The family milk cow

I was taking a couple of pictures today and thought I needed a followup on this picture from the spring of 1995. Sweet Pea and I used to take Sunday afternoon walks to help halter break her for easier handling later on.

Well, time has passed right on along and this is what Sweet Pea looks like now, at 14 years, along with her 2 month old 1/2 Limousine "Beauregard".


He'll be pushing 600 pounds by the time he's 6 months old and I figure he's pretty close to 200 pounds right now. His birthday was 2 months ago yesterday.

The economics of a family milk cow are somewhat variable. There are just the two of us now, with all the children married and with children of their own. However, the milk consumed by the calf will take a lot of milking pressure off of my wife and it still allows indirect sale of the milk. Of course, we've used filtered raw milk for a long time and have never had a problem with it. In fact, it's much better than the watered down stuff you get in the grocery store!

Years ago, when I was testing for DHIA, the average fat content allowable for "whole" milk, what we used to call 4% milk, was only 3.2%. Good Jersey milk will average 4%-5%, depending on the stage of lactation the cow is in. That's between a 25% to over 50% increase in butter fat and believe it or not, butter fat does affect the taste.

Feed prices have gone through the roof, like close to a 100% increase, mostly due to transportation cost and competition with alcohol (for mandated gasoline additive) producers. Therefore, a calf won't pay for the feed the cow consumes. That pretty well means the excess milk has to be used in other ways and/or sold.

In Texas, the sale of raw milk for human consumption is pretty well verboten. That doesn't mean it can't be sold for animal use and let the buyer use it for what he/she wants, when they get home. My wife is the "milk maid" and she does a good job of cleaning, prior to milking. The milking claw is her hands and they never drop into the manure, like they do in a milking parlor! We use stainless steel buckets and filters and cool the milk in glass containers as soon as the milking is finished. Sorta like this.