Al estimates that 60 percent of the newborns are baby bulls that the Kuehnert Dairy sells to neighbors for feeder calves or for 4-H projects.

Most of a dairy farmer’s time is focused on the herd.

“Absolutely,” Al says. “It’s 24-7, 365 days. A family makes a great sacrifice for the operation (of the farm). It takes a special woman to be a dairy farmer’s wife.” He estimates he and his brother each average 80 to 100 hours a week working the Kuehnert farm. He’s advised his sons to work away from the farm at least two years to see whether they choose to dedicate their lives to dairy farming. Nathan has a degree in agriculture economics from Purdue University, West Lafayette, and Andrew will be a junior at Purdue pursuing the same degree.

Much has changed in the 100 years the Kuehnert family has been in the dairy business on West Cook Road. But one thing remains the same: it takes hard work – much hard work – to put a glass of milk on the dining table.