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By Kim Gooden for the Tribune

Much has been written about “Lester the Tester” over the years, and many plaques have been awarded to him as he achieved milestones in his career.

Now, at age 90 years and 11 months, Lester Perschbacher has attained another milestone – being the oldest milk tester in the state of Minnesota — and the nation.

“And the planet!” an employee in the state Dairy Herd Improvement Association office said with a laugh.

Perschbacher began his milk testing career on Oct. 9, 1956, in Freeborn County.

At the beginning of his career there were three milk testers in the county because there were many dairy herds.

By 1962, Perschbacher had 99 herds he tested monthly. Thirty of them were official herds, which meant that he weighed and collected the milk samples himself. The remaining herds were owner-sampler herds, which meant the farmers weighed and collected their own samples.

According to Perschbacher, at that time the herds ranged in size from 22 to 40, and each herd was tested twice — once at the evening milking and again during the milking the following morning.

Once the samples were collected, Perschbacher did the necessary paperwork while still on the farm.

This included recording the name and/or ear tag number, weights of the milk, breeding dates, dry dates, freshening dates, offspring and anything else of importance, for each cow.

All of this information was recorded by hand, on a separate page for each cow, in a record book that was kept on the farm for the farmer’s reference.

Then he took the milk samples home where he tested them in the basement, with a centrifuge and sulfuric acid, to measure the amount of butterfat in each cow’s milk. This information was added to the farmer’s record book.

But gradually things began to change.

His paperwork was sent to the DHIA office in Coffey Hall, where they would check the information for accuracy and send a report back to the farmer. And eventually the samples were sent to the DHIA to be tested instead of him doing it in his basement.

In the early 1980s, he lost 22 official herds. Fortunately, he was able to pick up some new herds when another tester quit. However, this left him with 42 official herds and not enough days in a month to test them all.

“So, the DHIA committee decided as long as I could test them 10 times a year, they could stay official,” Perschbacher said.

That lasted a year or two, and then he lost more herds.

Because the number of dairy herds being tested was declining in other counties, too, in 1992, he took on Faribault County, and in 2000 he took on Waseca and Martin counties.

That increased his longest driving distance from 50 miles round trip to 130 miles round trip.

“At one time I traveled 4,000 miles a month,” Perschbacher said. “Now I’m under a thousand miles a month.”

The number of herds he tests has dropped considerably as well.

“I am covering four counties but I only test eight herds now,” he said.

“It used to be that I took samples in the morning and the evening,” Perschbacher recalled. “Now, for almost 15 years, I can only take samples in either the morning or the evening.”

That is largely due to the fact that some of the herds are so large and milking takes longer.

“My largest herd now is about 1,500 cows, and it takes 11 hours to take samples of the whole herd once,” he pointed out. “And that’s with four bottles in each hand.”

He also has six other herds that range from 250 to 40 cows, and one herd of 86 goats.

The amount of bookkeeping and the information Perschbacher records about each cow hasn’t changed much over the years. He still records everything by hand on the farm, but once he gets home it is all transferred to his computer now. Then it is sent to Buffalo, Minnesota, where it is checked for accuracy before being sent to South Carolina.

Meanwhile, the milk samples are sent by Speedy Delivery to Mankato, and then sent on to Sauk Center where they are tested for butterfat, protein, somatic cell count, milk urea, nitrogen, Johne’s disease and pregnancy.

That data is then sent to South Carolina and combined with Perschbacher’s other data before being sent to the farmer.

While not having to test the samples in his basement has lessened his workload, the frustration with his computer or printer that don’t always work has added hours to his day and delayed his testing schedule at times.

Loading and unloading the samples has made it necessary to find alternatives to how he used to do things as well.

“Initially I did everything in the basement,” he said. “But with the big herds, the cases with five racks of samples weigh about 90 pounds, and I guess I’m getting old because it’s getting harder and harder to carry those cases up 11 steps to get them to the delivery truck.”

As a result, he set up tables in his garage at the end of the summer to organize the samples numerically in the racks, and once the weather got too cold to be out in the garage, he set up two tables in the kitchen.

“It works good,” he said. “My friend Judy Christensen helps me because, with almost 1,400 sample bottles from my largest herd, it takes time to sort them into racks that hold 60 bottles.”

So why is he still doing this when he could have retired many years ago?

A big part of that is because the farmers he tests for, and their families, become like family to him. And because of a shortage of testers, he’s concerned that when he’s done there may not be a tester nearby to continue testing the small herds.

“A tester will come down to do the large herd for sure, and maybe the two next biggest,” he said. “But I just don’t know if the smaller herds will be tested.”

And even though he hasn’t had a raise since 2008 because he is paid based on the number of cows in the herd, and as the herds get fewer his salary goes down, he is still able and willing to do the job he loves and has been doing for 68 years.

How many almost 91-year-olds can say that?