Category: milking

Dottie, post milking and returned to the pasture. The black cow in the black of pre-dawn is challenging for a picture. This was the best of the lot.

Dottie was fantastic again today, meeting is in the pasture ready to milk and allowing herself to be halter led from pasture a all the way to the milking stanchion. She still balks at entering the stanchion but that will pass quickly as she learns it’s where the food and milking happen.

We got about 2 gallons of milk this morning so all in all things are progressing very nicely.

The inmates were both here this morning and are moving the cows to a new paddock and setting up the weeks paddocks. We still have a lot of logging to do and hopefully we will get some extra time this week to get a few more trees ready to send to the mill.

Today we had our second day of milking the new cow. Unlike yesterday where she was in the barn, this morning we had her out in the pasture with the other cows. You never know how that’s going to go but she came right up to is and was very interested in the food bucket. After a few munches I was able to walk her by halter to the milk parlor where she only balked for a few seconds before going in to be milked. 2 1/2 gallons of sweet Jersey milk later and she was done.

Pictured here you see Spork out this morning at 6am. He is part of the morning crew but what made this even more impressive is that he and a bunch of of the rest of us went out to see The Hobbit last night and didn’t get to bed till after 11pm. Not a complaint from the boy this morning. He jumped right on his chores. The girls, not so much.

So we made an executive decision this morning and the new milk cow will be named Dottie. I don’t know if we need to have a renaming ceremony like you do with a boat. After the issues we had with Maggie, I think its sounding like a better and better idea.

Today we had our first milking from our new milk cow. Despite the black coat, she is another Jersey. Here you can see the last milking being done at the previous owners place. This is the same guy, Mike, who we bought Maggie from. This was his last milk cow and as you can see by his 5 year old son sitting atop her, she is another gentle cow.

Here is another shot of her previous situation. She was a little fussy over the new people being involved but overall she seems to be a good cow.

Luckily Mike is just down the road on Penny Road so it was only a 15 minute ride home for our new cow. She is already bred back to an Angus so she shouldn’t get too much attention from Benjamin. Plus she has been bull bred rather than AI so she more used to a bulls attention. She is 3 years old so hopefully we should have many years together Lord willing.

This morning milking in our milking parlor. Just a few minutes work and she went right into the gate. All things considered milking went well and the reports on the milk quality range from “Fantastic!” to “Mmm that’s like drinking ice cream.”

We have yet to name this cow. I have heard a few suggestions go by, Dottie and Dolly being two suggestions. We’ll have to have a quorum and decide on a final name. I actually like Dottie of the suggestions so far. I am sure that there will be a name soon.

Scratch what I said yesterday. Here is todays haul and that was pretty much from one side. The calf had emptied the other side of Spunkys bag so this was a half load. I think the calf is an early riser and that’s why we are getting such different amounts. It depends on how far he has made it around when we get to her. That’s a solvable problem as we can isolate her from her calf at night like we used to so she has a full bag in the morning or we can graft the calf onto another cow and get all her milk. Either way she is producing all we need and we can get more should we choose. All is well again on the farm.

Btw, that’s Spork doing the work to get the bottles labeled and into the fridge.

We are getting all the milk we need from Spunky each day. However we are not getting all the milk she is producing. She’s holding back for her calf seemingly a little more each day. We like to keep the calf on her because it’s better for the calf, we don’t need all the milk, and this gives us an option if we cannot milk one day.

It does create this holding back problem though. I am milking the next few days by myself so it looks like it may be time for experimenting to see if I can increase the yield. I will keep you in the loop to see if there are any major break throughs.

http://youtu.be/hLTrMpwBBt8

This is the last few feet of 300 yards of walking. Spunky is following the yellow bucket and the food therein. At this point she’s just following as she’s not really eating that much on the walk. There are two ways to move a cow. The exciting way and the easy way. Having the cow willingly follow you is definitely the easy way. The first few days weren’t like this so it sure its nice when things work the easy way.