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?

   This video has been shared on a number of other farm blogs in the last few days but for those of you that don’t frequent these other blogs I wanted to make sure you saw it. The video was done by the Wall Street Journal. (They’ve done a few nice ones lately) It’s a quick look at corn-fed and grass-fed beef. 

  I think it’s got some valuable information but wonder about some things that are stated. For example, both the grass farmer and the feed lot owner mention how little profit they are getting per animal. There are so many variables to profit margin that I still believe we can try and keep our overhead low and make a profit with grass fed beef but I can understand that with 7 or 8 dollar corn it’s pretty hard to make a profit on commodity beef. 

   Any thoughts? Do you care what you eat, eats? Does any of this surprise you?

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.