Having a milk cow that produces milk has been an amazing addition to our lives!
Picking up where we left off in cow saga, milkings:
Cookie was quick to get into her stanchion. The first week of milkings, even though she was so large and engorged, we didn't want to milk her out completely because we didn't want her to get milk fever.
[Sidebar: What is milk fever?
Also known as postparturient hypocalcemia, it is a metabolic disorder commonly seen in bovines when they enter into lactation post-calving. One has to be cautious with modern day dairy cows especially because they have been bred to produce so much milk so soon---their bodies can use up their entire store of calcium, and if left untreated, the cow can die very quickly. Symptoms of milk fever include cloudy-eyes, clumsiness, irritability, lack of appetite, inability to stand or constantly falling, inability to urinate or defecate, and paralysis. Prior to calving, a cow needs about 30g of calcium a day, and then when they begin produce milk, it can increase to 50g a day, and until the cow's metabolism adjusts to that change, she is susceptible to milk fever. I have two tubes of concentrated calcium and magnesium in our house in case of milk fever emergency. If the cow cannot ingest the concentrated mineral bolus, then she has to be treated intravenously.]
Morning and evening, we would put Cookie in her stanchion, brush her down and check her udders and teats. If her udders felt particularly taut and engorged, we would milk out about a cup to a pint from that quarter (One whole udder is divided into 4 separate quarters that end in a teat)--enough to relieve pressure, but not to milk out the quarter completely. Anyone familiar with breastfeeding knows that milk production is a supply-demand relationship. If we milked out that entire quarter, than her body would produce that same amount of milk and more so thinking it was needed, depleting her body of calcium even more. Plus the milk for the first week was all colostrum, and while we could drink it, we don't have the taste for it. Instead, it got put into the freezer for animal emergencies. It's chockful of immunocomplexes that is beneficial to all of the animals on our farm.
We also checked the teats for cuts and scabs. The baby calf, in his eagerness to nurse, was quite rough on her teats, and because it's the middle of summer and the flies are in fury, any open abrasions are prone to infection. We have a little tin of bag balm and mint oils as well as a bottle of homemade fly spray that Cookie gets doused with before milkings, and then she is brushed down to scratch some itches and get the loose hair off so it doesn't get into the milk.
[I've never really liked bugs, but the flies remind of me of the biblical plague stories. They rise into the air in a cloud as the animals twitch or flick their tails and settle back down right where they were. Letting our chickens and guineas free-range in the cow and pig pens has done wonders. They dig through and eat the maggots. Zip flies out of the air and clean up beautifully. Also I've been hanging up the large fly paper and changing it out once a day. Every day that sheet is covered in hundreds of flies. They buzz angrily as I rip it off and throw it away---so satisfying!]
After a week of saving the colostrum, we are able to safely milk her out completely. The calf stays with Cookie all day and nurses on demand. Until week two, we milked both morning and evening until the end of that second week, our evening milking only produced one quart of milk---and then we switched to just once a day, our end goal milking schedule (my husband actually was a bit disappointed when we made the switch because milkings had become a time where we just chatted and slowly go out day started and it's a peaceful activity that ends up with a bucket of glorious milk!). The first couple of days after switching to once a day, we would inspect her udder, making sure nothing was engorged or needed to be emptied out. So here's what our mornings look like:
At 7:00 am, I grab the milk bucket, the wash pail, the strainer, some cleaning cloths, and a strip cup and head out the door. I try and sneak out without waking any of the children, but I have metal buckets in each hand and invariably clang against something at some point. Most mornings it is just my husband and me, but our youngest and our oldest are light sleepers so sometimes they tag along. Sometimes we have all four prancing around us as we make the trek out to the cow pen.
Cookie is waiting for us by the stanchion gate. Sometimes she clangs her horns against it if we are bit late, as if to say, "Do you know what time it is?" We open up the stanchion and toss in a flake of alfalfa into the trough for her and she daintily steps on to sniff at her breakfast.
[We don't grain feed her anymore. It is common practice for a lot of people that own cows to grain feed them, but they don't need it. Cows are ruminants which means they eat grass. It's the most healthy thing for their diet. While Cookie loves grain, and will do just about anything for grain, it makes her irritable and impatient and just bad spoiled girl behavior all around if she has it. She gets the minerals she needs from the salt blocks, and just on occasion, if she is deserving of a treat or we're trying to keep her still for something uncomfortable or unusual, she gets some, or a glug of molasses over her hay for extra magnesium, but we don't give it to her daily. We can enrich her diet with a variety of types of grasses. It's healthier for her gut and overall health and temperament.]
After being brushed and sprayed down with fly spray, she gets her udders cleaned. Clean towel into warm soapy water to wipe down the udders on all sides and on all the teats. If the towel comes off dirty, we get a new towel. We do NOT double dip into the wash water. And we continue wiping until the towel comes back clean and she's got a nice fresh udder. Then we do a strip cup test (actually we use a super fine mesh reusable Keurig cup that works just fine, you can even do a squirt onto a clean hoof if we're going super old school) to do a mastitis check--you never drink the first few squirts of milk because they have the highest bacteria count from being part of the teat plug. If there is an unusually high somatic cell count in her milk, it'll appear watery with chunks that will get caught in a fine mesh (it will also have a salty taste---I have read that even with mastitis, the milk is safe to drink, but I think for us, I would just give it to the animals or the garden). We do each quarter separately so that we will know which is the problem quarter. There is also a California Mastitis Test kit that we pull out if we have any suspicions: just squirt milk straight from the teat into the test cup and apply a few drops of testing solution and you get results within 20 seconds. So far, our milk has been wonderful and sweet with no issues. Once she's all cleaned and cleared we can begin milking.
The quiet mornings are my favorite mornings. I suppose we are an unusual milking family because my husband and I milk at the same time. My husband can do the full milking by himself before Cookie gets too impatient, but my left is weak from when Cookie crushed my thumb and forefinger the first week we got her in the stanchion.
[Our oldest wanted to learn to milk with us right away, and no amount of promises or telling her she will get a chance once we milk out the colostrum in a few days was going to keep her happy, so during the first week, she sat next to me and tugged on teats, while we tried to show her the correct method of milking: not a tug, but more of a pinch off at the top and a squeezing motion with the fingers. It's the same muscle movements I use to push icing out of tubes or pushing out toothpaste. But while I was trying to show my daughter how to milk, Cookie made an impatient shuffle with her foot and brought a back leg straight down on top of my thumb and index finger. I braced my shoulder against the inside of her hip and managed to shove her off of me, but I think the top joints were a crushed and even a month later, they're a little weak and have odd numb spots or have random shooting pains.]
My husband milks on the right side because it's an easier reach for him, plus he is in charge of emptying the milking bucket into the transport pail/funnel. No matter how clean we get her udder, sometimes there's a hair that falls or a piece of hay that lands because she flicks her tail, and so we have a big strainer with a filter that we pour the milk directly into for the first filtration.
I milk from the other side at the same time, and Cookie is super patient with that many hands on her, because if the girls are also with us, they like to have a "2 minute turn" to milk and sometimes toddlers are crawling on my lap reaching out to a teat to get a little sip before breakfast.
Ping! Ping! Zing! Zing!
Milk streams out in jets against the sides of the steel bucket. Cream colored bubbles froth up on top of the warm milk as we go through each quarter. There are teats that my husband and Butters both enjoy. The front ones are longer and resemble inflated fingers of a glove. They are easy to squeeze and fill up quickly with milk. I think they're the easiest to reach for nursing as well. The back teats are shorter and harder on my husband's hands to milk out so usually I work on those. Often I can spend the entire twenty minutes working on just the one back quarter because the calf never got to it. So there we are both working away. Sometimes pausing to shake out a hand or shift the bucket out of the way because Cookie is moving around a bit. Sometimes she has a tender spot on her udder so we have to pay attention to that quarter more, make sure it's completely milked out so there's no chance for infection. Sometimes she hasn't urinated before stepping in so she starts fidgeting and keeping her legs in a narrow stance because she's uncomfortable. Sometimes she's just feeling a little ornery and tries to kick the bucket away or put her hoof directly in it.
The first time Cookie stuck her foot in the bucket, it was at the beginning of the milking and I almost cried because it was a half full bucket completely ruined. I scolded her and barked at my oldest to go get another clean bucket. She tried to knock the other one out of the way too but we caught it this time. Still spilled milk all over the stanchion and made it a bit slippery for her. She stomped her feet and flicked her tail and then dropped an enormous cowpie. I had to remind myself that... Ok, we lost some milk. That was some work, but we have more milk to come and more in the fridge. She makes as much as we need and gives us as much as we can use every day. Sometimes spills happen. Just get another bucket and keep going.
Several milkings in, we can tell if she's going to kick. You can see the muscles start to move, the gradual shift in weight as she thinks she's going to get away with being difficult. And then one of us pulls the bucket away and puts it back to continue as if nothing had interrupted us. Sometimes she'll try and be sneaky and get another foot over but we're usually prepared for that, too.
But sometimes also, she's perfectly content chewing her cud. I shift from the milking stool to sitting on the stanchion and resting my head against her side to milk, depending on how she's standing. She is warm and smells like sweet toasted grass. Her milk smells that way too. The only time I'd ever been around cows in the past were those giant feed lots that smelled of sour manure, but Cookie always smells sweet and clean, even her cowpies don't stink.
When the quarters start to empty, the teats fill up more slowly, and the streams of milk lessen. The udder loses its tautness and hangs loosely between her legs. We squeeze out the last drops and usually Cookie is impatient to get back out at this point. We do a teat dip into iodine if she needs it, and then we shoo her out to spray down the stanchion and get it brushed clean. Usually her calf is up and waiting to see if we left him anything for breakfast (but he nurses all day on her whenever he wants so he can wait a little while if there isn't anything)---cows have this amazing ability to be able to hold back milk for their calf. Sometimes it will feel as if she is totally empty, not a drop left, and then when she's out, the calf is on nursing away and getting a frothy milk mustache. The hindmilk is the fatty cream part of the milk, so I have noticed on the days she is holding back, the creamline in the milk is 2-4 inches rather than 4-6 inches. I guess I could be grumpy about not getting all my cream, but the calf is getting so big and strong because of it.
The girls and I trek back to the house with the dirty buckets to be washed and the milk pail to be filtered for a second time---just to be sure there isn't anything in the milk. We drink our milk raw, you can take the extra step the pasteurize the milk at this point, but if you've ever seen my kitchen and the amount stuff that is always going on it in, you know I don't have time for that. Plus, it's wonderful raw. I use a wide canning funnel with a reusable stainless steel coffee bucket this time (the straining funnel doesn't fit into our jars). The bottles get labeled and they are put to chill immediately. Right now we get about a gallon a day, although one day, we made it out to milk the cow before the calf nursed and we ended up with over 2 gallons (he was a little upset by that). We estimate that she's probably making about 4-5 gallons a day, and she hasn't reached her peak production yet!
I thought that we would be swimming in milk and unable to use it up as fast as we were getting it, but through neighborhood swaps and all the milk science experiments, and just being a household of six, I believe we are doing pretty well in managing this beautiful product of our family cow.
I'll go into the details of all that we are doing with her milk in another post.
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