Pretty soon, the cows in the dairy barn at Lincoln Park Zoo will have to leave the city and get used to working at 5 a.m. again.
A popular field trip destination for nearly 40 years, the Farm-in-the-Zoo will close Oct. 8 and send its cows, goats, pigs, sheep and chickens to real working farms while the institution undergoes a $6 million makeover.
When the little city farm reopens next spring, only the main barn and dairy barn at the zoo’s south end will remain, and each of those will be gutted and enlarged.
Added to the farm will be new quarters for horses and chickens, a typical Midwestern farmhouse, small fields of corn, extensive outdoor pastures for cows and vegetable patches, making an already authentic operation even more so.
“As far as we know, we are the only zoo farm in the country with an actual, operational milking parlor where people can see animals being milked,” zoo director Kevin Bell said Wednesday in announcing the renovations.
Indeed, the four cows in the dairy barn–a Holstein, a Jersey, a Swiss Brown and a Shorthorn–are merely on loan from dairy farms in northern Illinois.
“On their home farm, the cows are used to being milked at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.,” said Lynne Pieper, director of Farm-in-the-Zoo. “Here, we have to alter that schedule so that they can be used in public demonstrations at 10:30 a.m., noon and 2 p.m.”
Opened in 1964, the farm is a landmark in its own right, its rustic red buildings sitting in the shadow of the swank urban high-rises lining Lincoln Park. A survey early this year showed more than half of the farm’s 1.5 million annual visitors don’t even bother visiting the animals in the rest of the zoo.
“For city people,” said Pieper, “farm animals are just as exotic as lions and tigers.”
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Farm-in-the-Zoo was built out of growing concern in the 1960s that children born and raised in the city had no understanding of where food comes from and how it is grown. If anything, that lack is even more striking today, said Bell.
“Now we don’t see farms in the suburbs, anymore, either,” said Bell, “and this is the only place for many children–and adults can come too–to experience a farm.”
Without changing the size of the farm, the renovation will reconfigure visitor entryways and pathways to provide more room for the animals.
The new farmhouse will be used for food demonstrations in the kitchen, lectures and storytelling in the living room and crafts demonstrations on the porch.
The farm, Bell said, will be designed so that people can choose whether to simply see and pet animals, to ask questions of volunteer docents or to seek out more substantial information from computers installed at exhibits.
To provide calves, goat kids, piglets and lambs for children to meet, the zoo has to bring in pregnant animals from real farms. Their babies are born at the zoo, and when they are old enough to be weaned, they go into petting pens, remaining there until they grow big enough to be returned to their home farms.
The lactating mother cows and goats remain on display at the zoo farm for milking demonstrations for several months before returning to the breeding cycle.
Federal and state livestock laws make such back-and-forth trades between farms and zoos extremely difficult. Because of the fear of the spread of contagious diseases, quarantine laws forbid a farm animal, once it lives at a zoo, to return to a farm.
“To make our operation work we had to build a totally separate zoo for the farm, with its own sewer system and its own staff of keepers, so that there was no chance of contact between the wild and domestic animals,” said Lester Fisher, the retired Lincoln Park director who first planned Farm-in-the-Zoo.
Pieper said visitors to the farm occasionally get the chance to witness the birth of animals.
“It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s memorable,” she said. “We had 125 3rd graders in the barn last March when one of our goats began to give birth. Some of our staff wanted to chase the children out, but I told the kids if they’d be extra quiet, they could stay.
“It was amazing. All those kids sat stone still and held their breaths, and we watched that little goat being born. It was just a great day. We are great advocates of people seeing that.”