hey friends today we're just going to give you a quick update on how things are going in the dairy department at the farm here uh and hopefully it will inspire you because we have made some
[Music] progress all right Drew tell us what has transpired since our last podcast so last podcast we were still logging and we were trying to get the um Cal into the barn on the regular right um and if you haven't listened to that episode go back and listen to it it's called what's the title how to milk a cow question mark um so since then we um have been able to get her to come to the barn essentially what I decided was I was going to work with the halter with her and Lacy and I kind of had this moment where we came together and Lacy was like look we can't both be working on this project together at the same time and I think that was a really good like moment of realization we were like it was kind of silly for us both to be trying to pull a halter you know like we both wanted to do it but um Lacy said if I got her trained then she would come milk fa not um I will say I think my influence was strong though because my idea from the beginning was halter yeah exactly and I mean I am with them every single day because or more because I'm moving them constantly um so I started with a halter it was like essentially just like I went out there and I would feed her an alphalpha Cube and then put the halter near her and then I just like kept doing this like um um I was doing it twice a day because at that point I was moving them twice a day so I just kept like slowly and then for a while I was just hanging the halter from her ears and um and then I would put it on and take it off and like it was over the process of what do you think like two weeks mhm about two weeks of doing that to where then I could put the halter on her and she had no problems and then I started doing where I would just like pull her a little bit and I mean it was again like we said in the first podcast it was just so much slower going than I'm comfortable with but I was just like you know I'm going to this is going to be a marathon like I kind of got in the mindset of like even if I don't milk her with this calf at least she'll be trained for the next C and and um oh and you'll be trained because we also have another cow that could potentially birth and then we could potentially milk her so it's like okay you learn this process fure this process yeah oh my gosh she's a little bit more wild so it'll be interesting if that her favorite thing to do is Moo at the top of her lung my go and to run and kick her back legs up in the air I'm not I'm not 100% sure she's a keeper you know like we've talked about this before with livestock if it's not a good fit it's not a good fit and you you can always move on I do think that she would be a great candidate for the Sho so I'm kind of like you know she might just might put her out there I mean that's kind of the nice thing about having that property is you know if they don't if they're not like a dairy candidate or a homestead Dairy candidate you put them out there and now they're a beef candidate right um well and that's again I mean the reason that we go with this Dual Purpose is because we want it to be and the the truth is the one we're milking lisel she is not a dual purpose she is a dairy breed yeah I think maybe in heritag speaking back back a few hundred years maybe she was a dual purpose breed but you know that how things she's not beefy no she's not beefy She carries her she carries her body for milk she does um so then we started taking the process of I and I'm still doing this I would take her into the barn and tie her halter to the headgate and feed her in the like feed her on the other side of the headgate and um that's what she does now and we milk her successfully so that's like a I remember the first morning I was just like I'm just going to take her and put her in there and then I was like you know I'm going to see if I can squeeze a little milk out and I was like you know what she's letting me and so I just kept going well I think we said in the original one it was never a matter if she'd let you milk she would always let me get down there and squeeze her at her she didn't care about that she just didn't want to stand still and she definitely did not want to be in the headgate where it would be convenient to milk her so it she was always pretty willing to let us squeeze and and get milk out it was just okay how do we get her to stand in a place do it yeah and so she would like she would I started with the halter pretty loose and then Matt was like you know just keep tying the halter Tighter and Tighter and like now like this today I actually had the halter like tied about as tight as it can go so she couldn't really step backwards she kind of had to keep her head in the headgate which when you like if you haven't milked before if they step backwards One Step it's not a big deal if they take two steps backwards now their foot's in the bucket or kicking the bucket over so for a while like I started out milking one handed one hand on the bucket and one hand on an utter but then you're not efficient no then you're out there forever and so and like some people will say you have to feed them um while they're milking and then some people say absolutely don't feed them while they're milking but I went with the approach of I was just going to give her alphalpha pellets while or alphaalpha cubes while I milk her so she's super willing to now stand there as long as she has food but when she doesn't she's not she's ready to go she's not as excited um but I even noticed this morning so I she was pretty much out and I had to push her to go back out and actually Clos the headgate after she was out because she was trying to stick her head back in there even though I was done milking so we're getting somewhere with that and I have a I have two volunteers that keep asking me to wake them up in the morning to come help and they just sit there and like drop one Cube at a time into the sink so cute I I had like this it's definitely easier to just get up and walk out the door by yourself and do everything but I to me the whole point of us homesteading and doing all of this is for the kids for them to be learning for them to be having those experiences alongside of us so I've just decided like yeah it's can be a little more frustrating cuz like I've got the bucket of milk and Abraham's like jumping back and forth through the little hole I cut out and like he's like standing on a board and he's getting ready to jump and I have like the whole bucket of milk and he's like um I'm going to jump over there I'm like dude this milk is like right here I don't want that spilled and you know then he's like twirling in the air and I'm like I don't want that in the milk and like so there's like there's a there's an extra challenging effort but I feel like at this point the milking is starting to refine itself more um the challenging part now is figuring out a system of wherever she is because we rotate so much of being able to have laneways back to the barn and um it's turning out like our driveway our property is kind of set up so our driveway way makes pretty good Lane way to the barn um well I think two things that I'm picking up from the conversation and just I think to be clear with everybody about the learning from this is um not possible without community so one of the things that's available on the internet at large and then you know Facebook world is you've got a group that for everything right got a group for how to keep a family cow and I'm not advocating for that group I'm actually advocating to potentially ignore that group and just find trusted friends in your community who have done what you're trying to do and we'll will help you you know pay them if necessary trade with them you know just be friends like have a community of people who are supporting one another and shout out to Matt who was a major help for Drew and also Courtney who was willing and gave she was the one who put the halter idea in my mind and um and I think every has a different vision for their Homestead and you're never going to be identical to anyone else um but finding real people and having real conversations with people who are doing it and not just the internet at large it just can be so overwhelming you can post in you know like Drew was saying with feeding them or not feeding them you can post in a group and they'll say oh if you're not feeding them while you're eat they're eating you're I'm going to call you know Child Protective Services seriously like people are just so no I know well when we first started like the whole process of like how are we gonna milk her I posted in that one family cow group and people just like I mean it was like insane and I was like all right right right this is Facebook and I should not be asking for advice in here and like I know people are passionate but people in that group were ugly and not nice and I've seen it time and time again on other people in other groups also and it was just like this is not helpful and it's going to stress me out and ultimately like like like you said it's not the real world it's not really people that are doing it and well a lot of times yeah know these people are just they could not even have a cow yeah they might not even have a c yeah you never really know and I'm sure there are a lot of great people in there that mean well and maybe the goal is to like just Whittle through and make some real true friends and Community from the people that you know are in there but it you know you can't just put your stuff out on the internet and wait for it to tell you what to do because it'll tell you everything to do right and I mean there's the whole context too you know like I don't want to use a bunch of chemicals I don't want to feed crappy feed I want to move them all the time and like our Homestead is like nobody else's Homestead and the way we move is completely different so it's like you've got I think there's you have to trust yourself also like you know last night we spent probably an hour or more setting up new laneways and all of this stuff and then the cows got out and came running down the driveway and you know well at least they showed you where the weak spots were during the frost and that's what L Lev was like at least you didn't wake up in the morning and they were gone I was like that's so true but you know and it's there's like this whole thing of like most people are like you know you got to separate the cow that you're milking from the rest of the herd and I can see that in a large herd it wouldn't make sense to bring 20 cows to the Barnyard but we have four now and I'm like you know what I'm just going to bring them all every time because then everybody is happier you know so it's like that context is very specific to ush and yeah I don't know there's still a lot of learning going on but I don't know major progress we're getting about a half a gallon a day right which for us is exactly what our family drinks so um if we can maintain that that would be lovely yeah I know pretty exciting so we just wanted to share that with you guys if uh you need help milking um find somebody that has experienced milking it's not us it's not us we can point you in the direction of some people we can yeah we can for sure and uh share this episode with somebody that might benefit you know they're like oh if they're listening they're like no don't tend them to me no maybe they be willing I don't know yeah you know somebody might need a little bit of encouragement and I hope that that's what this episode does for sure uh thanks for listening and tag us on social media
