My grand parents had a small dairy operation. They did their milking by hand, and we drank that milk. Their cows were tested regularly.
There was never any junk or poop in the milk to be strained either. What they didn’t use for themselves was sold to the local dairy operation.
The milk tasted like onions in the spring. It tasted great the rest of the time. We used to make homemade butter out of the cream, and it tasted great too.
With just two cows, we also milked by hand after washing the udders with a hose of course. Nevertheless, the cows had tails which they swished around, they shook themselves, et c. during milking, which got dirt into the open pail. One cow named Vicky, which was polled (thank God), swung around one time when I was milking her and butted me up against the side of the stall so hard I couldn’t catch my breath for a minute. Yes, dirt got into the milk. We screened out the dirt through a lawn filter. I don’t know how your grand parents avoided it. Machine milkers must be cleaner.
My grandfather was a microbiologist who ran a government animal experiment station in the Chevy Chase area of D. C. during the early past of the last century. His work with Emil Berliner (the inventor of the flat phonograph disc), and others, promoted the pasteurization of milk. His experiments with bovine tuberculosis probably led to his death in his fifties.
By the way, a study in Ireland has raised some questions about the effectiveness of testing cattle for
Mycobacterium bovis (
http://www.bovinetb.info/testing.php).