2018 Milk Production - By the Numbers

In the final installment of "By the Numbers" for 2018, we'll discuss milk.  During the year of 2018, we milked 3 of our cows, Rosie, Luna, and Clarabelle.  We didn't have all three of them in milk at the same time for very long.  It is hard to milk 3 cows twice a day and have any semblance of a life.  Tricia often says it would be so nice to have a milk maid.

As with rainfall and egg production, we chart milk production.  Here are figures for 2018:

July was the big month and December was the smallest month, but you can't really glean anything from the times as the primary factor is how many cows you are milking.  It also needs to be noted that we aren't going into this shooting for big production figures.  If that were so we'd have Holsteins instead of Jerseys.  Holsteins produce the largest volume, while Jerseys produce milk with a high butterfat percentage.  Furthermore, our cows are primarily grass-fed, so we aren't feeding them a high protein diet to boost their milk production.  One additional thing to keep in mind is the fact that until the calves are weaned, we share the milk with the calves.  This means for half of the day, the cows produce milk for their calf.  We then separate the momma from the calf and the milk made on that half of the day is for us.  The milk the calves drink is (obviously) not measured.

Nevertheless, the volume produced in our little dairy from our little farm sitting on 3 acres is pretty good, for us:

In total the girls produced 780 gallons of milk that was measured.  Milk weighs 8.6 pounds per gallon.  Over the course of the year, we lugged 6,709 pounds of milk from the barn into our home.  Put another way, Tricia and I carried 3.35 tons of milk into the house.

"You move 3.35 tons, and what do you get?  Another day older and deeper in debt.  St. Peter don't you call me, cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store..."  (Maybe the song didn't go exactly like that.)