My neighbor bought a milk cow. It’s been the hot topic around here for a couple of weeks now.
The cow, whose name is Lottie, was pregnant when she bought her. That’s important because having the calf gets the milk flowing. So we all waited for the birth of the calf. And waited. And began to think she had changed her mind and wasn’t going to have it after all.
And then she gave birth. Nobody saw it, but I was there shortly afterwards. The calf was standing up, kind of wobbly, and still a little wet. Maybe a few hours old and cute as can be.
The calf is tiny compared to the beef cattle calves around the ranch. They are older, having been born early this spring. They are also a larger breed, Angus, as opposed to Lottie who is an economy-sized Guernsey. The calf is almost lap-sized for now. The calf is named Marmalade. Despite there being calves all over the place, this one seems quite different. The lighter hair makes the dark eyes very expressive.
There are lots of different relationships with cattle. There are beef cattle, which are basically inventory. The ranchers care for them, and do what they can to nurse the sick or injured back to health. They don’t have names any more than Smith’s would name carrots.
They do have identities, with their ancestry carefully tracked. You need to be careful about inbreeding, so knowing which bull bred which cows is important. That all used to be in big ledger books. Now there is software. There’s not much emotional attachment.
That isn’t to say they are all alike. The bulls, in particular, have their unique personalities with some being quite docile and others flat out mean. And there are a couple of older cows that have a supernatural ability to find a weak spot in a fence even if there is nothing to eat on the other side.
Then there are dairy cows in the commercial-scale dairy context. The relationship there is a lot more personal because you interact with them daily. The beef cattle are out on the range, pretty much on their own for the most part. Even with the most modern computerized automatic/robotic milking setup, the dairyman knows his cows. Their milk production and food mix are all tracked by computer, and they wear a collar with a chip that ties the data all together.
A milk cow is another thing entirely. A milk cow is part of the household. She lives near the house, and you milk her every day, twice a day. Including Christmas. She’s not exactly a family pet, but you spend a couple of hours every day up close and personal, which is more direct, hands-on, time and attention than most kids get these days.
Lottie is cooperating with the milking pretty well. She’s been through this before, so she knows the routine. Marmalade isn’t sure what to make of any of it, but doesn’t panic when Lottie is in the chute and not available.
My neighbor and her husband are out there hand-milking morning and night, before and after their regular jobs. They squirt the milk into quart jars that get dumped into a bucket and strained. She — my neighbor, not the cow — is almost euphoric about it. Her husband seems supportive, but doesn’t seem as into it as he could be.
It’s not bad now while it’s warm out, and it’s new and different. They have a shed where they can be under cover if it’s raining (we should be so lucky). But it’s a lot of work, and endless. Even with Marmalade getting her share, they have more milk than they know what to do with.
A home-scale, one- or two-cow electric milking machine is available from Amazon for $164. That already seems like a bargain, and I’m not doing the milking. A cream separator for home use is $165. There’s some novelty in our world of homogenized milk in seeing the milk stratify in the bottle, with the cream rising to the top and the blue-ish skim milk at the bottom. But no two glasses of milk taste the same no matter how you shake it up. After you take the cream off the top, it’s still raw milk.
Amazon has a 2-gallon home pasteurizer for $706 — a price tag that may have something to do with raw milk’s current popularity. But for a total of a little over $1,000, you can end up with something approximating the milk you buy from the grocery store, except for the part about actually milking, feeding and cleaning up after the cow. Clearly they are not in this to save on grocery money.
When my family bought the ranch, it was an operating dairy. We were milking about 125 cows, which was a big deal back then. I remember getting the “Mickey Mouse” squirt from the udder right into my mouth. It doesn’t get any fresher than that. I’m forever grateful that we shut the dairy down before I was old enough to be of any use.
It’s really fun to see a milk cow around again, making that almost mystical connection between farm and food, as long as somebody else is doing the milking.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.