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?

It sounds a little out of place but Bill Crites of The Storks aquaculture farm in Chaffee, MO has been raising both Rainbow Trout and Pacific White Shrimp since 2005 in his 4 large ponds. Bill experimented for a few years in a small existing pond and then had 4 ponds and a well installed to really make a go of it. Each pond can be drained for harvesting of the crop and refilled to start the next crop in his rotation.

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Over the cooler months Bill raises Rainbow Trout and as it warms up he starts his warm season crop of shrimp. As quoted from his website:

We receive our shrimp as larvae which we place into saltwater tanks. For a period of forty-five days we slowly wean the shrimp off of saltwater so that we may stock them in our freshwater ponds. Our harvested shrimp grow to an average of 8-inches long.

Often people comment to me that these must be prawn and not shrimp but they are in fact real shrimp. To go a step further, Bill only feeds the shrimp and trout an organic meal, making them appealing for the health conscious as well.

Bill has also acquired a local convenience store in Chaffee where he sells his shrimp and trout by the pound, and cooks some of the best barbecue around. We’ve bought shrimp for special events a few times and it’s always been easy to prepare, reasonably priced, and tasted great! I wouldn’t even think of buying shrimp from the store anymore when I know I could be supporting a local farming family. In this situation the farmer is selling the end product so he is able to make the best return and that should make a buyer feel good. I love seeing other farmers try something new and different and it doesn’t look like Bill Crites is stopping where he is, he’s already started a small herd of sheep!

If you’d like to get some local seafood, give Bill a call, he can also give you cooking instructions and tips. If you stop by the store, Larry’s in Chaffee, MO, I’m sure he’d love to tell you how he got into the business.

The Storks

Article in Sauce Magazine

So how many people are there in Southeast Missouri and around the country that aren’t at all aware about the local products available in their area?  And how does the typical consumer go from thinking, “I’d sure like to try some local food” to becoming a regular customer?  On the whole, the local food movement seems to have a problem of awareness.  I can think of a couple of ways that consumers can connect with their local food movement, but I’d like to hear more:

• Local Farmers’ Markets - This is probably the first thing that crosses the minds of consumers when they start thinking about local food.  But not every farmer participates in these, and at least in our area, many consumers can’t participate either (the largest local farmers’ market is during business hours on a weekday).
• Small Grocers and Organic Food Stores - Local food seekers might also turn to their local food stores in their search.  Again, I would venture to say that a small percentage of family farms are selling through these channels.  And the stores don’t exactly have an incentive to help consumers make connections to local farmers that don’t sell there.
• Internet sites – There are a couple of types of sites… one is the individual farm site, much like our own.  Obviously, we hope to be high on the Google search list for terms like “local food Southeast Missouri”, etc.  But this is hit-or-miss, and even if they find one source of local food, they aren’t necessarily going to find out about the others.  Then there are sites like EatWild, which list multiple farms for a given area.  Again, the issue is getting these potential local food consumers to these web sites in the first place.  But I think there is a lot of promise there.

So what are some of the other ways that people go about finding local food?  And how can we small farmers do our part to raise awareness not only of our farms, but of all available local foods?