What We Do When Our Cows are Dry

We mentioned a few posts ago that all of our cows are dry.  We've no fresh milk.  A veterinarian came and palpated our cows to find that LuLu is two-month's pregnant and should be calving somewhere around July 2026.  With no cows currently in milk and the fact that we have dried up our goats from which we were getting fresh goat milk each day, a big question arises.  What do we do about milk for personal use?

In today's post, I'll show you.  Fortunately for us, we have good friends with cows in milk.  It is from these friends that we borrowed a bull to breed our cows.  Our little bull, Nicky, came from these friend's bull, Nick, that we brought to our farm to breed the cows.  Back to the story - these friends are 8.8 miles due north from us.  They have a PMA (Private Membership Association) that affords members to access directly farm products produced on site.  

These folks are wonderful Christian people and do things the right way.  Come along with us as we pick up a gallon of milk this week.  We put an ice chest in the back of the vehicle and in less than 10 minutes, we arrive at Grace Ranch.  They have a very nice building for members to pick up the many products they produce off their farm.

As we walk inside, everything is clean and orderly.  There are three coolers and freezers on the east wall loaded with fresh offerings: Eggs, kombucha, raw milk, raw cream, yogurt, broth, chocolate milk, and beef products.  No one is in the store.  It's honor system.  There's a notebook where you log the jars you return, the products you're picking up, and the amount of cash you're leaving.

A receipt taped to the jars details what's being held for you.  This week we have two half gallon jars of 100% Jersey milk waiting for us:

A professional label lists the product, the size, and (I like this!) the name of the cow providing this week's milk (Molly, in this case) and when it was produced.  It doesn't get much fresher than this!  Except, of course, when our Jersey cows are in milk.

As we leave, there's a posting of what Harvest of Grace stands for and their commitment to the families they serve:

Top-notch people producing quality products for local families interested in real food.  We support them and will continue to do so until sometime in July when LuLu calves and we are back in milk here at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  So what do we do when our cows are dry?  Well, we feel blessed to have friends that we can source raw milk from while our cows are not in milk production.  

The Dairy Daily Diary

Tonight I'll bring you up to date with what's going on with the milking operations at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  We're milking one cow (LuLu) and two goats.  We drink all we can and sell the rest.  Despite the high heat LuLu, our Jersey cow, yields rich milk, high in butterfat.  Look at the cream line in that gallon jar of milk!  The cream rises to the top and almost a third of it is heavy cream - perfect for butter or whipped cream, excellent in coffee or for making ice cream.

I walked out in the pasture in the late afternoon.  Cows aren't super smart, but they aren't super dumb most of the time, either.  Notice how Rosie and Elsie are grazing in the shade.  They follow the shade out and wait until the shadows lengthen before they move on out.  Belle is guarding her charge, too.

LuLu is grazing by herself, but she's following the same protocol.  She'll move on out as the shadows lengthen.

Here is Rosie in the foreground.  She is 18 years old!  She is the first Jersey calf born on our property.  She was a champion show cow in her time and gave us many wonderful calves over the years.  Her time is getting short, however, and we'll have to make some hard decisions soon.

Here's Elsie.  She's a bossy beast, if there ever was one.  She is still a heifer.  She should have calved two years ago.  We had the veterinarian come and check her out when she never got pregnant.  He found a cyst on her ovary and got rid of it.  She was going into heat every cycle, but still never got pregnant.  She's a fat, good looking Jersey, but if she's only going to eat and not give us calves and milk, well... the clock is ticking for you Elsie, girl.  The pressure is on.

We'll see.  We haven't seen her go in heat for the last several cycles and Tricia seems to think her udder is showing some changes.  Is hope on the horizon for this heifer?  Funny, I pray every single morning that our cows get pregnant.  As I said, we'll see...

And this is LuLu.  I call her LuLu Boofaloo.  She has been in milk now for two years come July.  That's a long time to be milking a cow.  We need a break and she does too.  We plan on drying her off on July 4th.  Independence Day (in more ways than one.)  We've seen her milk production really fall off.  It could be the heat or the time in milk, but it could be that she's bred, too.  We will find out in due time.

Here is the bull.  Nicky.  He's a registered Jersey like Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu.  He, hopefully, has planted his fertile seed.  When the girls had not gotten pregnant, I had talked to a neighbor down the road.  He has a Holstein Jersey cross.  He wants to trade me his bull for Nicky.  That way we'd learn if Nicky is "hot" or fertile.  Introducing a bull with Holstein would make calves with more volume.  Holsteins give more milk, but Jerseys give richer milk.  I'm thinking we'll just keep Nicky, but if he's not going to be successful in his breeding endeavors, we'll make necessary adjustments.  We send our bulls to be processed to fill our freezer and it's pretty empty right now.

The pasture is holding up pretty good right now, thanks to the lime Dad and I broadcast in the early spring as well as the wonderful rains we have been getting.  Cows head down is something you like to see.  Later, when they sit, chewing their cud, you know they are happy creatures.

That's gonna be a wrap in the Dairy Daily Diary.  

Too Much Milk? Make Cheese!

A family that purchases milk from us went on vacation.  That meant we had a lot of milk on hand.  Normally when that happens, we make a bunch of ice cream and/or butter.  We can't let LuLu's good milk go to waste.  This time we figured, "Let's make cheese!"  Mozzarella is about the easiest to make.  Let's get started.  We pour 1 gallon of fresh milk into a pot and get it to 55 degrees.  This is whole milk.  None of the cream has been skimmed off.

1 1/2 teaspoons of citric acid dissolved in 1/2 cup cool water is prepared.  This is called inoculation.  It slightly acidifies the milk so that the rennet works.

This goes into the milk that is at 55 degrees, and it is stirred up.

Then 1/4 teaspoon of rennet is diluted in 1/2 cup cool water.  The rennet is the coagulation stage.  This causes the acidified milk protein to coagulate.

The rennet is added when the milk is 90 degrees.  We stir it up real good and then leave the pot alone for 5 minutes.

Next thing you know, you have curds!  It is the consistency of custard.  Once it is firm, you begin cutting all the way to the bottom.

Once the curds are cut, you put the pot back on the stove and heat the curds to 105 degrees F.  You'll want to gently stir the curds. Then remove the pot from the heat and stir for five minutes.  The liquid substance with the curds is whey.  Remember Little Miss Muffet?  She was eating her curds and whey.  

We then scoop out the curds with a sieve.

We work the curds, squeezing softly, to try to remove as much whey as possible.  We keep the whey.  We'll show you what we do with it in a later blog.  The curds are formed into three baseball-sized balls.

Then we heat the whey in the pot to 175 degrees and add 1/4 salt to the whey.  We put the balls of whey one by one into a ladle and dip into the heated whey for several seconds.  Each time we remove, we'll knead the curds.  The cheese gets smooth and shiny.  We do this for 3 or 4 iterations.

As you keep doing it the cheese gets elastic.

Did I say elastic?  I mean REALLY elastic!

The mozzarella cheese is done!  We roll them into balls.  One of the balls will be eaten warm, while the other two will be cooled in ice water and then stored in the refrigerator.

This is the one that is still warm.  I sliced it and dipped into some extra virgin olive oil with some sea salt and black pepper.

What a treat!  Homemade mozzarella is easy to make and easier to eat.  

Land Flowing With Milk and Honey

The lights are burning in the barn.  LuLu has been in milk for 14 months now.  We've finally weaned her bull calf, Nick, and he's in the back pasture that we call "the bull pen."  As the cows go into heat, we run them into the bull pen to be with Nick until after they've finished with standing heat.  Our goal is to get Rosie and LuLu bred and the big heifer, Elsie, bred for the first time.  

We're milking LuLu in the morning and at night.  She's not making a whole lot of milk, but we're trying to keep her cleaned out so that she doesn't get mastitis.  LuLu has been a pretty good milker.  Since Nick was weaned, she's making SO much cream.  Sometimes almost half of the bucket is heavy cream!

Here is our inventory in the fridge of LuLu milk.  It's all dated and we use the First in, First out method to make sure it doesn't go bad.  We get real creative with different things to do with milk when we have a good supply like this.

Cream rises to the top, so you can see what I mean about the rich Jersey milk from LuLu.  We skim the cream off the top and shake up the rest.  So delicious!

Lately, we've been making lots of butter and stockpiling it.  Butter freezes nicely, so we're building up stores of butter in the freezer.

We also have more fresh-churned butter in the fridge ready to slather on piping hot sourdough bread.

At some point here pretty soon, we'll dry off LuLu and that means we'll have a break from milking until the cows calve and freshen.  We're still milking Agnes, the goat.  Tricia plans on freezing some of her milk to make some goat milk soap.  We talked about milk tonight.  I've a story to tell you about honey, but I'll save that for another night.

Progress Report on LuLu

In the middle of the long, hot summer last year, LuLu gave birth to her first calf, Nicky.  Calving in the worst possible time of year wasn't bad enough.  We happened to be in a drought.  We had no grass.  LuLu was in stress from labor and delivery and had no strength.  We babied her and her calf.  We ran water hoses to try to keep one small patch of pasture alive with bermuda grass.  We drenched her with molasses and gave her a calcium supplement.  

In all truth, we thought that we were going to lose her.  Slowly, she rebounded.  She and Nicky, although stressed, made it.  This year, the grass in the pasture is growing as we've had lots more rain than last year.  LuLu is a small cow and isn't a particularly large producer of milk like our other cows.  We get between a half gallon to a gallon each day.  She seems to have perfected the art of holding back her milk for her calf.  She is able, somehow, to not let her milk drop for us.  She's real tricky like that.

It's hot in the barn so we keep the fans running while she eats.  That helps in two ways:  It cools us and her down and it blows the mosquitoes away.

You can see we have some hay twine wrapped around her rear end that holds her tail out of the way.  LuLu will show her annoyance at us, if you don't wrap her tail, by swishing us in the face with her tail.  Although that's not such a bad thing, it is not an enjoyable experience if her tail is wet with dew or urine.

We hobble one of her back legs to a cleat on the 4x4.  That keeps her from kicking the bucket.  We've learned that lesson the hard way, having milked mostly a full bucket and then having her kick it over and spill the whole thing!  Hence the old saying, "You can't cry over spilled milk."  She isn't the type cow to kick you to hurt you, so that's a good thing.

We are talking about weaning Nicky within the next month.  That will take some of the stress off of LuLu for the peak summer months.  Plus, he's a big galoot and able to make it on grass as he approaches his one year birthday.  We'll be focusing on getting LuLu re-bred and Elsie bred to yield spring calves in 2025.

Treating LuLu's Mastitis

One morning we went out to milk LuLu and when we started to milk, something wasn't quite right.  LuLu is normally a gentle milker, but she kicked and kicked.  Tricia noticed that she was kicking when Nicky tried to nurse.  He's rough with her.  In a few days, she wasn't as sensitive, but she allowed Nicky to suckle.  The next time we went to milk her, we could tell that the left front teat was hard.  When we started to milk, it was difficult to get the milk to flow properly.  It was as if there was something messed up in the teat.  We assume that somehow Nicky, LuLu's bull calf, did something in nursing that messed it up.  

Due to the fact that the teat was damaged by Nicky, she didn't allow him to completely empty it out and LuLu got subclinical  mastitis in that front teat.  Tricia did the California Mastitis Test and confirmed that she had a slight case, even though there was no visible sign of mastitis in the milk from that teat.  The other teats were clear, so we've continued milking those for us.  We're leaving the affected teat for Nicky to clean up.  In a few days, the teat didn't appear to have the same difficulty in milking, but a trace of mastitis was still there.  

We knew that we needed to treat that front teat.  Tricia uses Synergy Animal Products product called Superior Cow Cream to put on the udder and Ex-Cell Countdown 7000 to treat up the affected teat into the quarter.  We got LuLu and Nicky together and let him completely empty her out.

We filled a syringe with 30 ml of product with a teat infusion cannula on the end.  We make sure we keep everything sterile.  We wash the teat with an alcohol swab.

The syringe is inserted into the affected teat.  You would have thought that she would kick, but she didn't.  She is used to standing there, without kicking, while we milk her.

The product was slowly injected.

And soon was emptied into the quarter.

We keep the the calf, Nicky, away from LuLu all day long.  Twelve hours later, we let him nurse and repeated with a second dose.  We separated them.  The next morning, we put them together, let him nurse, and then finished up with the third and final dose.  By the time the third dose was inserted, she kicked a little, letting us know that she was not happy with the treatments.

We'll now wait for seven days and then do another California Mastitis test on that teat to see if she is clear.  If it isn't, there are other products that we can try to resolve it.  In the meantime, we'll continue milking the other 3 quarters.  We'll see how the results from the test turn out and how we'll proceed in a week.

Fresh Milk from LuLu

LuLu gave birth to a little bull calf back in the hottest point of this summer in the middle of a drought with not much forage to eat.  Poor LuLu was so run down with the heat and rigors of labor and delivery that her condition deteriorated.  She got real skinny.  We babied her.  At several points, we didn't know if she was going to survive.  We drenched her with molasses, gave her minerals and supplements and what do you know?  'Ol LuLu pulled through.

She's not in terrific shape as the pasture went from full drought to dormancy for the fall/winter.  She's eating hay and a little sweet feed.  We have decided not to push her with daily milkings and have, instead, allowed her little bull calf to nurse on her at will.  Normally, we'd let them stay together and then separate the cow and calf overnight so we'd get the morning milk.  Instead, the calf has been getting all the milk and we haven't been milking.  This morning that changed.  We decided to slowly start milking.

Here is the bull calf.  We named him Nicky.  His daddy's name was Nick.  As we walked out this morning Nick was posing in his winter coat in front of the hay.  I nicknamed him "Nicky Hay-ley." 

We brought LuLu into the barn and quickly milked her while she ate her breakfast.  Since this is her first time in milk, she's a little nervous, but she doesn't kick while we milk her.  Tricia gets the two teats on the left and I sit on a stool on the right and get the two teats on that side.  In no time, we're done.

We milk into a stainless steel pail and use a muslin cloth as a filter to keep out the dust, hair, flies, hay, etc.  

Fresh, delicious, raw milk.  Tricia used some of this to make a big broccoli cheese soup using some of the broccoli florets we picked later in the afternoon.

The milk is still warm at this time as it just came out of the udder.  We pour it into half gallon sized mason jars and quickly chill it in the fridge.  LuLu isn't making a lot.  This morning we got just shy of a gallon of milk.

Once it has chilled for a bit, the cream rises to the top.  That is skimmed off and used for making butter, whipped cream to top homemade pies, or for coffee.

For years we milked every. single. morning.  It's been nice to have a break for a while.  But it's also nice to now have milk!  Funny thing is, fresh raw milk is, to us, a completely different product than the stuff from the store.  Good to have the real stuff back in our ice box!

Time To Wean Elsie

We've reached a point well past the time for weaning.  We want to wean the calves and dry off the cows so that we can bring them to a neighbor down the road that has a registered Jersey bull.  There we'll have our cows bred, have them calve and allow them to freshen.  In about 6 months we'll do the same for our yearling calves - Elsie and LuLu.

So we're weaning Elsie first.  We use a weaning device.  We did use this one several years ago.  It is called a nose thorn.  That doesn't sound pleasant, does it?  You put it in the heifer's nose (ouch!)  The object of this device is that when the calf tries to nurse the momma cow, the pointed thorns poke her bag and she kicks the calf off of her udder and won't let her nurse.

We've also used this weaner.  It has the same general idea.  You put it in the calf's nose, pull the two pieces together and then tighten up a wing nut. You bend the pointed things outward and when they try to nurse, the pointed things poke the momma and she kicks her off.  Over time, the calf gets tired of getting pushed away and she stops trying - meanwhile the momma cow "dries up."

This was a new weaner available at the feed store.  It was a little more pricey than the other two, but we wanted to try this one out.  It works the same way the other two work.

With much fighting, we were able to get the weaner in Elsie's nose.  After much kicking, dust flying and rodeoing in the corral, we finally got the weaner in.  At this point, amidst all of the chaos, we didn't realize that we put it on BACKWARDS!  I tell you, they say you learn by your mistakes.  It seems like we should be really smart, because we make a lot of them.

If you could capture this photo, It'd say, "What did you just do to me and how am I supposed to eat??"

To answer the eating question, it is amazing how quickly they learn that you must stretch your head out, pull your head forward, and the weaner lays flat against the ground, allowing you to eat grass while pulling your head back to you.  In the photo below, Elsie's momma, Clarabelle, is wondering what that contraption is on her daughter's nose.

Elsie looked at us as we left the barn.  She had mischief on her mind.  She went out to the pasture.  The next morning we found her without her weaner on.  Tricia and I walked up and down the pasture until we found it laying on the ground.  She had apparently found a way to pry it out of her nose.

In losing the weaner, she was able to get to Clarabelle and drink all of her milk!  Oh no.  So, we resorted to the old tried and true weaner.  You'll see below, we have it installed.

We have this one installed properly!  So far she hasn't pried this one out of her nose.  We'll keep a close eye on old Elsie, though.  She is cunning and crafty.  If we can keep this in her nose, we'll be successful in weaning her.