success in PA
We love to hear from other farmers!
Dear Shawn and Beth,
Thank you so much for all your advice and encouragement via email, your book, ebooks, and blog!
I wanted to give you a quick update on how everything was going. Our 3rd daughter was born on Oct 3rd, and we are grateful for her and that she is healthy and doing great. I absolutely love that I can drink nourishing raw milk in abundance every day from our milk cow Blossom!
My husband and I hand milked together until just before our daughter was born, we ended up deciding to just milk the front teats leaving the back (small, hard to reach) teats for the calf. We were never able to fully transition to milk into a bucket, Blossom’s udder is positioned far back so her back legs would get in the way, and so we couldn’t put our legs under the cow between her legs and the bucket so her hooves would kick the bucket when she would step (the hobbles helped tremendously with her kicking but she is still a very “steppy” cow), and seemed to develop a fear of the sound of the bucket which would cause her to be even more restless. Since we were milking into a quart jar then transferring the milk into the reservoir bucket we would each milk one year at a time. Once our daughter came, my husband started milking on his own before work and started using the small 2 teat battery powered milking machine my parents had gifted us, milking both the front and the back teats with it. We’ve enjoyed having more milk again with milking the back teats, and I’ve just this past week started experimenting with making cheese. We hope to hand milk again at some point in the future, either together with this cow or with a future cow with better udder placement/longer teats, but as you reminded me, good enough is perfect right now!
We used the info from your book/ebooks to figure out when to get Blossom bred back and to figure out when she was in heat. It took 3 tries, so she will be due July 3rd (we were hoping for being able to have her calf again earlier in the spring but oh well!) In addition to requesting grass genetics in the bull, we also requested long teats (we used a COBA AI tech and semen straws from them), so hopefully either our current heifer calf or a future calf will have longer teats!
We’ve come a long way in the 4.5 months since Blossom had her first calf and we started milking! We’ve learned a lot, and used our excess skimmed milk to fatten our pig, which we had butchered just before our daughter was born. The pig definitely fattened beautifully on the milk, much better than on just the pig feed! We feed our chickens skimmed milk (along with soaked wheat, table scraps, and they are currently cleaning up our garden bed for us so getting food from that too). Sometime this next year we hope to find a local place in our area to get feeder pigs from so we can raise a couple more. We have plenty of hay and excess skimmed milk/whey to feed the pigs, but little else right now (all our winter storage crops like corn, potatoes, and winter squashes failed for various reasons), and I’m assuming just hay and milk is not enough for the pig without other things to supplement? So we will likely wait until next summer to get the pigs so we have more garden stuff to give them.
I attached a pic of our first snow (from November 1st), and Blossom and her calf Petal happily munching on grass under the snow. From what we learned from you, we are rotating our cow through the tender clover/mixed pasture grass that was left from our hay fields that got mowed (by our neighbor in trade for keeping some of the hay), then grew back, and using that now, then when that is gone later this winter we will go back to the main pasture area to our stockpiled areas that have more taller summer weeds mixed in.
Thanks again for all your wonderful teaching and advice!
Dear Rebecca,
The cows are beautiful and all your work sounds just great! As far as food for a pig goes, it's partly a question of how fast you want him to grow. Enough milk and you can just let the rest be hay - but, of course, you probably have other things (table scraps, etc.) to feed him. We keep young pigs over the winter; they don't grow very fast during the cold months, but they are there to eat all our stored winter feed, and all the table scraps and milk surplus we have to give them, then they take off in the late spring when the cows freshen and the garden comes in.
B