How in the World Did we Begin Milking Cows?

If you've been following our blog, you know we milk cows.  We started down this path many years ago.  I know that I might have talked about, at some point or another, about the genesis of this decision, but for some reason, (perhaps to justify to myself), I'll attempt to explain again today.

To begin, I've shown below LuLu, one of our two Jersey heifers.  She's a pretty little thing.  She's healthy and playful and looks to be a great addition to our mini herd going forward.

To the left of LuLu on the other side of the bale, is Rosie.  That's LuLu's mother.  She's getting up there in age.  Clarabelle (not pictured) is the mother of Elsie (not pictured) and she's getting up in age as well.  Our intention is for LuLu and Elsie to replace Rosie and Clarabelle on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.

LuLu was born on 6/14/21 and currently weighs 440 pounds.  Elsie was born on 4/7/21 and currently weighs 514 pounds.  About every other year, Rosie and Clarabelle give us calves.  When they are bulls, we raise them for a year and a half and then take them to be processed.  They provide meat for our freezer.  Grass fed, no hormones, no antibiotics, and about as natural as you can get, although not organic.  When the calves are heifers, we generally keep them, but have sold them on several occasions.  There is a good market for Jersey cows.  Their milk is rich, having the highest butterfat content in relation to other breeds.

So what made us start this?  Although I was raised on a farm, we didn't milk cows.  Tricia was raised in a city and certainly didn't milk cows.  Prior to getting cows, we got laying hens and daily collected fresh eggs.  It was always a great thing for kids.  I recall my children going out to the chicken tractor with a basket and collecting eggs.  It was a fun thing.  But milk cows?  Tricia and her quest for health, was the catalyst for this decision.  She wanted a milk cow and, well, I got her one.  Buttercup, who we always just called "Mama Cow," (with a calf by her side) arrived and was greeted with much excitement.  One day later after milking, or attempting to milk Mama Cow, Tricia cried, saying, "Can we do this, Kyle?"  Many years later, we're still doing it, so the answer was in the affirmative.

But let's go back and expand on the why.  We had a number of health issues in our family that Tricia researched in the area of gut health, and determined that drinking raw milk provides beneficial bacteria to the gut as well as other nutritive benefits.  Pasteurization heats the milk, killing off good bacteria along with the bad.  We didn't want to do that.  There are many people who are like-minded and seek out raw milk for the exact same benefits.

While we are talking benefits, let's talk about more of them.  Milking cows is a pastoral, peaceful thing.  Many mornings, especially cold, rainy mornings, we don't want to go out there and milk, but once you get out there, you are glad you did.  The cows are glad to see you.  The barn is cozy.  The routine is relaxing.  We hand milk, and that takes about 20 minutes.  When you sit on the stool and begin to milk, it is the PERFECT time to pray.  While the milk squirts in the bucket rhythmically, we talk to God, thanking Him, confessing our short-comings, and calling out our family member's and friend's names in prayer.

A family cow is a great way to teach kids responsibility.  They need to be fed and watered.  They need to be cared for.  Our kids showed livestock.  The nice thing about a dairy cow is that the cows are a continuous project.  You show the same animal year after year.  A bond is made between the child and the animal and a tenderness and sense of care results. 

Having fresh milk is a benefit in the kitchen, having fresh cream for coffee or whipped cream or butter making, having milk for drinking or making ice cream or sour cream, being able to make kefir or cheese, having the by-product of whey for lacto-fermenting.  It is a life long endeavor and we still learn things.  The book, "Keeping a Family Cow," was a great resource for us when getting started.  Living in a small rural town, there are many families that have dairy cows that are a library of knowledge when we have had questions or problems.

There are some drawbacks, to be sure.  Cows don't take weekends off.  Or holidays.  They have to be milked every day.  Vacations must be planned.  Excursions or day-long family events are always planned with the question, "Do we milk before we go or after we come back?"  We've milked many times very late at night.  Although it only takes 20 minutes to milk, you must come back to the house from the barn and pour the milk and sanitize the bucket and rag we use to filter the milk through.  Cows are hard work.  They can be stubborn and hard-headed.  They step on your toes.  They swish a urine soaked tail across your face from time to time.

Cows and calves sometimes die.  As they are around for more than a decade, you develop a sort of friendship with these gentle animals and it is hard when they die.  But that's life.  The positives definitely outweigh the negatives.  We try to live a simple life and milking cows hearkens back to the rural, family farms of times past, and I like that.

Our plans in the next several months is to wean LuLu and Elsie and, when they are breeding age, bring them and their mothers down the road to a neighbor that has registered Jersey bulls, for them to all be bred.  Then the cycle begins again!  It is a journey, for sure.  If anyone has any questions, post a comment below, and I'll be happy to try to answer them.

The Last Show

Benjamin is a senior this year.  He's also the baby of the family.  We started out many years ago with his brother and sister, Russ & Laura Lee, showing Boer goats.  Then in 2012 we moved to showing dairy cows.  This is the "last rodeo."  We loaded Rosie and her little bull, "Aussie" and Clarabelle in the trailer and headed to Gonzales for the State Livestock Show.  We stopped in Scott, Louisiana (the Boudin Capital of the World) as has become the tradition, and went the the Best Stop for boudin and pepper jack wraps.  Pepper Jack wraps are a guilty pleasure consisting of boudin with pepper jack cheese on top rolled into an egg roll wrapper and then deep fried.  Wow!

The animals patiently waited as we purchased boudin

Speaking of wrapping, Benjamin wrapped up his showing career.  It was kind of bittersweet.  Showing livestock is a lot of work, often in freezing cold weather washing the animals, knee-deep mud, ubiquitous cow poop, and, this year, radiators blowing up on us on the way to the District Show.  However, it is a labor of love.  Showing livestock teaches work ethic.  It teaches doing your best in the ring.  The animal may not always behave, but you continue to do your best.

Unfortunately, in Benjamin's senior year, his animals were not competitive.  Rosie is an aged cow and Clarabelle did not get bred in time to calve prior to the show.  But that's okay.  We're proud of Benjamin.  He did his best in the ring and did not give up.

Benjamin's sister even came in to cheer him on!

During the years of showing, we've been able to meet great people in the Jefferson Davis Parish Dairy Club, forging friendships that won't ever be forgotten. 

The families we show livestock with work hard, but play hard, helping one another out and we're grateful for that. 

Kyle (Not me, another Kyle) & Benjamin

As the animals were loaded in the trailer for the ride home, their showing days are done.  They'll never leave Our Maker's Acres Family Farm again.

More importantly, Benjamin's showing days are over.  Another milestone in the march toward adulthood.  Hopefully, he'll have good memories of his showing days and experiences with livestock.

Sunflower Power

Before we switched to a packaged Dairy Ration to feed our dairy cows, we mixed our own ration.  One of the components of the ration was Black Oil Sunflower Seeds.  Black Oil Sunflower seeds give supplemental nutrition to cows, specifically fatty acids and higher milk protein.  Since switching to the ration, we haven't purchased sunflower seeds for them.  We feel that they are getting good nutrition from the ration AND a 50 lb bag of black oil sunflower seeds was doggone expensive!

My parents went on their annual trip to South Dakota to visit with family and friends and to hunt for pheasants and brought back two sunflower heads for us.  I have them pictured below.  I should have put my hand in the photo for comparison purposes as you can't really discern the size of the sunflowers.  Trust me, they are bigger than my head!  The item on top of them is one of the many louffa gourds we grow, and I'll post on that perhaps later this week.

We ate some of the seeds right off the head but decided to go ahead and feed the rest to the milk cows.  These, I think, are confectionary sunflower seeds and not black oil sunflower seeds, but I read that they are still considered beneficial feed for cattle.  It was a beautiful afternoon, so Tricia and I stood on the back patio and pulled all the seeds off the heads and captured them in a bucket.

I snacked on a few walking to the barn.  They taste great right off the flower head.  Mom & Dad also bring us bags of South Dakota sunflowers in dill pickle flavor, barbecue flavor, and bacon flavor.  We devour those things!  The cows, however, are getting the regular unsalted flavor.

Since Benjamin will be showing Clarabelle in the Jefferson Davis Parish Livestock Show, we decided to give her the sunflower seeds so she'd get the benefit of the fat supplement in her diet.  Oddly, she picked around the seeds and only ate the dairy ration.  She lifted her big head and chewed funny.  I guess the texture was new to her.  I certainly didn't want to waste the South Dakota sunflowers.  I thought about feeding them to our hens, but then Tricia suggested that we feed them to our other dairy cow, Rosie.  She's in milk and could benefit from the seeds.  We dumped them into her trough, and she quickly gobbled them all up and moaned for more.  Clarabelle's pickiness caused her to lose out on a mighty fine and nutritious meal. 

2015 State Livestock Show - Gonzales, Louisiana

Hundreds of Louisiana youth flocked to Gonzales, Louisiana last week for the 80th Annual State Livestock Show at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center.  It is a fine facility that has been hosting the State Show for quite some time now.  When I was younger and showing sheep, the State Livestock Show was held on the LSU campus.  I assume that it was moved to Gonzales due to the traffic congestion/parking issues on campus each year.

As a boy, I'd look forward to the livestock shows as it afforded the opportunity to get out of class for a few days as an excused absence.  I remember having so much fun running around with my buddies, unloading our Show Boxes that we made in Vo-Ag class, setting up our Parish Area, getting ready for the show, and then having the nervous butterflies in your stomach as show time arrived.

As much as things change, many things stay the same and Benjamin participated in the exact same things as I did - but 34 years later!  He had the opportunity to ride with a friend a day earlier than us and stayed in their camper with them.  They went out to eat and I got the following text from him: "Dad, we went out to eat at TJ Ribs and I got a half rack of pork ribs, 1/4 of a chicken, red beans and rice. and fries.  I think I gained 5 pounds!"  Some things do change - I never ate quite that good at livestock shows!

Benjamin brought his heifer, Amy, a Jersey Dairy animal, to the show.  We decided to leave Daisy and Rosie, our two Jersey cows in milk at home this year.  The Showmanship competition began Saturday and exhibitors wear white shirts and bring their animals in the ring.  The judge is looking at the ability of the exhibitors to show their animals - not the quality of the animal.  The classes are broken up by age group of the exhibitor and it doesn't matter what dairy breed the animal is.

Bringing Amy in the ring

Benjamin was a little reticent about showing Amy as, wouldn't you it, she was in heat.  When animals are in heat, they jump on other animals, on you, and on passers-by.  It is embarrassing and they are hard to handle and it was unfortunate timing...  But that is life.  You deal with it, control them the best you can, and move forward.

Showmanship (You can see the many different breeds of dairy cattle: Jersey, Holstein, Ayrshire, & Guernsey)

In Showmanship, the exhibitor must watch the judge very closely, as the judge is motioning directions.  Eye contact is critical as you want to stop and set your animal up quickly when the judge instructs you to.

Keep your eyes on the prize

The judge makes his way around and asks questions to each exhibitor to ensure that each boy or girl has been involved in his/her project.  In the photo below, the judge is asking Benjamin:

"What is your heifer's name?"

"When is her birthday?"

"How much food do you feed her?"

"What is her sire's name?"

Benjamin getting questions from the judge

In the end, Benjamin did a fine job.  He placed Seventh in his class and received a nice yellow ribbon.  When I looked at the ribbon, I remembered that the very best I ever did at State showing sheep was Seventh Place.  I have a ribbon in my old bedroom at Mom & Dad's somewhere that is exactly the same color, shape, and size.

Seventh best Showman in the State in the 13 year old class

Here is Benjamin's haul of ribbons from the Parish, District, and State Livestock Shows for 2015. The three on the left are from State.  After placing Seventh in Showmanship, he went on to get Fifth place in the Jersey heifer class and Second Place in Louisiana Bred Jersey heifer.

It's really not about the ribbons, though.  It is about making memories and putting your efforts into a project that teaches work ethic, responsibility, patience, time-management, character-building, budgeting and compassion - all valuable traits that will serve them well throughout adulthood.  They are indeed Learning By Doing - which just so happens to be the 4-H Motto!