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Micro-daries, cheese making, milking Dexter cows, and keeping our Crooked Gap Farm pork/chicken/beef/lamb frozen. Those are all topics on todays episode of The Beginning Farmer Show. Thanks to a great question from Scott in Minnesota I spend some time talking about why we aren’t milking on the farm right now, and why it could possibly be an enterprise in the future. The biggest hang-up I have is the capital costs needed to do an enterprise involving milk or cheese for sale. Scott also gave me a great suggestion about using a walk-in freezer instead of our current set-up of a multitude of upright freezers. I think this is a great suggestion on many levels and I will be looking into it very closely this winter … I hope!
Links Mentioned in This Episode
- Crooked Gap Farm Hoop House Website
- Bob-White Systems
- Finger Lakes Dexter Creamery (A Dexter Micro-Dairy)
- Farm Crawl
If you have an input on the topic be sure to leave a comment below or send us an e-mail.
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Hey, Ethan! Thanks for talking about my email! I tell you, it was the strangest experience to listen to this podcast. I loaded it on my phone and was listening to it in my car on the way to religious release time instruction in one of the communities I serve. It was like you were sitting in the car with me, talking to me–and I kept wanting to interrupt you with a question or idea!
Here is an introduction video to Bob White stuff–this is what got me hooked on thinking microdairy. There’s a great video of their morning chore routine, too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddKhjmd4OZc
Keep up the great work! I’m sure I’ll pester you again.
Peace.
Scott
We are about to be thrust into the world of milking Dexters. Our 15-year-old boss cow just unexpectedly dropped a dun calf (our 10 month old bull calf got in with the cows on Christmas day last year). We aim to share milk–we’ll give her about a week with just the calf–whereby we’ll pen the calf away from his mama at night, milk her out in the morning, then let them run together for the day. I expect we’ll get in the ballpark of a gallon a day.
While a small-scale dairy certainly is and can be done profitably, I think the real economy of milking is in having a homestead cow or two. What she produces above your family’s level of fluid milk consumption goes to ice cream, butter, cheese, etc. And the skim milk can go to the hogs (as can any extra whole milk, if you don’t have a market for it).
With the Dexters my main concern is hand milking. Seems like cows of all breeds haven’t been selected for hand milking much, so while their teats are fine for the milking machines they’re a bit hard to grip by hand. My wife milks our Nubian doe currently; I tried but could barely use three fingers, and I kept accidentally diverting the milk stream with my ring finger! Unfortunately my cows’ teats aren’t much bigger than the goat’s, if at all. Guess that’s another trait to be considered when selecting breeding stock.
There’s a great presentation given at an E.F. Schumacher Society meeting/conference by Sally Fallon Morrel of the Weston A. Price Foundation (author of Nourishing Traditions) where she discusses how a small dairy can pretty much change the world. In short, what doesn’t get consumed as fluid milk or butter & buttermilk gets turned into cheese; the whey is used to fatten hogs; the manure from the hogs and cows is used as fertilizer for a market garden; and probably chickens provide meat and eggs from cleaning up what the cows and hogs miss. That’s a lot of food, and a lot of jobs. Our food system would be revolutionized with a certain number of those small farms. But I digress.
And I’m sure you’ve found it by now, but Bob-White Systems is a small-scale dairy equipment company (http://bobwhitesystems.com/). Pretty neat stuff.
Will let you know how the milking goes.