No, not that kind!
We made the big plunge! We bought ourselves a dairy cow! Really had been thinking about it for some time and finally ran across a good deal. She’s young and will need a few more months before she’s bread – then 9 months and a few more to wean that calf, so we won’t be milking for a little over a year. Yeah… it just hit me… we’ll be doing our first milking a year from January when it is COLD!
Well, that gives me a year to get that barn done now doesn’t it!?
I don’t want you to think we’ve given up on goats milk – quite the contrary. We’ll have at least 4 in milk next year – twice what we have now. If Willow gives us a hard time next year we’ll probably have to sell her though, and that will be sad because she’s one of our favorite goats.
We’ll see how things go when we’re actually drowning in milk – not like we were with two goats and floating down a river of milk! Our thoughts are still to drink the goat milk – it is good and easy to digest. But we’ll have a lot of it still – and we’ll make cheese from much of it. From the cow we’ll make other products – skim cream, sour cream, yogurt, cheese, ice cream of course, and butter.
A Holstein isn’t as rich in butter fat as say a Jersey, but they do give a lot more milk – so we’ll take what we need and feed the rest to the animals. Pigs do well on left over milk (Psst. Tristan, you have a year to get back into the pig business!).
A little anxious – and overwhelmed with the work to do, but boy oh boy will this be fun!