Last spring we bought a jersey heifer. She was bred and so began our milking story. I decided to document my journey as kind of a journal so I could remember the big events that changed my life. We bought Sadie, our future milking cow, in the winter when she still had her winter coat. She is a grass fed cow which is what I wanted. We kind of do things the old fashion way around hear because the other way is too darn expensive. My goal in getting a cow for our family was to provide my family the best I could give them. We raise chickens for eggs, goats for weed control and the occasional meat, and now a cow for milk, butter, ice cream and someday cheese. My goal in getting a farm was because I wanted to know what my food was eating. It started with solely food storage. What better way to store meat than on the hoof. It rarely goes bad even in a power outage. :) When I looked into how meat was raised these days it might have been found in an a paper I read in college about what brought about the regulation of the meat industry in the first place. It is so true, "you can buy anything with enough money." That is certainly true of the FDA. The things that are approved by the FDA so we can get cheap meat is disgusting. Did you know they can feed them stale candy bars and chewing gum in the wrappers. That is approved by the FDA. Anyway I digress.
So that is where I started from. Then I heard this and that that led me to investigate raw milk and the benefits of it. Again the FDA thinks it is worse than feeding your family poison. I was pregnant with Caroline and the first thing the doctor said was don't eat anything from raw milk like brie. When I looked into raw milk, a lady not too far from me was also pregnant and raising milk for her and her family. She didn't see the danger. I started to question why they would say it was so dangerous. I don't think my doctors are trying to keep me from healthy food, it is just there can be problems with raw milk if everything is not kept sterile. So anyway, when Caroline was born and done breastfeeding I again looking into raw milk. Besides what did the pioneers do without convenient little cans of formula? Lots of people all over the world don't use formula and the baby population has not been destroyed. I read that raw milk has probiotics just like breast milk. That was what she was used to. Pasteurized milk doesn't have that because it has been destroyed trying to make it safe for us to drink. Needless to say Caroline went straight to raw milk. I met the most wonderful people who I would buy my milk from. We called it magic milk. I have 6 children so I know when you take little ones out and about, or we go out and about they get the benefit of getting the germs we bring home and they get sick. Caroline is now 2. She has been sick 3 times. 2 colds and 1 24 hour flu. Every time she got sick she was on pasteurized milk. When you are dealing with the farmer directly sometimes supply doesn't keep up with demand. It could be too hot or too cold, or other factors that effect their milk supply. As soon as I would get the raw milk again she would instantly get better. So we called it magic milk. Again I said we have 6 children so we go through a lot of milk. 7 gallons a week. I was buying milk from sams club because that was the cheapest. Then I would get 2 gallons of raw milk that was Caroline's. I couldn't afford to give my whole family raw milk it is 3x the price of sams club milk. But then I realized there was no label on the Sam's club milk that said they did not use hormones on their dairy cows. I started to pay attention to the stores that did carry the label "no BGH which is Bovine Growth Hormone. It helps the cows produce more milk. But they have found that the hormone is passed to us through the milk. I don't know about you, but I have 5 daughters. They don't need any additional hormones. Not good. So no more Sams club milk. Walmart, Aldi, Price chopper all carried milk with no BGH so I thought well the rest of my family is getting as best I can do. But the price was a lot higher. So again my budget went up. I did some calculating and convinced my husband that we could not only save money, but we could all get the magic milk if we bought a cow. I told him I would do the work and all would be perfect. I finally convinced him. Here came Sadie.
Well August was a long time to wait for milk. When we traveled to Arizona for our summer vacation (I know, how dangerous) I met with a wonderful woman who raised miniature Jerseys. She asked me what I had against goat milk. I told her the taste. It is too goaty. She brought us inside to try some goat milk. I couldn't taste a difference. David who has a more sensitive palette than I said it was good. So when we got home from Arizona we bought a dairy goat. She is a registered Nubian. She is very well mannered. I actually like her the best of all our goats. I figured it would give us some practice while we waited for Sadie. When we bought her she had already freshened in Dec. (that means she had a baby goat in December) She had already been giving milk for 8 months. She is now on her10th month which is a normal lactation for a goat and we are doing once a day milking and getting only 2 cups a day. Little did I know when we bought her, her production wasn't were it should be. I figured it was her first freshening and she had already been giving milk for 8 months. I don't know how much she gave when she first freshened. It was good practice for Sadie. Myia is a goat. I can milk her by hand in about 8 minutes. It doesn't seam to matter the amount of milk I get, it always takes the same amount of time.
On August , 2010, the night of book club, I got a phone call from my kids saying Sadie was in labor. Then I got a call saying Dad says she is not in labor. She was already 2 weeks late so I high tailed it home. When I got home my husband had just came in the house and assured me she was not in labor. He went in to take a shower. My kids also went to take showers. I thought I would go check on Sadie so I could see what they were seeing. Of course she was hiding in the farthest corner of the field and she was in labor. I ran to the house to get someone to come with me. This summer, when the goats were delivering I learned that when someone is in labor, every one wants to watch. I wouldn't be able to deal with 15 goats a llama and a new mom with her first calf. Tiffany jumped out of the shower, got dressed and ran to help me. When I was out to dinner with my book club, they all shared the stories about how all cows need help delivering. I was prepared to call my friends who have cows and have them run over. By the time Tiffany and I got down to the field she had had it. We locked up all the other animals and ran to see. It was a beautiful little baby. When she was born she had a white marking on her forhead in the shape of a heart. It was all red from birth. But she is a robust little jersey calf. We named her Little Dipper. I figured when she gets big we can name her Big Dipper.
