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.

Read more on Eat Wild

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?

Well, to get this Salad Bar Beef we must have pasture and cattle. We chose a small breed of old Irish cattle called Dexters, more on that later, and had to plant our pasture from scratch. The 10 acres that we fenced were producing soybeans and wheat last year and corn the year before. This year the “pasture” would have been planted in corn again but we decided to plant a “perennial polyculture”, as Joel Salatin would say. This simply means that we didn’t plant a monoculture of only one type of grass so that there would be a whole salad bar of choices for the grazing animals. We settled on planting Orchard Grass, MaxQ Fescue, Ladino Clover, Alfalfa, and a nurse crop of Oats on the main 8 acres. We also wanted to plant 2 acres of Bermuda because it is a warm weather grass and we could move to it in the summer if the pasture slowed too much in growth.

If you didn’t notice, this spring was very wet! So, our schedule for drilling seed in the pasture was put off longer and longer. We ended up drilling seed on April 17th and being so late, we left out the most expensive seed, the MaxQ Fescue, because it isn’t said to do very well in the spring.

We ended up with a very good stand of oats that we started grazing at about 6 or 8 inches tall. The other grasses and legumes were just at the first stages of growth when we put the 6 Dexters on it. Now, when I say that we started grazing I don’t mean that we just turned the cows loose in the field. We are using a MiG or Management Intensive Grazing model to try and get the most out of our pasture and keep our cows healthy. The basic idea of MiG is that cows are confined to a relatively small area of pasture (a paddock) and moved often. The benefits are two-fold. Number one is that it benefits the grasses by grazing them evenly, evenly spreading manure and urea, and giving a long rest period before that paddock is grazed again. The second benefit is to the cattle. Moving the cows to clean pasture in three days or less helps keep the cows healthier by keeping them away from yesterdays manure. This cuts down on worms, flies, and other problems. Keeping all the manure in a small area and then moving away from that area also helps the dung beetles to do their job more efficiently! This way they don’t have to travel half their lives trying to find a pile of manure.

We put the cows in an area that allowed them to eat the oats down to an inch or two in one day and then moved them to the next paddock each day. We’ve been very impressed at how the grasses and oats have recovered from the initial grazing and are now grazing those original paddocks for a second time.

Check back later to hear more about how our pasture is currently doing and what happened with those two acres of Burmuda Grass.