Because the cows stay with the bull year around there is no way to know for sure when they are bread. So my plan all along has been to stop milking Olive as soon as I feel the calf move. That was last week. Last night it was very active. I told Lisa it looked like it was kicking field goals and felt that way too when I placed my hand on Olives side.
I milked Rosie for the first time Sunday and it went pretty well. When I bought her I was told that she had been hand milked.She was my insurance because Olive had only been used as a brood cow and never milked or even handled.
Monday, well that was an entirely different rodeo. When I opened the gate to give her the grain she pushed past me ignoring the grain all together. I tried to hold her back and it almost worked. Emphasis on almost. I had to get a rope and drag her back to the milking stall through the muck and mud. Oh, did I forget to mention that it was pouring buckets. We got about 5 inches in a short period of time. Anyway, I got her back to the stall, locked into the stanchion and she was eating somewhat content. That is until I started to try and milk her then she got agitated again. Picking up her feet side stepping fighting the stanchion. Completely different animal from the day before. Eventually she kicked the bucket over and I gave up. I turned her out to her calf and her pig. Yes, she has taken up with another pig. Silly girl likes her piggy’s.
Tuesday, expecting another round of excitement, I put food in her trough over the gate and let her start eating before I opened it. Then I dropped both the barriers on the stanchion so she couldn’t move too far to either side. Then I locked her head in. The actual milking was mostly uneventful until she ran out of grain. I was nearly finished so I let her go rather than get her too stressed out.
The strange part was that the milk wouldn’t pass through the muslin cloth. It wouldn’t even go through the wire coffee filter. Something that looked like thick cream clogged up the filters. I was able to do a little at a time rotating the filters and washing them in warm water between uses. The substance melted like cream under warm water. It took a little longer but it worked. Rosie’s udder wasn’t feverish or hard, the milk wasn’t yellow or off smelling so I don’t know for sure what I am dealing with. She still has her calf and a pig nursing so I don’t think it is mastitis but I have ordered a CMT kit just to be on the safe side. It should be here by the end of the week. Until then I plan on adding raw apple cider vinegar to her food morning and night. I haven’t tasted the milk yet so I will give it a sample taste this evening.
I browsed the “Keeping a Family Cow” (an excellent book by the way) forum and it looks like a cow will sometimes let down allot of cream and it will look like this. I never ran into this with Olive who is a Jersey. Rosie is a Dexter and supposedly her butter fat particles should be finer and more homogenized so I wouldn’t expect to see this. Obviously I haven’t reached the top of the milk cow learning curve, not that I really thought that I had. There is always something new to learn.
