Milking a Moving Target
May 31st, 2015 · 1 Comment · Posted in farming
When we decided to share our Jersey cow, Emily, with her new calf, we knew we were in for a learning process, but we never calculated how opinionated Emily would be about our plans.
Getting Emily used to the idea of being milked took some doing. She seemed at first relieved to have some of that load taken off her udder. Then for a while, she wouldn’t stand still. Ever seen a cow hop on two legs? That’s how she avoided me when I closed in with the milk bucket.
The calf–we call him Del, short for Delmonico–seemed to prefer nursing off the front two of Emily’s teats, so we focused on the rear. Once she settled down, we were richly rewarded, collecting three quarts–that’s six pounds, in dairyman talk–from both the morning and evening milkings. I started making yogurt. My wife made wonderful ricotta cheese and butter the color of eggs yolks. Still, since we really don’t drink milk (our daughter is lactose intolerant) we were beginning to wonder how we were going to deal with all these new found dairy riches.
Feed it to the pig, if we had a pig.
Well, that’s when the calf intervened. He’s been growing by leaps and bounds, fattening up on all that milk, exactly as we’d hoped. But soon the front two quarters of the udder weren’t enough for him. And as he started sucking on the rear quarters, Emily got less and less generous about us milking there.
Can a momma cow really know to protect the milk her calf is drinking? Judging from how Emily took to dancing out of my way when I approached with the milk bucket, I’d have to answer a definite “yes” to that question. As long as Emily had her head in the grain bucket, she’d let me milk. I took to putting rocks in with the grain, just to slow her down and keep her distracted. But as soon as she took her head out of the bucket and paused long enough to think things over, she’d skip sideways out of my reach, or swipe at me with a hind leg. I’d sit there on my milk crate, staring at Emily, Emily staring back at me. With luck and a little coaxing, she’d turn her head back into the bucket and let me resume the milking.
But lately, as the calf grows even larger, there has been little milk to be had. By the time I got there, the udder was almost empty, my cat-and-mouse routine with Emily producing only a trickle. So now I’m separating the two at night: Del stays in the paddock, his mom is locked out in the pasture on the other side of the fence. After the first night of this new arrangement, I collected more than three quarts of milk, just like the old days. Emily wasn’t exactly happy about it, but she finished all her grain. Del, meanwhile, just stood with his nose pressed against the milking parlor fence, bawling and complaining while his mom ate.
That’s one thing you can say for sure about being a newbie farmer: every day brings something different.
If the calf is odd enough to eat or drink anything other then momma’s food truck, there is a cheat that could work. Works (sometimes! There are some critters no trick can de-stubborn. Sorta like people that way.. no matter well hidden my dad STILL won’t eat cooked carrots!) for calves, goat kids and lambs, even had success with a couple horses (for dealing with checkups for momma’s) and once on a water buffalo calf! If the calf eats anything other then milk sometimes a bribe during the milking can work. Chopped up apples, carrots, even a sweetened mash can distract enough to get the milking done. If still strictly liquid interested, a bit of watered down applejuice can be bottle or bucket fed. (NOT TOO MUCH. Diarrhea is not a worthwhile trade for 10 mins of milking time) If you can hit on the right ‘treat’ for baby (it took carrot juice of all things to deal with the water buffalo calf. Not exactly on the list of things growing in their original habitat, but whatever works I suppose) milking time can become a lot less fraught. After a few days, they even start to get the idea that snacktime is coming and hurry momma up to be milked. A similar thing might work for Emily as well. If you give her a healthy goodie after, pretty quickly they learn that good behavior now means happy snacking soon after. Just DON’T get them used to the habit and then forget one day… the next few milkings following can be exercises in extreme tempertantrums from both. The calf’s fit can be possibly ignored with headphones, but a kicking breakdancing peeved cow? I’d rather go to the dentist 3x a day for a week then deal with THAT again! And with that wordy comment, off to do a bit of blog rummaging – just discovered the site and really like what I see.