Milking questions

A reader sent the following email which I'm posting for everyone's benefit:

I am writing about milking cows. We live on 12 acres is East Texas. We moved here about a year ago. I always said I would never milk anything, but things change. I have Nubian milk goats and I am just not satisfied. Milking two gets me less than three quarts a day. You can not easily separate it and my husband thinks the cheese tastes goaty. I agree on the soft cheese. So my question for you is do you milk once or twice a day? If you milk once a day, how do you get to that point with the calf? How long til you can separate the calf from the mom for the night? Cows are much larger than goats, hence I didn't get one to start with. A little nervous. But I really like making cheese. Excellent article in Backwoods Home Magazine on cheese making by the way. So I think I am going to need to upgrade to a cow. Also any suggestions on buying one? Should I go to a dairy or buy one from someone on Craigslist?

My reply:

Regarding milk cows: I think it depends on what breed you get. For years and years we had only Dexters, which are a small dual-purpose (milk and meat) breed and I milked two cows. But then our neighbor got a Jersey and I fell in love with the breed, so we got Matilda. With the Dexters, because their milk output is not huge, I felt comfortable milking just once a day (I'd separate the calf at night and milk in the morning). But when we got Matilda and since she came off a commercial dairy, she had no calf on her and I was forced into a twice-a-day milking schedule. The rewards were tremendous - huge amounts of creamy milk, so I made butter and cheese like mad - but the schedule was rather unforgiving. It's not like I could skip a milking, after all, or the poor girl would burst.

But an interesting thing happened after Matilda had her calf last year - the calf took a lot of the cream and a lot of the milk, and though I was still milking twice a day, her output was FAR less (actually, this was a blessing - who needs five gallons of milk a day?). So I dropped to milking once a day (evenings) and that worked fine. Then as Matilda adjusted her output, I actually got lazy and stopped milking altogether. (Frankly it was a nice break.) I certainly could have continued milking but as I said, I just got lazy.

So to answer your question, a lot will depend on whether you get a heavy milk-producing breed or not, and whether you keep a calf on the cow or not. A cow will adjust her milk production to the demand. If both you and a calf are taking milk, she'll adjust her output higher. If you forego milking and just leave the calf on her, she'll adjust to that.

Frankly I like the once-a-day schedule and sharing the cow with her calf. I think it's healthier for the calf to be raised by its mama (and I think it's beneficial for a cow to raise her own calf), and a once-a-day schedule means you're not a slave to your cow. You can occasionally skip a milking by keeping the calf with the mother at night, for instance.

I like to keep a calf exclusively on the mother for two weeks. This bonds the animals and insures the calf gets all the colostrum it needs. Then if you plan to separate the calf at night, make sure you do so in such a way that the animals can still see and smell each other, such as a pen for the calf. If you just spirit the calf away at night and the mother has no idea where her baby has gone, she'll break the barn down in a frantic effort to find her calf. But if they can see/smell each other but are just physically unable to touch, there will be a lot of loud complaining but at least the cow knows where her baby is. It takes about two or three weeks for them to stop complaining and get used to the idea of being apart at night.

If I were to recommend a breed to a new milker, I would recommend a hand-raised Jersey. Dexters are a more spirited breed and may be a difficult adjustment, but if you're familiar with handling cows they're a fine breed to get. If you get a Jersey - and if we could do it all over again and if we had more money - I would get a healthy four-quarter cow (meaning, all of her udder quarters are working) with NO history of mastitis. You'll pay more but we had a nightmare case of mastitis when we got Matilda and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Since getting Matilda I've learned a great deal about udder attachment. Matilda has a terrible udder attachment but our neighbor's Jersey has a superb udder attachment. When looking over a potential animal, see if you can bring along someone who is knowledgeable about such things to help guide you. Commercial dairies tend to sell off their lower-quality cows. Be careful with a Craigslist listing, as you don't want to pick up a sick animal that someone is disguising as healthy. With a cow, you really do get what you paid for. We paid $500 for Matilda and, while I love her to pieces, that's all she was worth. Our neighbors paid about $2000 for their Jersey, and she is a far higher quality animal. Ah well, live and learn.

Dexter cow - excellent udder attachment

Dexter cow - poor udder attachment

Dexter cow - poor udder attachment - see how saggy-baggy she is.

With udders, a poor attachment looks "saggy baggy." A good udder attachment means the udder is held tight and close to the body. Ideally teats should be not misshapen and not poking out in all directions.

Dexter cow - excellent teats - all uniform.

Dexter cow - misshapen teats (harder to hand-milk)

Hope this helps! If you don't mind, I'm going to post your question and my answer on the blog so everyone can see it.

Church chuckles

"Don't be so apt to...fill your house with food and water."

In response to my blog post People are Terrified to Death concerning the Egyptian riots and the shortage of food and water that was plaguing the citizens of Cairo, a reader sent the following comment:

Look, don't be so apt to go out and fill your house with food and water. Just imagine what will happen when everyone in your neighborhood that has no food or water will do when they realize you have plenty. They'll stop at nothing to get it from you.

I confess I find this a baffling approach. Does this mean no one should ever do anything to prepare for a disaster? That the people in the path of the massive snowstorm that hit the middle and eastern United States last week should have just sat there and twiddled their thumbs in case the neighbors had no food?

Or, addressing the Egyptian situation, is it better to have no food or water in the house when rioting strikes (thus assuring your family goes hungry or thirsty, or that you literally risk your life to go to the grocery store)? Or is it better to have plenty of food and water to ensure your family's comfort and hopefully have enough to share with hungry neighbors?

I would like to think the person leaving this comment isn't suggesting it's better to go hungry in the face of a calamity rather than take some sensible precautions. Then why leave such a comment? I confess I find it baffling and would welcome some clarification from the person who left it.

Today's chuckle

In response to my post Marriage and Rush Hour Traffic in which I mentioned "Since men are simple creatures and women are a whole lot more complicated...," a reader sent this:

It's a boy!

Matilda had her calf today! A sweet little bull calf.

For the last week we've kept a sharp eye on her. We didn't want the calf born in the woods so we pulled Matilda into the driveway area around the house so we could watch her more closely. The poor dear was terribly swollen and misshapen, with this massive beach ball of an udder between her legs. Unlike Dexters, Jerseys get all bent out of shape just before giving birth.

I've been keeping her pen clean and padded with extra straw, since we didn't know when it would be required at a moment's notice.

But meanwhile nothing was happening. I'd check Matilda at least every hour, but nothing doing. Trouble is, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my busy days, when I'm away from home for most of the daylight hours. I just knew Matilda would have the calf when I was gone.

But I was wrong.

Around noon today, Don and I were upstairs talking about the clothes drying rack when I heard a low moo below the deck doors. I couldn't see Matilda from where we were, so we went downstairs and saw her right by a window. Her tail was kinked up and her vulva was twitching - and she kept giving low moos. "This is it," said Don.

So I made sure her pen was clean and pulled her inside. It was a chilly day and snow was flying, so the pen was a nice refuge. Here her tail is still kinked up...

...and her back is hunched, classic signs of a cow in labor.

When I checked on her half an hour later, this is what I saw:

The proper presentation for a calf is the two front hooves first, followed by the nose and head, then the rest of the body. These two protruding hooves meant things were progressing normally.

Shortly thereafter she lay down and rested for a few minutes.

Notice the preoccupied look on her face. (Sorry her eyes are white - it's the flash.)

Another good push brought out the rest of the front legs and most of the head. Notice the amniotic sac is already torn.

Then she heaved herself back to her feet and turned around. The calf's head and ears are out.

After this she lay down again to finish the job.

Slorp! He's out.

Matilda immediately set to work licking him to life. The licking accomplishes three critical purposes: (1) it cleans the calf; (2) it stimulates the calf's circulation; and (3) it familiarizes the cow with her calf's unique scent.

Within a minute or two, the calf was lifting its head and shaking the mucous from its nose.

Meanwhile the other animals knew something was up, and kept coming up with excuses to hang around the stall gate.

This is Gimli, the calf's father.

Matilda kept on licking. At this point we still didn't know the calf's gender and kept trying to catch a glimpse of the genitals.

Aha - a tiny scrotum - it's a boy!

How adorable can you get?

First attempt to stand.

Crash and burn.

Younger Daughter couldn't resist a touch. (Older Daughter vows to adopt someday.)

Matilda is dripping with colostrum.

The girls and I couldn't wait for the calf to fully get on his feet because we had to leave for the city. But in the evening after we got back, we saw that he was nice and dry, and Don says he's been nursing healthily.

No name yet, though Younger Daughter is favoring "Thor" (we've been studying the Germanic tribes which invaded early Europe) because Don is thinking he might train him to pull weights (a plow, a cart, whatever) rather than going into the freezer, in which case Thor would be an easy name for the calf to learn while learning commands.

Laundry issues

Ever since my clothesline broke last fall, I've been using our indoor clothes drying racks. (For new readers, we have a clothes dryer but prefer not to use it because it uses so much propane and electricity.) But clothes racks are expensive and/or hard to find second-hand, so I'm chronically short of drying space when it comes to doing laundry.

So my dear husband offered to build me a clothes drying rack, one that is attached to a pulley system from the roof of our upstairs.

To explain a little something about our house, it's two stories and has a steep-pitched roof on the upstairs. Don's idea was to install a hanging clothes rack above head-level near the upstairs deck doors.

So he made a sturdy frame about five by seven feet. The cross-pieces are rounded on one side so as not to crease the clothes.

He had to measure how far down the sloped ceiling to put the hooks and pulleys.

He used paracord because it's so strong.

Here Don is hooking all the cord through the pulleys and drawing them through a single O-ring so the unit can be raised and lowered on an even keel.

He made a sturdy tie-down anchored into the roof studs to hold the unit at whatever level I wish.

And it works beautifully! Here it's holding a solid three loads of laundry. It can handle sheets (washing sheets is a perpetual problem in the winter because we don't have anyplace large enough to dry them except our stairs banister, which only holds one at a time) as well as extra-large towels. At the same time, too!

Oooh, I just love being married to a woodworking man!

Marriage and rush-hour traffic

Recently Older Daughter and I had a conversation about husbands. Specifically her question was, “How do you know you’ve found the right man?” I explained the importance of Red Flags and dating (courting) for at least two years so each person can see the other in a variety of circumstances, etc. We discussed the importance of having similar views on religion, handling money, and raising children. I told her some of the qualities I think are important in a husband.

Long ago I worked with a woman who told me some advice her father had given her as a teen. “If you want to find out what a man is really like,” he told her, “Spend an hour with him in rush hour traffic and then go home and see how he treats his dog.”

I thought this was rather comical but not especially realistic advice until, shortly thereafter, I witnessed my roommate’s boyfriend who would fight rush hour traffic to come see her and then treat her dog very poorly.

Rush hour traffic, as any commuter knows, ties people up in knots of frazzled frustration. How they treat their helpless and innocent dependents (i.e. dogs, children) after a bout of rush hour traffic says a great deal about their character. (To be fair, my roommate married the fellow in 1988 and they’ve been very happy. But he would not have been a match for me.)

I remember many years ago, shortly after Don and I got married, I received a troubled phone call from my younger brother. I was the first sibling in my family to get married, and so my brother turned to me as an “expert” on marital issues. He wanted to propose to his girlfriend, he told me, but how did he know she was the right one? How does one ever know someone is the right one?

Put on the spot, the best I could come up with was: “If you wouldn’t change anything about her, than she’s probably the right one for you.” In retrospect, it probably wasn’t such bad advice. (My brother and his girlfriend were married in 1994 and have a very stable and happy marriage.)

The whole idea of marriage is going into it with both eyes open. Although there have been happy exceptions, I tend to believe people shouldn’t get married before about 26 or 27 years of age, since by that time people gain maturity and can look beyond the superficial when it comes to choosing a life partner. Younger people tend to only see the handsomeness/prettiness of the other person. “He was rich and handsome,” a divorced and remarried friend once told me about her first husband. “I was eighteen and I thought, ‘What more does he need to be?’” The answer became painfully obvious after he started beating her.

Being slightly older allows people to recognize and pay attention to the ever-important Red Flags. If someone has an addiction (be it drugs, alcohol, sports, spending money, whatever) then maturity allows you to recognize the Red Flags for the danger they are, rather than dismissing them as unimportant. I’ll say right now I know some extraordinarily mature young people whose prospects for a happy marriage are high because they’re smart enough to see what’s in front of their face; and I also know some extraordinarily immature older people who are likely to choose poorly because they wouldn’t know a Red Flag if it bit them on the butt.

But marriage, I explained to Older Daughter during the course of our conversation, is more than just picking the right person and having a pretty wedding. It’s all the years and years and years you’ll have to live with that person afterward.

A great deal of what makes marriage successful is how a woman treats her husband. Since men are simple creatures and women are a whole lot more complicated, much of the nature of a marriage is up to the woman. If she treats her husband with love and respect and refrains from nagging or emasculating him, then the chances for a happy marriage are much higher.

Just some random thoughts on this gray winter day as we still wait for Matilda to have her calf….

Problem solved

Problem: Deer in the wheat field, grazing contentedly at dawn.

Solution: The white and black blurs are the dogs discovering the deer in the wheat field.

If you look closely you can see the deer leaping the fence, their white tails flashing. Don't worry, the dogs are in the yard and can't chase the deer.

Garden of Eden in a bucket

You remember the meaning of KISS, right? Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Prepping has gone high-tech. You can now outfit your bug-out location with a complete cadre of solar panels, deep-cycle batteries, generators, and other accouterments that will keep you in every possible comfort if the bleep were to hit the fan. Why, if you pour enough money into your prepping efforts, you hardly have to change your modern comfortable lifestyle at all. Let the other poor saps struggle to cope - you'll be living in style.

Until, of course, you blow an inverter. Or run out of diesel. Or the batteries fail. If you haven't adapted to life without conveniences, you'll be in deep doo-doo if your conveniences fail. It's a whole lot easier to read about this stuff and become an armchair expert than it is to actually do stuff - and fail.

My friend Enola Gay, who knows a thing or three about the harsh realities of off-grid living, wrote an excellent piece on why the most intelligent approach to prepping is the simplest. Consider the conveniences of our pioneer forefathers and embrace their wisdom and creative solutions to their basic needs.

Along those lines, SurvivalBlog had an equally excellent piece called The Hard Truth about Starting Your Survival Homestead. Believe me, this writer knows what he's talking about. "I have noticed a frightening trend being used by many of the “survival seed” companies that have started up in the past several years. The same trend shows up on many “survival/ prepping” web sites. This is pushing the idea that in TEOTWAWKI one merely needs to open the bucket and have an instant survival homestead. That isn't necessarily so," he writes. "The Garden of Eden in a Bucket group would have you believe that these skills can be learned and preparations made after the fact."

Let's face it, most of us didn't grow up learning homesteading or survival skills at our parents' knees. If we want to acquire the wisdom of our forefathers and their seemingly (emphasis on seemingly) effortless techniques for living a low-tech rugged lifestyle, we have to learn them the hard way. I had to teach myself to can, to milk a cow, to make cheese, to garden, and an endless list of other skills. And let me assure you I fail all the time. That's the price I pay for having grown up living a soft and modern life.

But here's the thing: today, everyone lives a soft and modern life. (Well, almost everyone.) It's not meant to be an insult, it's just the truth. The dangerous part is when we think we can just effortlessly - tra la la - waltz into a pioneer lifestyle in a "bleep" situation and expect everything to be just like it is in the books. If we plant a garden, it will grow. If we get a cow, she'll be gentle, healthy, and give endless milk with hardly any effort on our part. If we buy a farm, fences will never break down and barns will never need repair and cougars will never take a calf.

I encourage any and all prepping efforts, but please - please - don't think homesteading or low-tech living will be easy or trouble-free if you spend enough money or read enough books. You need to go through trials and errors and endless failures at a time when those failures won't mean the difference between life and death.