Steven and I are learning first hand the work load increase that any small farm, grass fed dairy incurs. Steven wakes up one hour earlier to make his trek out to the paddock where the cows are grazing. (The walk gets progressively shorter since the rotationally grazing mob is on their way back to the barn. Every day, the walk is 30 feet shorter.) For the majority of dairies, they cut out this trek to the pasture by keeping the cows in sandy stalls or a dry lot and bringing them hay and grain.

Ivy is the cow. Milk is her game. She is a dehorned, black Irish Dexter cow and despite her eight years as “just a cow” she has become a quite trusty and calm milk machine. Steven halters her and leads her to the barn. He built a milking stanchion last year in hopes that one day he would be able to lead one of these dual purpose bovines up onto the raised platform to get a taste of this solar powered butter, cheese, ice cream, and milk. The crest of Ivy’s shoulder is just above my waste, so you could imagine the problems one may have when trying to milk udders that are so close to the ground.  We milk with a “short bucket” and a raised cow.

Day after day, Ivy gets more and more comfortable with her new roll. She knows where the stanchion is and will walk up into it and put her head through to chomp down on some delicious alfalfa cubes. I’ll admit, she liked my husband way more than me at first. She landed three kicks of about 30 tries when I first tried to take a turn at milking. Now when I see her shifting her weight, I rub the cow equivalent of a shin on her back leg until she calms and levels her weight back out. When you’re so “personal” when the cow and your head is totally in HER space, you can tell when she starts to have thoughts of kicking.

Milking is definitely a learned technique. You just have to learn it by doing it. Steven gets her going and the bucket gets all foamy. I tried and I was barely able to get a squirt out! Now, I am proud to say, that I can hum the melody to “I’m a Soul Man” to keep a rhythm and milk our three quarters of a gallon. Oh, yeah! Sure, she still gives Steven more milk, but my skills are growing.

When Steven milks both morning and evening, we are getting just over two gallons a day.  All this milk, what to do? What to do? Well make butter of course! Dexter milk has a fair share of cream. The lush alfalfa, clover, and orchard grass pastures make fine milk with plenty of cream. One quarter or more of each jar is cream after 24 hours. It takes longer to separate and float to the top than Jersey milk because the fat globules are smaller.

We’ve been exploring Gelato making. So far, we’ve had two batches that were C to F grades. This was due to our rookie mistakes. Now we are just pulling out two more batches, one vanilla and one Nutella. They are better but we may need to get a gelato maker as it seems that the speed of the paddles are slower when making real gelato.

For all of you who don’t know why one would go through the trouble to milk a cow I’ll just sum up some of the reasons. First, Ivy is 100% grass fed. Her milk has benefits similar to meat that is grass fed. The milk fat is healthy. Ivy is not fed “preventative” or sub therapeutic  antibiotics. So this is not in her milk. She is not given any bovine growth hormones to increase her production. Her body is cycling like a natural cow, a healthy cow, a womanly cow, as God designed. She’s giving the amount of milk that God intended her to give, not artificially over-producing for the sake of business profits.  Hormones come from the cow into her milk mainly in the fat molecules, so if there are added hormones (or naturally elevated estrogen due to the cow being pregnant) they are found in the cream & butter.  Ivy’s cream and butter, on the other hand, contain (probably) higher levels of CLAs and better ratios of EFAs.

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Anyone else have experience with a milk cow that you’d like to share? Anyone milking a Dexter? Anyone have any stories about Raw Milk benifites that you’ve experienced?

I’m moving the cows every day between 5:00 and 6:00 pm. We’ve got 6 Dexter cows, 6 Dexter calves of all ages, 1 Dexter Bull, and 5 Belted Galloway yearlings. All of these bovines are grazing paddocks each day that are right at 0.14 acres. That’s just over 1/8 of an acre. At this time, May 30th, each paddock is starting at knee high and over, of alfalfa, clover (ladino and red), orchard grass, and a little Max Q fescue. There is a small amount of weeds and I’m starting to see crabgrass and some other grasses that I haven’t identified yet. We are now on our second rotation since…. I believe March 27th of this year. This is the date that we let the cows off of their winter paddock by the barn and stopped feeding hay. We did supplement with just a little hay to help them keep from bloating though. When we first started rotating the cows were grazing most of the forage off, after a couple of weeks we were able to get the right paddock size that caused the cows to trample any forage that they didn’t eat. This has been spectacular for the regrowth!

Now, in the second rotation the grass is tall and the cows are continuing to do lots of trampling, now as much as 40 or 50%. If we were grazing existing pasture I might feel bad about all that trampling but we have to keep reminding ourselves that 13 months ago this “pasture” was all dirt! Being crow crop land for 30 years or more, the organic matter was very low and this trampled forage is helping to build soil and create the excellent soil fertility that we desire. It’s amazing to see how long moisture is held in the areas with tall forage and or trampled forage. It’s also great for us to see how soil life is thriving. We see many insects in the fields, worms in the ground, and dung beetles working hard to bury the manure! This is actually really important because the manure (fertilizer) is being moved closer to the plant’s roots, flies aren’t able to reproduce in the cow pies, and holes are left in the ground that help to absorb and store water when it rains.

On to some pictures of this years forage.

First is a picture of the grasses just starting to grow. We have really bad rows showing because of using a seed drill last year and it was worrisome to me in the beginning that we may have not left enough grass standing last year.

Next is a picture from just a little later. This is when we were allowing the herd to graze just a little each day, in preparation for the start of full grazing on the spring lush.

These pictures are probably 2 weeks into grazing. Each day the forage residue is a little different but this is a pretty good look at a typical move. The cows are eating tall (first rotation still) spring growth and leaving shorter, damaged forage behind with a high amount of manure deposited.

This is probably 2 weeks of rest.

The rest period on the first rotation was around 50 days but here is a picture at about 25 days rest. There is really no comparison to how it looks now.

This is my little girl sitting right in the middle of the salad bar at about it’s maximum height. I feel that allowing the forage to get tall and mature helps them to develop the root system that will benefit us in the future. Not to mention that our cows are our only tool to manage the farm at this point and they can only eat so fast!

Getting back to the thought that I had when starting this post, Moving the cows IS the best. I have such a great time moving the “mini mob” onto new forage each day, taking note of how the last paddock looks, now the new paddock looks, providing water and minerals to the animals, and walking backwards through the field to see how it’s all recovering and what is working the best. We do have an area that was trampled really badly when it got too muddy and it’s really interesting to see how it’s recovering over time too. If in the future we can get away from feeding hay at all, and just rotate cows onto clean salad bars each day, now that would be the ultimate job for me!

Do any of you have the same feelings about moving cows, have experience doing Management-Intensive Grazing or mob grazing, or have a similarly gratifying “chore” on the farm? I love comments!

All twelve of us just stood close to the electric fence watching it scamper about in disbelief of both the reality that it was born so soon and that it was so agile and energetic while still soaking wet. “Awwe, God is real,” I thought. This was in response to a comment I had heard on talk radio the night before that I just could not get out of my head. The speaker was boldly, or just plain sadly, proclaiming all life and specifically human life to be nothing more than the mere “fallout of debris” from the big bang. After witnessing this tiny new life run around for the first time, muscles stretching and contracting, breathing, its heart beating, I was once again reassured that there was an intelligent design to life and indeed an Intelligent Designer. This is yet another example if how natural-farming has given us a window into the magesty of God. He is so good.

Our little heifer is still going strong today just as she was that Monday evening when we found her. We are very excited to have this little addition to our herd.

More pictures can be seen in the photo albums on the right.

As you can see in this picture of Corretta and her new calf, it doesn't take much to keep the cows in their paddock. The tiny white line that you can see is the electric polywire. Boardering the corn is our perirmeter high tensile fence. In the distance you can see the other calf "creep feeding" by going under the portable fence to find grass.

Our livestock management is then focused on getting all the animals to consume as much pasture as possible. They are actually harvesting our crop for us rather than us using a combine, tractors, and trucks to harvest and haul the crop to the animals to be eaten. The most efficient way that we have found for the cattle to harvest our pasture and actually enhance the pasture rather than damage it is to move them every single day to a new paddock or piece of the pasture. We do this with a single strand of electric polywire that can be wound on a reel and set up with temporary step-in posts.

This type of grazing is called Management Intensive Grazing or MiG. Because our pasture is very new our stocking rate is not as good as it will be in the coming years. We have plenty of bare ground that is waiting for the right conditions and seed to come it’s way so that it can produce more forage. For now though we are staying pretty consistent with our paddock sizes each day. It’s working out that the cows are on about 1/8 of an acre per day. This is 4 cows, 2 yearlings, and 1 calf that is just starting to eat some grass. I’d say that this equals a little over 5 cow units or about 0.02 acres/cow/day. This isn’t much land per cow but then again this is only for one day.

I understand that this may seem a little confusing or like useless information but with these numbers we can see that over a 30 day rotation we are going to need about 3.57 acres. 30 days is the most often recommended rest period for pasture but we’re raising that to at least 60 days considering that we just planted our pasture this spring. This should give the forages plenty of time to develop root systems that will help them survive grazing and the winter freeze.

Hopefully every year our pasture space needed for each cow will decrease as our forage quality increases this should allow us to produce quite a bit of beef on our meager 10 acres.

* Keep in mind that our adult cows are only about 750lb Dexters, not 1200lb commercial cattle.

Many of the reasons that we chose to start with Dexters are discussed in the video and the article that goes along with it.

They’re half as big as full-size cows, and have even littler appetites: They eat only a third as much. “It’s definitely economics,” says Ms. Coad, gesturing across her barnyard to Snickers …Article In WSJ

Dexters are small, hardy, easier to work with than alot of cattle, they eat less pasture/hay, and they produce great meat and milk. We’re relying alot on second hand knowledge and what we’ve read about Dexters but so far it’s panned out. We milked one of our cows a few times and she sure had alot of cream and alot of milk! Also, they’ve been very easy to handle so far, training easily to electric temporary fence. They also have been very good foragers, eating alot of “weeds” that many cattle would turn up their noses at. It’s great to move them into a new paddock in the evening and see them attack the tall weeds like they’re candy before moving on to the alfalfa and grasses.

I hope you enjoy the video, I love hearing kids talk with a southern accent!

Dexter Video in WSJ

Dexter Pictures  in WSJ