POWELL (AP) - If you want an 8-5 job, don't look for work on a dairy farm.

Work on the Willwood Dairy farm, owned and operated by the Roger Easum family, starts with the morning milking at 3:30 a.m. Sunday through Saturday and doesn't end until the afternoon milking is done sometime after 4 or 5 p.m.

"I have no concept of what people who work for eight hours a day do with the other 16 hours," Roger Easum said.

But then, he added, there are no snowmobiles or boats around here. There's no time to use them.

Between and after milkings, cows and calves are fed, manure is cleaned out of corrals, cows are bedded down with straw, milking equipment is cleaned and sterilized, and the general needs and management of the herd are seen to.

During the summer, work days get even longer, with cultivating, planting, irrigating, crop maintenance, harvesting and fixing equipment added to the list of chores. That extends the work day to 8:30 or 9 p.m.

But Roger said there's nothing he or his sons, Jeff and Cody, would rather do.

"You either like it or you don't. If the boys didn't like it, they could do something else. They're pretty well versed in just about anything," he said.

Cody said the Willwood Dairy herd averages about 120 head of Holstein milk cows. That's the ideal size for the family operation, he added.

Besides the 130 milk cows, the Easums have about 250 heifers ranging in life stages from birth to approaching their first calving.

Each milk cow produces an average of 75 to 80 pounds of milk per day. At 8.6 pounds per gallon, that means each cow gives an average of just less than 10 gallons per day, Cody said.

Cody said it takes a new cow about a week to get used to being milked.

"We let them walk through (the milking barn) a time or two before they calve," he said. "Then it takes them a time or two (of being milked) before they decide they like it and know what's going on."

While milking is routine business, some cows stand out. They line up in similar order for each milking, with some vying for first place, while others lag.

"There's the favorites, then there's the ones you dread to milk cause they're kind of kicky," he said.

Each cow requires a large amount of food daily to be able to give her 10 gallons of milk. Her daily diet is calculated to provide the best nutrition for her health and milk production:

-4 pounds of cotton seed;

-18 pounds of ground, shelled corn;

-8 pounds of soybeans;

-6 pounds of sugar beet pulp in dried pellets;

-22 pounds of ground alfalfa; and

-22 pounds of corn silage.

All totaled, each milk cow eats about 80 pounds of food daily. That means a herd of 120 milk cows consumes nearly 5 tons of food each day, most of which is produced on the farm.

"That's a lot of food," Roger said.

It also produces a lot of manure, which must be hauled out of the corrals, he added.