2016 Milk Production on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm

But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.  Matthew 10:30

In the last segment of our record-keeping for 2016, I want to talk about milk production on our little farm.  We keep records just to see where we are this year compared to last year or the years prior.  Yes, it is a little crazy, especially when sometimes the figures don't really mean a lot, when there are many variables involved, and when you have little to no control over what you are trying to track.

However, it is interesting to me, and history suggests that people have been keeping track of things for thousands of years.  I read where they actually uncovered baked clay tablets from ancient Egypt with cuneiform marks that tracked numbers of sheep and goats and wheat production.  Keeping a proper accounting of things has been done for a very long time, for good reason.

We have Jersey milk cows on our little farm.  At most we have 3 cows in milk.  At least we have none producing.  At some times of the year, we are milking 3 cows twice a day.  Sometimes only once a day.  Sometimes we share the milk with a calf. One of our three cows in milk only has 3 working teats, whereas the others have four.  What I'm trying to say is that it is difficult, if not impossible to learn much from what I'm about to show you.  It is simply interesting information.

The chart above shows milk production, by month in gallons.  For the year our cows gave 1400 gallons of milk.  Actually, they produced a little more.  We don't mark down the milk that we drink in our records.  Perhaps we should.  As a family, we drink about 2.5 gallons of milk each week, so more accurately, the cows produced 1,530 gallons of milk in 2016.

Whole milk weighs approximately 8.6 pounds.  If you multiply 1,530 by 8.6, you get 13,158 pounds of milk for the year.  If you divide 13,158 by 2000, the cows produced about 6.6 tons of milk!  That seems like a lot - and it is, but we don't really push our cows milk production by giving them an extreme amount of food.   We give them the recommended amount of food.

I guess it sounds like a whole lot of milk when I think that we had to carry all of that milk (6.6 tons) from the barn to the house.  That sounds like an impossible task, but it goes to show you that a whole lot is possible when you do it a little at a time. That applies to a lot in life - not just carrying buckets of milk.