Nine degrees. NINE! That’s what the thermometer in the kitchen window said this morning. Makes it really hard to get outside to feed. But…we’ve got three butt-headed boys that keep ripping the electric deicer out of their trough-enough so that they’ve broken off the ground prong and then another prong the other day. I’m not sure how or why they keep doing it, but explaining the reason behind the deicer has proven futile. I just hope each morning that the ice isn’t too thick and keep a shovel (which they never seem to bother) nearby if needed. I know they’ll be thirsty. And the chickens will
The single digit temp brings me back to what I feel really started our farm life. And the desire to blog about our new adventure. It was 2017. November or December I can’t remember but several months after we’d moved here. A coworker at the time worked on his dad’s dairy farm. One of their Holstein heifers was set to calve soon but she had a bad hip. Her hip prevented her from being able to walk or stand on concrete, which deemed it impossible for them to keep her as a milker. They asked if we’d be interested in buying her and the calf after it was born-either to keep or to butcher. Four hundred bucks for a cow with a calf at side? Heck yeah we wanted to do that! She calved on Christmas Eve Eve (Dec 23) so Lyla and little Evie came to join us a few days after. I don’t remember which came first- the idea of milking a cow because we had one or the realization that little Evie would never be able to drink all the milk that mamma was producing for her. Either way, it wasn’t long before we’d called my parents to find out what we needed for a one-cow milking operation. Luckily, they’d had both milk cows and goats in the past so they offered to come over and get us started. Also, as luck would have it they didn’t currently have a cow so they were more than willing to buy our extra milk.
It took a few days of watching YouTube and Ed and I both milking twice a day, swapping off as our hands got tired to get the hang of it. It didn’t take much longer for us to both realize that being dairy farmers was not in our future. About the time the thermometer starting hitting single digits multiple days in a row (the coldest week we’d had in several years I might add) we decided to get little Evie a friend. We headed back to the dairy farm a couple days after the next calf was born. (A little bit of background explanation- a dairy heifer will start to produce milk for the first time when she calves for the first time. Generally the calf is taken off the cow and bottle fed so that mamma can be milked for production rather than raising the calf. The bottle calf can then be sold to be raised for butcher or sometimes kept to be put back in the herd and raised as a replacement cow.) The farmer we were buying them from breeds his dairy heifers to a beef bull so an inexpensive beef-dairy cross proved to be ideal for us since we had the plan to raise them for butcher. They keep them for a couple days after birth to make sure the calf is good and healthy before selling them. So in two short weeks, we’d already grown our cattle herd by 50%! Haha- it tickled me every time I told someone that- I guess it still does…
That winter we decided to raise beef, bought a cow, learned to milk her, nearly froze our tushes off, learned how to make butter, and felt one of the greatest senses of accomplishments ever. So why not keep going with it and blog about it along the way?