speaker 0:   0:00
welcome to the old fashioned on purpose podcast. So if you've been following me on Instagram lately, you know that we have some new babies. Cow babies, to be exact, our brown Swiss mama Cows all have their babies this week, which is one of my favorite times of year because there is nothing cuter than a brown Swiss calf. But it also is a little bit stressful because I'm out in the barn a lot more checking, Christian says I worry too much. He may be right. I don't worry as much over the beef cows, but the milk house they're my thing. They're my they're my kindred spirits, and I have to make sure everything is just right. So anyway, we've been posting pictures and updates on social media, but I thought it would be fun to just kind of dive into the ins and outs of how we breed are milk cows and how we have our milk cows. Because I get a lot of questions about this, and for some of you who are new to this idea, I thought this could be interesting and informative. So here we go. I'm your host, Jill Winger and This is the podcast for the Trail Blazers, the Mavericks, the makers, the homesteaders, the modern pioneers in the backyard farmers. If you're ready to boost your food security and living more homegrown lifestyle, you have found your tribe. This episode is brought to you by Lehman's hardware, my number one all time favorite resource for home studying and old fashioned living supplies. More than ever, I want to be supporting small businesses right now, and Lehmans is a shining example of that. Not only did it carry everything from gardening supplies, kitchen equipment and all sorts of very awesome off grid appliances. They've been a family owned and operated company since 1955. Let me tell you, when I visited their original store in Kidron, Ohio, last summer, pretty much completely fell in love with them.  For a limited time, only if you use the coupon code, Jillmay. You can save 10% on their entire stock of baking supplies, which, yes, that includes their heritage stoneware bowls. You know, the ones with the blue strike that you've seen on my YouTube videos. Yep, those are included to so head on over to the show notes to grab the link and the discount code and happy shopping. So I know a lot of you when I say a lot. Some of you, I guess, feels like a lot. It makes me excited. You're looking at home dairy animals. Maybe for the first time this year. Maybe it's a milk cow. Maybe it's a dairy goat dairy, sheep. Cool like never done that. But more power to you. And I love the increased interest around this. Let me just tell you that home dairy is one of the most rewarding aspects of homesteading, in my opinion, because, I don't know, butter, cream, ice cream need I go on and there's just something really special about the relationship you have with the dairy animal and your it's feeding you and your feeding it and it's just cool. So anyway, in this episode, we're just gonna talk about breeding and calving, and I'll do some more episodes, and I have other episodes on the ins and outs of home dairy and why we do it and how we do it and frequently asked questions. But I wanted to get a little bit deeper into some of these actual processes because I know this could be a foreign topic and is also kind of interesting if you've never been involved. So to start it all off we breed are cattle in the summer. Ideally, July August ish cattle have a 10 month gestation period. And so when we breathe in that middle of summer, that means we're calving April May, and that for us is just a little easier. Weather wise, you can't have earlier. We actually calve our beef cows a little bit earlier. But you just have more weather drama, right? Because you may have seen the pictures of the Calves in our mud room or the beef cows that get cold. And they have to come in the mud room and so on, which isn't the end of the world. But milk cows, especially since I end up milking after the milk cows, calves. I'd rather be a little bit nicer weather. So at the time of this recording, it is end of April, and all three cows that we had bread have calved, and so now we'll give our babies a little bit of time, and then we'll roll right into milking. We ai or artificially inseminate our cattle now we've done the old fashioned way in the past. For us, Ai makes sense because then we can pick any sort of bull that we want. Previously, when we were doing regular just past your breeding, we would have to borrow a bull from a neighbor, which is a little bit of a hassle, because it's kind of a big ask right, and all of our neighbors have beef bulls, which you can breed a beef cow and a dairy cow. But the calf is then mixed, and it's not as desirable because the beef people don't want it. The dairy people don't want it, and you're kind of left with this mutt, right? For lack of a better word. So we've prefer, if we can, to breed to a dairy bull, and that just makes a calf with a little bit easier for us to either use or sell. Now I just want to say if all you have available is just a beef bull, that's fine. Just use what you have. It'll still work, but if you have an AI technician in your area for us, we actually have several. And then Christian became one. A couple of years ago. It just is kind of easier, actually. So when we AI, we have to check and make sure the cow is in heat right, ovulating, and then we take the semen and we do the thing. And we personally use have use the last couple years sexed semen, which is kind of cool, because then we can get heifers, which it's not. Genetic modification, my mom asked the other day. Is that genetically modified it like No, Mom, they they just look under the microscope somehow and they know that which of the little swimmers are boys and girls, and maybe that's probably not the actual technical way they do that. But that is how Jill thinks a bit. So if you are a AI laboratory specialised, you are free to email me and tell me how horribly oversimplified that statement just was. But anyway, we use sex, semen, and we get Heifer cabs, which is really nice and kind of feels like cheating because it's so cool. But we do it and I think that seems a little bit more, but it's worth it because then we either keep the heifers for future milk cows for us or we sell them as future milk cows. Two other families and I just would rather do that than have bull calves that we end up. I'm just taking to the cell barn for meat. Not that you can't do that. You can, but we have beef cows, so hopefully that makes sense. So we we ai them in the summer. And then the rest of the pregnancy period is usually pretty simple. Sometimes oftentimes we will have them pregnancy checked a k a. Preg checked in the fall just to confirm they are bred. And if they aren't bread, you know you have the option of selling them at that point, which is what a commercial producer would do, we usually just keep him and go, shucks, We have to try again next year, right? Um so well, pregnant Check them in the fall and then they just hang out and it's pretty easy. They eat hay all winter. They survive the blizzards with the windbreak, and it's pretty much business as usual. The ones that we're careful of, though, as we get closer to calving time, is we don't feed a lot of alfalfa.Milk cows can suffer from a condition called milk fever, which can cause paralysis and sometimes even death. And it scares me so bad. So we stop feeding alfalfa because in increase in alfalfa can cause higher occurrences of milk fever. And we've actually never had milk fever. I think it's a little bit more popular in Jersey cows. We have brown Swiss, so I don't know if it's the breed thing or we've just gotten lucky or what, but so far, so good. But I am always like Christian. Don't feed the alfalfa bails. You know those last few months, we always feed them just grass Now, once they calve, then we give them alfalfa. Because alfalfa is great for milk production. It's better for them is their nursing babies. And these these cows produce a lot of milk, but we always wait till right after they have so having time. I have We've actually never had a complication knock on wood with one of our milk cows. During calving, we've had a complication with our beef herd, which is pretty normal because we have a larger number of them. But are milk cows like Christian likes to say, their big old girls and the Calves just slide right out. So we've never had to pull a calf. We've never had to do a C section. They just have very easily without assistance, even when we've had twins. We've had two instances of twins, and even then we have no issues, which is a huge benefit. But we still watch them because if you are watching and there is a complication, you have a much better chance of saving the cow or the calve if needed. You know, if you can call it that in time, it's just better. So especially like this last couple weeks. I watched the cows obsessively. Partially, that may have been because it's quarantine and I am home a lot and I can't see my friends. So I watched the cows A lot, and Oakley would like, Look at me, Oakley is our matriarch cow I'd walk out there and she's like, What are you doing? Why are you looking at me again like this is not normal? Um, but normally I would say in the weeks leading up to it, I check a couple times a day and then when I know we're really, really close I will be a little more frequent. With the cows, We don't usually do a lot of night checking. We did a couple times, I bribed Christian. I got there, like, 2 a.m. On there was a couple nights What was really cold and rainy. And I was worried about the cows, the calves being born in the rain and not being able to get warm, but they didn't have those nights, and it was fine. Where was I here in my list. So, yeah, once they calve, I like to give them space. So, like last night, for example, or no. Two nights ago, we had our our final milk cow calf, and Christian saw it happening in the pasture. So we did roll out there in the ranger just to kind of watch so I could get a little bit of video. But then I just left her alone because I could tell she was being a good mama. The calf was alert in an active and trying to get up, and she was cleaning off the baby, and I just wanted to let them bond, so we can't just leave them alone for the first little bit unless we see there being a problem. On occasion, we've had a calf or two that looks like they're not able to kind of figure out the whole nursing thing really efficiently. So we'll get in there a little bit and kind of direct them to the teat the first few times. But that doesn't usually happen all the time, and usually the calves are pretty good about figuring that out after a few tries. So we like to give them space and then, depending on which cow it is, sometimes we have to help her out a little bit with the milk. Now, with our younger cows or heifers who've calved, it's not as big of a deal, but with Oakley, who is 10 years old this year. I can't believe it makes me sad. She's old, for a cow that's old, her udder is very, very large, and you might have seen the pictures online. It's it's very large. Gravity is not your friends this point in cow life, and she produces a lot of milk, and it's way more than one calf can drink. And if we don't help that calf out when it's brand new and it doesn't have a really high capacity for a lot of milk, then we run the risk of having Oakley get mastitus, which is infection, right? And that is just a mess. You don't want to deal with that. So, like, right now, Oakley calved, I think 5 or 6 days ago, Um, so I've been going out there twice a day and just letting a calf nurse and I work on some of the other quarters of her utter and just get some milk out released the pressure. Keep things flowing because otherwise that calf is so small still, it picks 1/4 and it ignores the other three and they don't get emptied out. And I've noticed that when I do that, it just makes everyone's life a little bit easier. It's not my favorite thing, because at this point, especially when the other gets full, the teats really engorged and they're kind of hard to squeeze at first, and you kind of have to take a couple minutes to get everything flowing. But like I said, it's worth the preventative measure And then once we get through this kind of initial birth, you know, we watch the cow to make sure the afterbirth came out. Um, make sure she's not having any milk fever symptoms like she's laying down and she won't get up or she acts. Stumble your weird, and we make sure the calf is drinking right. Getting that colostrum and their stuff orange Butterfinger colored poop coming out. Um, because we always watch for that, too. Then we just leave them for a little bit. And it usually takes a couple days for the colostrom to be done and for her milk to come in. And then I'd say a week or two into the process is when I actually start milking just because I could probably push it a little bit. I just like to give the mama and baby time to bond and kind of get to know each other and get into their routine. And then when we do start milking, you've probably seen, may have seen my blog post on this. I think I have an episode on the podcast here as well, but we do the once a day milking so sometimes I get people on social media so angry at me, I don't know why. Because they automatically assume that we rip the babies away from the mamas. They just automatically assume that. And I'm like, No, I don't want to bottle feed a baby unless I absolutely have to. Um, it's time consuming Milk replacer for cows is very expensive, and they just do better with a mama. So we leave our calves on our dairy cows. And when we're ready for milk for the house, all we do is we'll separate the mom and baby at night like we just put the baby in a pin and they can still see each other. And it's very low drama, and we'll give the baby a little hay and a little water and they nibble on that and then the mom's udder will fill up all night long, right? And then in the morning, first thing we go out, we milk mama cow out, sometimes not even all the way. I'll get like, 2 2/4 or 3/4 of her udder and leave some for the baby. And then we turn the baby on with the mama cow and they hang out all day together they go on the pasture, they do their thing and then we just repeat that in the evening. And it just is like, the best thing ever, because in the olden days, like the old way to do it was you would take the calves away right away and some people still do this. You take the calves away, you put them in a separate place and you feed him a bottle and then you have to milk the cow twice a day. Rain or shine without fail or her milk supply will start to decrease. Right. And I can't personally handle the schedule of twice a day. Milking is just too much for everything else we have going on. So once a day is perfect because it keeps the milk supply more manageable. And then I can if I need to go on a weekend trip, we just leave the baby in the whole time. Or let's say I'm to super lazy and it's like a Thursday and I don't feel like milking. I just don't milk. I just don't lock the baby up the next. The night before, excuse me. The night before, I don't lock the baby up. So is a win win. It's a great system for homesteading, and it just makes the whole milk cow thing a lot less stressful. So that's how we do it. Hopefully that answered some of your questions. Or maybe just address and curiosity. Milk cows are not a common thing anymore. Right back in the day, everyone had one, and everybody knew how it worked. And it's just not the same. So I love teaching people the art of the milk cow. It's so rewarding and so much fun. So if you have a little homestead, I hope that at some point you can add a dairy animal into your barnyard. And if you can't, I would encourage you to seek out a local milk producer and support them. And you could maybe go see their operation and have a part in the local milk world and that way instead. So if you think home dairy is definitely in your home studying future, you can grab a copy of my Complementary Home Dairy Handbook. It'll help you skip the farm store and make safe natural products for your cow or goat at home head on over to theprairiehomesteadcom/homedairyrecipes to grab it, and that's it. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, I would be so honored if you could pop over to your podcast player and lead a quick review. It just helps more people find this podcast, and then they can bring home setting into their lives. Plus, I read every single one that you leave me, thanks again for listening and will catch up on the next episode of the old fashioned on purpose podcast.