Just ask Carol Yemola.

After reading an email from Turkey Hill’s Ice Cream Journal about the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association’s chance to win a “V.I.P Dairy Farm Experience” for a day, Yemola, 54, of Drums, entered her essay in the contest and was one of six winners.

“I thought it would be a fun experience go to a modern day dairy farm and see how milk is produced,” Yemola said. She and her husband, Ed, 58, were given a tour around the Mason Dixon Farm to allow them to be “treated like a cow” – a nod to the modern comforts cows enjoy on the farms of today. Yemola and her husband learned how the animals are cared for and how the milk they produce makes it to market.

Yemola said she had never been to a dairy farm before and after her visit there she had learned a lot.

The Mason Dixon Farm is one of the largest farms in Pennsylvania and cows are milked entirely by machines. The cows are able to eat and drink when they please and they choose when they want to be milked. The cows would walk down a one way maze and then go in to the milking area where the machine would automatically sense where the cow’s udders are, clean them, attach to the udders and milk them. The machine would then sense when the cow was empty of milk, clean the cow off, and let the cow leave.

Richard Waybright, the owner of the farm, designed the building himself and the entire farm has been in his family since the 1760’s.

Waybright also designed a machine to clean up the manure. Not only did this keep the area clean, it would also transport the manure to a digester where it would produce electricity to operate the farm using the methane gas from the manure.

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