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.

Just in the Nick of Time

It was about 19 months ago that we borrowed a registered Jersey bull from a friend who lives about 10 minutes away from us.  The bull's name was Nick, and that dude was big and not halter broken.  We didn't know how things were going to work out, but he ended up being gentle and we got him to the house.  We unloaded him and he was able to breed LuLu.  Elsie did NOT get bred.  As it turned out, she had a cyst on her ovary and hopefully we got that fixed.  Rose Ethel did not get bred, either.  We think that she may be past her 'child-rearing' years.  She's old.  But you never know.  Abram laughed when he was told that Sarai would give him a son in his old age.

It's been almost a year since LuLu's bull calf, that we named Nicky, was born.  He was born at the hottest point of the year, during a drought.  LuLu was extremely stressed after calving and we thought that we were going to lose her.  We kept her alive by keeping a water sprinkler going that kept a small patch of bermuda grass growing and by feeding her sweet potato vines after she stopped eating.  We drenched her with molasses, too.  She pulled through and has raised a nice calf.  He's coming up on a year old on August 6th.  Here is Nick today:

Up to this point, he's been docile, but in our experience with previous Jersey bulls, that changes as they mature.  We're starting to notice that with Nick.  He uses his head as a weapon, threatening to come at you.  He'll also push the water troughs all over the barnyard.  He just likes hitting things with his big, meaty head.  We don't want one of those "things" he hits to be us, so we never turn our backs to him.

Our plans for him are what our plans have been for every Jersey bull calf born on our little farm - we'll eat him.  We'll give him another six or eight months to mature and, most importantly breed LuLu, Rosie, and Elsie and then we'll take him to the slaughterhouse.  We'll get all the meat, organs, bones, and tallow.  We use almost everything off of the animal.  It may seem cruel to some, but meat comes from somewhere, and that somewhere might as well be from our pasture where he's lived a good life, eating grass, with no antibiotics, hormones or medications.  

Nick Goes Home

Nick is a Jersey Bull that we've "borrowed" from some friends down the road.  He had a very specific job to do and that was to seduce our Jersey cow, Rosie and our two Jersey heifers, Elsie and LuLu.  Exactly four weeks ago today, we picked him up and brought him to Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  He is a big dude and he's not halter broken.  My immediate concern was, "How in the world are we going to load him back up in the trailer when it is time for him to go?"  We don't have a corral or loading chute.  It might end up being an adventure - or impossible.

We're kind of "fly by the seat of your pants" folks.  I just thought that we'd deal with that problem when we had to deal with it.  First things first - we had to get our three animals bred.  Cows have a 21 day cycle.  It's been four weeks.  We see no more 'activity' so we're thinking the romancing is done.  But here's the thing: We saw evidence of the two heifers going in heat, but never Rosie.  Even with the heifers in heat, we never Nick and our cows consummate their relationship, if you know what I mean,  but, we weren't watching 24/7.  There was programming on a TV network Nickelodeon a long time ago called "Nick at Nite."  Perhaps Nick was amorous at night, hidden from view.  We hope so.

So today we had a window of time between morning and evening worship service to load up Nick and bring him back home.  How was this going to work?

We backed the cattle trailer to the gate and opened it up, chaining the gate to the trailer, so there was no way for him to escape.  Then I got a bucket of sweet feed to coax him with, because everyone knows the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

Nick was very suspicious.  I opened an escape door in the back of the trailer and then walked backwards with the bucket, luring him to the open gate.  Slowly, slowly...  I got him to where he got his front two feet in the trailer.  Benjamin ran up from behind to shut the back gate in back of him.  Ol' Nick figured out what was up and he backed up in a hurry.

I'm not one to give up easily.  This time I led him with the feed and let him get a good taste of the molasses-laden sweet feed.  He liked it!  I pulled it away and walked into the trailer, setting the bucket in the very front.  I walked out of the side gate of the trailer and waited.  Nick jumped up in the trailer and Benjamin slammed the cattle trailer gate closed.  Got 'em!  Nick was not happy that he'd been hoodwinked.  We fastened the gates shut with ropes and began the ten mile drive back to Nick's home.

Three ladies bid Ol' Nick farewell.  They'll miss him, but it'll mean more hay and feed for them.

A cows' gestation period is nine months, so we'll hopefully have three calves somewhere around August of 2023.  That means we'll be milking again in September.  C'mon Nick.  I hope you did your job and our cows are carrying.