The title of this post is a misnomer because I guess I never actually wrote an entry specifically about calf-sharing ups and downs with our first milk cow... but here we are with Lovelle, counting down to her second calving, and preparing ourselves for another milking season of calf-sharing.
Firstly, if you'd like to read about our cow adventures, I've covered some information on bovines here, here, and here.
The past milk season, I hadn't been as involved as I would have liked because 1) Lovelle, our milk cow, sees me as direct competition for my husband's attention and 2) having a baby really switches around your daily program. On the mornings that I did make it to the stanchion with my husband, Lovelle would not relax; she refused to let down her milk or wouldn't even get into the stanchion sometimes, if I was too close. If she was kind enough to get into the stanchion, the baby would decide that mid-milking was the perfect time to get fussy and make her tense up from the noise, and so I'd hastily retreat back to the house, having upset the milking routine yet again.
Thankfully, my husband is perfectly capable of milking without me. And he'd proudly set a full pail of frothy, creamy milk on the kitchen for me to strain and chill. He'd tell me if today she was very cooperative, or the calf was being ornery and difficult, or she decided to give him a hard time, but he out-stubborned her, and he got all the milk anyway.
Lovelle, like Cookie, is a good, attentive, mother. Sometimes, I would say, almost too good--because, if you may recall, cows are able to hold back milk in their udder to reserve for their calves, even if you're milking them consistently. Lovelle's instinct to hold back her milk was so strong, that she'd only give us a meager quart and save the rest of her full udder for her baby. While this was very nice of her as a mother, it wasn't going to fly on our farm, as that was her job---to give us milk. My husband was wearing out his hand, spending up to an hour trying to coax every single drop of milk out of her. He knew there was milk she wasn't sharing. You could see it in her udder. You could see it in on the infuriating milk mustache the calf would have smeared across his snout when Lovelle was let out of the stanchion. There were some options to helping out a stubborn cow.
You could keep her in the stanchion and just come back regularly in hour intervals and milk her, teaching her that this was the time to let down.... but my husband has a day job, and I also was not able to babysit a cow all day for however long it took for her to learn that lesson.
Another option was to inject oxytocin into the udder---it's the hormone that stimulates a let-down, but my husband doesn't do needles, and neither of us didn't feel particularly excited about any kind of injections for something that we all know she can do without chemical intervention. (Also, she already associates me with unpleasant needles and things from her scrape with bloat, and I don't need to further our already tense relationship by adding more needles into the mix.)
And lastly, you can bring the calf close by. For some cows, just the sight or smell of their baby would be enough to start a let down, but in the case of Lovelle, he needed to physically latch on and suckle for a minute before she would give any more milk.
My husband eventually got a system going where after Lovelle had her first let-down, he'd bring the calf around to latch on and get whatever she was holding back to relax. He'd clean down her teats again and milk a second batch. This was considerably more than the first let-down, and not to worry, there was always plenty of milk left for the calf to guzzle down afterwards, too.
This always amazes me because Lovelle is considerably smaller than Cookie was. She's not a heavy producer, but she still could give us a gallon or so and feed her greedy little calf all the rich cream he needed. Because her size is smaller, she's gentler on the stanchion and on the pasture, and less intimidating to stand next to face to face.
There were days when even this system of putting the calf on didn't work. Sometimes the calf would refuse to come. He was having fun by himself and couldn't be bothered to come nuzzle his mother. Or Lovelle would get antsy and wouldn't stand still and they'd shuffle around further from the milking station than was convenient, and my husband wouldn't be able to get her back before the calf emptied the udder. Apparently, Lovelle is also a much more stubborn cow than Cookie was, but cows are also creatures of habit, and eventually the routine of milking became more and more smooth. There were mornings where I was so frustrated on my husband's behalf because I couldn't be out there to help him, because he couldn't milk fully that morning because he had to run into his office for work or some other issue that would spring up and make things less than ideal. We bounced the idea around of perhaps weaning the calf, but this either meant making a completely separate, pasture for him (a certainly a source of distress for them and more labor for us) or getting rid of him altogether. Once we weren't calf-sharing, we would get all the milk from her, but there would be no breaks--no calf to take the milk if we were sick or my husband was out of town or life got busy...and let's face it, with everything in our life this year, we weren't consistent enough to be able to do that.
While I dreamed of a milk fridge over-flowing in milk so I could make cheese and experiment with all things dairy, I was just barely about to make yogurt and butter, before being swamped by other responsibilities. This was not our year to be milk farmers. This was our year to learn and be grateful for what we did have. We did make some improvements in our milk set-up, however.
My husband put together a cow shelter with room for putting in separate pens for calf and mother, and any other members of the herd that have to be isolated for whatever reason. It's a sturdy structure to cover the stanchion and the animals from the elements, and also a place were we can store our dairy equipment and not have it get lost in the pasture.
This next month, we will not be milking, because it's close to the calving dates and we want to give her body a rest before a new baby. The (now) yearling doesn't seem to have gotten that message because we see him pushing his mother around trying to get a snack when they're out on pasture. I think this next time around the milk-sharing will go better. Last year was the first time Lovelle was milked, and I believe the 2nd round of milking will be smoother because of the familiarity. She might even let me get close to her to help out, and with my baby being a year old then (!!), I'll be more readily available to share in the morning chores.
I have a feeling we'll continue to calf-share this time, too. There are arguments against it---if you really want to maximize the milk production and get it all for yourself. If you want a line of cream that takes up the entire jar, and you want to make all of the cheese, then that's probably the way to go. But I don't want to bucket feed or bottle feed a calf. I don't want to be chained to the farm for the scheduled milkings. Our schedule is best when it's flexible, and maybe this time around, Lovelle will be a bit more flexible with us, too.