Annette Drexl strokes Hilde’s blaze, “yes, I love you too!”. Then she explains to the round Apolonia that the vet would certainly put her on the treadmill to lose weight, so she better hold back when eating. And she calls the small, black-and-white Stella “a beauty” in passing. Welcome to the Muh Museum in Inning am Ammersee, probably the smallest dairy cow barn in the Starnberg district. “Moo Museum”, the name was created by a butcher from Pöcking a few years ago when he picked up a cow from the freshly whitewashed walls from 1929. Annette and Andreas Drexl thought: “Yes, that actually fits!”
Eight dairy cows and seven young cattle are kept in the barn on the farm in Schlagenhofen, the oldest in the village. These include Pinzgauer and caramel-colored Murnau-Werdenfelser, both breeds classified by the Bavarian Ministry of Agriculture as endangered. A Vorderwalder beef is also milked here and two original Simmentaler from Switzerland. “Nice animals,” says Drexl. The 53-year-old is not concerned with milk production and yield. Your cows are family members. “They have such strong characters,” she says, “like people.” Her favorite cow is Hannah, a robust Murnau-Werdenfelser cross, currently pregnant in the second month. “She’s so wonderfully stubborn! If she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t like it.”
Next to it is the heavily pregnant Josefa, not even half as wide. Drexl shrugs: It is what it is. Oh yes: of course her cows have horns. And most of the year the animals are out in the fields, i.e. in the orchard or in a fenced-off area at the neighbour’s. The smallest calves are allowed to stay in the garden. Like the three-month-old Toni. The new bull in the stable still looks pretty cute like a milk boy, especially when he flattens his ears. “I’m in love right away, ge?”
Of course, the Drexls’ cows have horns…
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
…with the young bull Toni things are a bit different.
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
Traditional farming is the couple’s hobby. Andreas Drexl’s grandmother was able to make a living from animal husbandry, says Annette Drexl. In the meantime, livestock farming is already in the second generation as a sideline. Anette Drexl moved here six years ago with her son from her first marriage to her husband, who runs a carpentry business.
Most of the year the cows are outside frolicking in the orchard.
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
The alarm clock rings at 4.20 in the morning, at half past four we go to the barn for milking and mucking out. again in the evening. It takes two and a half hours until all the animals are taken care of. “My workout,” says Annette Drexl. Her husband needs the barn “to switch off”. They only spend three days a year on a farm in Vipiteno. “Then I hear the milking system and I’m happy that I don’t have to go to the barn.”
Anette Drexl mucks out three times a day – and there is always something else to do in the stable.
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
On their farm in Schlagenhofen, they still milk with an old vacuum system that no longer exists in modern farms. “The less milk there is in the bucket, the easier it is to carry,” says Drexl. At noon they muck up again, cattle just make a lot of dirt. They sell the milk and the calves, but it doesn’t make financial sense. Just for fun, Drexl once calculated her hourly wage: 14 cents.
If an animal is slaughtered, it goes to the local butcher
Still, stopping is out of the question. With their museum in the barn, they also want to preserve a tradition, from binding and grazing to regional marketing. If a cow has to go to the slaughterhouse, they drive the trailer four kilometers to Georg Friedl’s Broslhof in Inning. “That’s humane,” says Drexl. If an animal is sold, “we look for a good place”. Some of the cattle born here are in the open-air museum on the Glentleiten, “with a view of the mountains”.
Drexl reports on so-called “screaming children” in the stable that they raised and the disabled bull Sigi, who romped through the orchard despite a shortened tendon, as a picture on the kitchen wall shows. Why not? Restrictions are a part of life, regardless of whether they are farm animals or humans.
Drexl herself has various allergies and neurodermatitis, she has to wear gloves in the stable and is not allowed to touch her face while working. Otherwise the skin reacts with an itchy rash. Despite the circumstances, she cannot imagine life without animals. In the garden, the dwarf rabbits Johannes and Johanna hop across the frozen meadow – “our treasures”, as Drexl says.
In the Moo Museum there are not only cows, but also the dwarf rabbits Johannes and Johanna.
(Photo: Nila Thiel)
The 53-year-old did an apprenticeship as a retail clerk and worked for a large hotel chain before starting an apprenticeship as a farmer at the age of 30. When her son Ludwig was born ten years ago, her husband gave her a special gift: he had a cow inseminated by Murnau-Werdenfelser cattle. “Penelope was a beauty,” Drexl enthuses to this day.
The deputy district farmer obviously feels comfortable in her rubber boots, trudges through the driveway in a thick down vest and with a cigarette in her hand. When she cooks for the carpentry staff at lunchtime, Andreas Drexl quickly loads the manure spreader or takes a quick look at the animals. “The stable is his second office,” says his wife and laughs. “If you can’t reach him by phone, come over.”
Of course, not only carpentry customers come to the Muh-Museum for a long time. Many people from the village get their fresh milk from the Drexls, “I can assign almost all the jugs to the individual houses”. But the old stable with the swallows’ nests on the wall has long since become a place of attraction for maltreated souls. “An Iranian helped out for a while,” says Drexl.
They even let a pensioner in a life crisis clean out and help out. A 58-year-old lady is currently coming by regularly to walk the calves. Going for a walk with the offspring? “That’s important,” says Drexl. After all, the young cattle have to get used to people and traffic. “Otherwise they’ll be terrified on the pasture when a bike rings.”
Kindergarten groups and school classes also come regularly to see how milking the cows works. A group of disabled children from the neighboring village of Hechendorf visits once a week. The Drexls are happy about that. “Everyone is welcome in our Moo Museum,” says Anette Drexl. The opening times? “We are in the barn every day from 5 p.m..”