Down the hill from the palace, Jay Prabhupada Das — his spiritual name — spends his mornings clucking over his brood of car-sized cows (launch audio slide show in new window). After 5 a.m. worship in the temple, the native Brazilian crosses Palace Road and fusses over the temple’s half dozen dairy cows and one young calf. As he drops scoops of corn, oats, and molasses in front of each one of his charges, he chats with them like an animated mother pouring cereal for fidgety children at the breakfast table.

Jay flits about the barn to warm up the tubes of the mechanical milking machine, the cows mooing anxiously. “When the air start to come inside this, seal it, thhh. The air inside seal it by suction,” Jaya, 54, says as hooks each cow’s udders to the milking machine while the cows, oblivious, lick up grain with banana-length tongues. “When you milk, it’s like this: chya, chya chya,” he softly mimics the airy pumping sound. “In my country, it’s by hand.”

The leaders of New Vrindaban brought Jay from Brazil three years ago to inject life into its agricultural projects. Indian culture reveres cows because of a romanticized portrait of ancient India’s rural agricultural society. Each family depended on a cow to till the fields, give milk, and provide fertilizer. The cow in turn was cared for as if it were a family member. But it didn’t exactly work out that way, Jay says, waving his arms. “Here, because you have more than one cow, you know, because I don’t own the cows, then the relationship is different. And sometimes it become, just, work. You know, just work. How do you say in America? Dirty work. You take out the pleasure of the activity just because you change the relationship between animals and people taking care.”

New Vrindaban is still heavily reliant on modern society, Jay says. Monks drive gasoline-powered cars to do outreach programs at regional universities, such as the University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University in Morgantown, and Ohio University in Athens. The temple provides Styrofoam plates and cups for visitors at mealtimes. A wood-splitter at the back of the temple provides the fuel to heat the temple and keep the deities warm — as long as someone takes the time to use it. Jay and others try to get more people to commit to the day-to-day maintenance of the very agricultural and sustainability projects that are the ostensible goals of Hare Krishna belief. “We have problems to get people to be involved in this job. Nobody wants. I came from South America because no one in America wants to do it,” Jay says.

After the day's first worship service at 5 a.m. and before breakfast at 9, Jay heads to the barn to care for New Vrindaban's small herd of dairy cows.