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?

After looking at her a few times, noticing that her tailhead was becoming more pronounced and that she had a little discharge, I had to take another look at her teats…  The hair around them looked like someone had sculpted them with hair gel and they were not wet, but looked awfuly clean! My first thought was that the new weanling Belted Galloway bull claf may have nursed from her. That quickly was disputed by the fact that she’s not too fond of him. Then I got the bright idea of searching around for a calf, just in case. Remember, it’s very dark by this point so I started at the water trough and walked the fence line in their enclosure. With every big, dark, shadowy pile of manure, I thought I might be walking up on a calf but finally one of these tiny dark piles moved on one end and lifted up it’s HEAD!

I quickly forgot how cold my hands were and got down on the ground to check her over. Using the light from my cell phone I discovered that she was a heifer and after only a few seconds I herd mama come running. Black Lady is a 7 year old cow so she knows how to take care of her babies. I actually started running too because Black Lady has some impressivly sharp horns. She chose a great time her have her calf because it was pretty mild and dry this week. It’s now back in the 20′s at night but at least the calf is dry now. The next morning I went back to check on her and got these pictures. We’re pretty excited about her because she’s only the second heifer to be born on the farm. It’s great to show up to the farm and find a healthy, active calf that needed no human help being born. I sure hope this continues for years to come.

Feel free to leave name suggestions in the comment section. She was bred at Lonesome Valley Ranch so her name will be Lonesome Valley _something_ or maybe LV _something_.

Not seeing much rain in the last few months, these cows were a little on the skinny side but they should shape up well on our 10 acres of grasses and legumes. Right now they are in a small paddock of their own. We’ll wait a while to introduce them to the rest of the herd.

We’re growing in another area too but this was a much cheaper purchase. Two Saturdays ago we picked up a buff rooster and a red hen at a local poultry sale. We’re hoping that one of our hens will decide to sit on some eggs and eventually hatch us some more chickens! We could have used this rooster a few weeks ago when we had an especially broody hen. The rooster is proving to be very well behaved and so far is doing his job.  :-) His name is Bruce and he’s a big buff colored bird that must have some Cochin in him because he’s got feathers on his legs.  Geri has been saying for months that we needed a rooster named Bruce.

The hogs continue to eat thier fruit, nuts, bread, corn, and grasses and adding on pounds! I’m picking up persimmons every day to feed them and yesterday was able to get about 2.5 gallons from our 2 trees. The loved it. I also had a neighbor come and ask if I wanted his walnuts so I hope the hogs develope a taste for them too!

I’ll try and get some pictures up this weekend.

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

What is Salad Bar Beef?

“Salad Bar Beef” is a term used to describe cattle that have been fed a wide variety of grasses and legumes.  The whole notion here is that we’re extending the old phrase “you are what you eat” to “you are what you eat, eats”.  In other words, when you eat an animal product, you’re essentially eating a bit of whatever that animal ate in its lifetime.  And every day when our cattle are moved to a new paddock, they have a “salad bar” in front of them – consisting of a wide variety of grasses and legumes… just the kind of thing that your doctor would probably suggest that you eat!

Health Benefits

Our salad bar beef is healthier both for what our cattle eat and what they don’t eat.  Our cattle are given no hormones and no routine antibiotics.  Grass is essentially the only thing going into their bodies, other than the salt/kelp mix that they have access to for their mineral needs.  Kelp is dried seaweed, and is a natural source of trace minerals.

So what impact does this diet have on you?  In addition to minimizing potentially cancer-causing hormones and unnecessary antibiotics, grass-fed beef is better for your body overall.  According to Loren Cordain, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, grass-fed beef resembles the wild game our ancestors ate.  It contains less fat, less saturated fat, more CLA (an anti-cancer fat) and more omega-3 fatty acids than grain-fed beef.  This means that the fat in grass-fed beef has more “good” fat, much like salmon, which has also been touted as a good source of healthy fat.

Quality / Taste

The heath benefits of salad bar beef would be of limited value if the beef ended up tasting awful.  But the beautiful thing is that beef that is finished on grass is wonderful – in our opinion, it makes other beef pale in comparison.  But don’t take our word for it:

Which steak tastes the best? – Slate Magazine

Environment / Sustainability

About 70% of the corn grown in the United States is fed to animals.  Instead of letting cattle pack on the pounds by eating grass, we move them all to centralized feed lots and ship in corn for them to eat.  We believe that it is a more sustainable option to let the cattle harvest their own food – by eating the grass directly from the ground.  This article from the New York Times Magazine lays out the life of a typical steer… it is well worth a read for anyone interested in the food that they eat:

New York Times Magazine – “This Steer’s Life”

How can I order?

Please let us know if you’d like to purchase salad bar beef from us.  We are building a list of folks who would like to be notified when we next have beef for sale.