bawlin' cow blues

And two mammas equals twice the bawling too.

Ok, just the honest to goodness facts is that we're slow a lot of times. We read the books, sure, and talk to the agri-farmers, and we know the theories, but when it comes right smack dab down to it, we feel our way along. We change all the time, but slowly and always in a direction.

So it should come as no surprise that the we've just left the calf on the cow and milked away up until now. And then, finally, I decided its time. We've discussed it way before now, brainstormed through it, come up with ideas, but in the end it comes down to someone deciding that the time has come.

So tonight, for the first time ever, the calf is in the pen by herself and her two mammas are in the field. There are things I'm concerned with . . . mostly that the mammas don't decide to get out. That the real mamma always drinks when she's put in the pen so I want to make sure she knows how to drink from the stream. Well, I know she KNOWS because she was turned out there for months without a trough to drink from, but anyway, her water intake is still a concern. They can actually see each other, mammas and calf, so I don't think anyone will get in any big panic. And it is just until in the morning.

Two mammas, you ask? The three of them are funny. The calf drinks from real mamma but hangs with auntie mamma. Auntie mamma wants to be her real mamma. Hopefully we've found a bull to "expose" auntie mamma to, a Jersey since I'd love to perpetuate her terrific genes. Of course, that is slow to work itself out . . .

And tomorrow will be our first morning milking.

Did I forget to mention daughter belly skiing through the grass behind the calf? Scared me to death. I had just given them the instruction "Don't let go," but then when I saw that I was saying, "Now would be a good time to let go!" What did she say? "It was FUN!"

Yes.

Are you fierce enough to milk unabated while a calf with a tongue rough as a cat's but 20 times bigger and backed by that much more weight and strength too repeatedly licks that little (tiny actually, and insignificant) love handle at the small of your back?

the heart of life

We're back in milk and it feels good. She's a very different cow. She has a LOT of milk but lets down very slowly.

There is nothing bad, but everything is different. It has reminded me of the times I've run across people who know already exactly how everything is going to be. The funniest ones were going to raise chicory for their goats to browse on, and when goats proved too difficult for their pansy rears, they got a cow and failed at that too.

Not that there is anything wrong with failure. If you aren't failing at something, you aren't trying at very much. But success just isn't all that difficult either, so if you aren't succeeding at something, you aren't trying at very much either. By any measure, we've failed at most things we've tried in one way or the other. But we've always kept at it, and that is a good measure of success.

The other day a tree blew down across our road, about half-way between the house and the road. Luckily one vehicle was out already because moving it took several days -- although if no vehicle had been on the other side of it, I'm sure we would have worked a bit earlier and more diligently to get it moved. My point, at any rate, is that to most people a downed tree would be nothing but a liability, especially across their road. But to us, it was only a very mild inconvenience and in the end an asset as it becomes the beginning of next winter's firewood. That is because when you shift your perspective, everything looks different. Scratch that, everything IS different.The down tree was a heavy sugar maple. Cutting it into pieces with a bow saw proved an exercise in how many ways one can get a saw bound, and a lesson in levers. There is still one big piece down there that wasn't in the road so we didn't haul it yet, and a bunch of smaller pieces to be worked into lengths there and brought up on the cart. It was fun to hook and work the horse. Then we went on down to the garden and harrowed a bit.

The kids and I came back up to milk because right now it takes the whole crew (at least three people, preferably four). She's getting the routine but we've still got the calf running around loose, and, well, it can get complicated. Luckily our children know what chores are.

Chores, for those of you who might not know, are work that really does have to be done, no excuses, no make work, nothing decorative, no complaining, period, even if you are on your deathbed. Some chores, like doing the dishes or hoeing, can be put off for a day or two but you'll pay for it. Others, like tending to day old chicks, must be done on time or the chicks will die. Milking you get to slide and hour or two but otherwise, it simply has to be done. I think a lot of adults don't understand the nature of chores as they've never dealt with them -- they think it is an imposition instead of a centering, a grounding, a basis for all of life and living. Busywork is the basis of schooling -- it would be my posit that meaningful work is the basis of unschooling.

For the time being we've converted the old shoeing stock into a milking stanchion, and two of us milk her from opposite sides at the same time. She isn't fixed in the stand yet by a head stock so she can leave when she wants too and yet we're still getting lots of milk only milking once a day and not yet having taken the calf off at all. We have tentative plans for an eventual milking area but until this cow, I never would have made plans to be able to have a milker on each side. I may never have another cow that requires it, but one never knows these things.(see that rope-like thing on the bottom of her belly going to her udder? That's a vein! I think that is the coolest. Her teats are really small, her udder huge, those are a daughter's hands, and a cat catching milk from the quarter that had a little mastitis and so it being milked to the cats and not in a bucket.)

(pps I actually have not forgotten the dish rags folks, this is just my normal slowness)

Morning Chores in Snow

This is the first time in my memory that we’ve had significant snow in November. And it is significant. We woke up to several inches and it was still snowing.

I went to milk after fortifying myself with coffee and donning multiple layers for warmth. Visibility was maybe 100 feet, up to 200 sometimes. Then the wind would blow and the snow on the trees, and especially on the pines, would say “Geronimo!” and the air would look like a fog.

I always milk first and feed the horse second, but both things happen in the same little shed and most usually the horse is waiting in the shed even before I milk and I bark “Back!” to him and used to he backed out (he is trained to voice commands) but now he turns around to get out and the shed is just barely big enough for him to manage to turn himself around in. But he comes out and he and donkey wait just outside the shed while I milk and the cow eats.

Milking is a meditation, really. My consciousness becomes a speck while my body continues to sit on the stool and my hands continue to squeeze the milk into the bucket and I am not my body and I am not separate from the cow or from the bucket. This morning I was in such a state when the speck of consciousness became aware that something was eating my hat! The horse was a bit impatient maybe, or maybe he just thought the giant pompom on my hat was funny. My consciousness was immediately aware of my body being on a stool stuck between a 700# cow and an 1800# horse who pretend they don’t particularly like each other. “Back!” I said, and he took a step or two back and I laughed at him and at the beauty of the morning.

Then I took the milk to the house when a wind came and blinded me under the trees and I just stood there while white came down all around me and into the collar of my coat. The children were already sledding, laughing. I took the feed back down to the horse, gave the donkey his obligatory handful, and waited while the horse eats. Donkey took his usual aromatherapy from the empty bucket while I scratched his withers and admired his snowy, spiky mane and the curls on his thick coat. I turned to check the horse over and found a place that needed my attention, just an itchy spot on the side of his hock, and while I was bent over attending to this I felt something quite heavy come up against my behind. It was donkey’s behind. After his withers get scratched, he has a spot on his rump that is his real favorite spot and he can be quite insistent that I attend to it. While I did this, the goats came up waiting to clean up any grain the horse may drop. They were fluffed out to twice their real size.

When the horse was finished I went to get a bale of hay and throw it to them in piles in the field, and then I found my way back to the house and to a breakfast of eggs and toast by the fire.

A Different Stripe

These are the things my life is taken up with: discussions about goat and chicken management, putting up food and making the staples and what’s for supper and washing dishes, keeping the fire going for the smores, lots of other similarly real and productive endeavors, and, today, bovine AI.

AI = Artificial Insemination

Now, years ago I did this, actually helping to collect, examine and insert the semen . . . but on a horse farm. And years ago, things were done via palpation and now ultrasound has taken over. Where they used to palpate for follicles and pregnancy checks, now it is ultrasound. And that was horses, not cattle, so my experience is worth even less.

Hey, did you know there were such things as traveling semen salesmen? And sexed semen? I mean, until about yesterday it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder about such things, but there are. There’s also this guy, on a farm a good ways from here, who is willing to come all the way here to inseminate my cow basically as a favor to me. And he doesn’t know me at all. I went to his place today to pick up prostaglandin in order to induce her cycle so as, hopefully, to be more ready to “catch” her. His place is HUGE, more than 400 Holsteins.

I got a paper that listed sexed semen from different bulls with all these numbers telling you how much milk fat, protein, mastitis cells, numbers of lactations, and a whole lot of other things that the bulls offspring have on average. I am like, boys, you all know way more about this than I do. They said, oh, then you are in trouble. Yes, the bulls are fascinating and the men are hilarious.

What I like the very best is the milieu, the culture, my culture. They are willing to do me a favor and to give me a hard time while they are doing it. A girl can appreciate that.

Maybe next time I’ll say yes to their invitation to join them for lunch.

Winter's Dazey

Dazey guts
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

We have an old Dazey butter churn. The thing must be near 100 years old. I got it from my mother but it isn't an ancestral churn -- my ancestors used dasher churns.

We've used, quite actively, this churn for years now. The top "works" of it were just riveted onto the top and turning it hundreds of times for each pound of butter creates some stresses at those attachments. Even before we started using it, stress cracks were developing and after years of our use, I was getting concerned about them.

Thankfully one of our good friends is a metallurgist. Now, ages ago when MadCap put together a virtual community of homesteaders, people offered up "skills" like "cook" and "networker" and "counselor". Let me tell you now, if you are not able to cook, network a couple computers together, or counsel a friend to not be stupid then there is no hope for you. Skills are more real, more concrete, and more rare than that. Like looking at an ancient butter churn and knowing what to do to fix it. Although in the end, if it came down to it and we didn't have this friend, we would have had to figure it out ourselves.

After coming out here and sipping some excellent Irish Whiskey and playing some music and solving the world's problems with us, our friend took the churn top home with him. He took it apart, analyzed it, and fixed it for us. Turns out the shaft was crooked so he straightened it. There were lots of jokes about this. There was a pin that was about worn in two so he replaced that. And where the top was cracking, he reinforced it on both sides with copper washers, soldered it with tin, and replaced the rivets with a small bolt and an elastic threaded nut that won't work loose. New meets old, modern meets ancient, useful meets useful.

Dazey w/ butter
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

He returned the churn to us before we were out of fresh butter. Thanks friend.

Scenes

Sometimes I feel like puking. Like, no, please, this is not something I can handle at the moment. Then, of course, you handle it because that’s what life is.

I was at the computer when daughter came in holding a chicken, one of the young layers who are not quite yet laying but soon should be. One of her legs swung at an unnatural angle and I felt like puking. I could tell that this was not good. This was not a break on the shank, simple to splint. This was at the hock or above. I hoped for a dislocation and sent her to her dad. He came back in with the chick and said her thigh bones were shattered. He fixed one splint and I taped it. It has to be loose for swelling. It has to be tight enough. I prefer to use popsicle sticks and masking tape if you must know, for chickens anyway.

We got that splint on and there was still a sickening rotation. We have to splint the hock I said. We did that. He pronounced that the bones were close which is as much as you hope for really. We put her in a dog crate that we just got another chicken out of (if you have a sick chicken, the first best treatment is just to take them out of the pecking order, let them be by themselves, with free choice food and water and if they can get better, they usually will). She ate. A lot. She is able to take natural chicken positions. We’ll see.

There is one goat we can’t find. One of the “babies”, no longer much baby really, but one of this year’s girls. She is not very herdy and she did this before, we couldn’t find her for a day or two and then there she was, but we’ve all looked now, and we’ve seen every other goat and not her.

The donkey is being ridden. I’m not sure how long the daughters had been doing it on their own, but now we’re doing it formally which means I’m supervising. I need to get a bridle but in the meantime I just knot a rope in a sort of bridle for him. He is funny because you can see him deciding whether to cooperate or not. He loves the girls but he learns from me. He cooperates for them, but he gets the expectations from me. Which makes me about a thousand fold more effective than I would be without them, and lets them learn how to communicate expectations across species. He was getting a little attitude riding today, a feeling of, hey, are you sure this is a good idea? so I just led him around after that and he led perfectly and he usually has a thing against doing anything at all perfectly.

Tonight supper being ready and milking time ran together, what with chicken splinting and goat searching and donkey riding and all going on today. So we ate first and I milked in the dark. The flashlight is a small thing with one LED in it, weak. And the cow was not there. She is usually waiting in the shed. I noticed there were no lightning bugs. I wonder how long they’ve been gone. The sky is overcast and the wind is blowing and has water in it but it doesn’t say clearly if it is going to rain or not and I silently cheer Humberto on. I sook for the cow. Sooookcow, soooksoooksooookcowwwwww, soooooooookcoooooowwwww. I cannot hear her bell in the wind. The flashlight is no help seeing anything and there is no moon, no stars. Soooookcowwww. I stand my ground because I don’t want to move with no light -- we’d more likely walk past each other than find each other. I hope she can hear me over the wind. Sooookcowwwww. And I think I hear a bell. Soooook. One dark shape seems to move a little bit against all the other dark shapes and I move back up and into the shed. She stops outside and shakes her head at me. She thinks I’m late and bumps me with her shoulder as she passes me. She is not unlike that donkey in that she is in charge and she cooperates with you on her terms, not yours.

Count yourself lucky if they like you.

Knowing What's Important

My mother died. Depending on what you define as “sick”, she either was sick for 15 years or about two weeks. This week has been a month long. August must have lasted at least a year. And was over in the blink of an eye.

We still have to eat of course, and when you get us too far from the farm for too long, it can become quite difficult. My in-laws took us out after the funeral which was a real godsend, and the day between her death and the receiving of friends, I baked those roosters and bread, and made butter and cheese, and that pretty much got us through.

roast rooster leg & liver

Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

Times like these, you know how important food is.

And in this time, this most difficult time, what a comfort the milking routine has been. Solid. A meditation. Peace. Constant. An anchor. And that, my friends, is life on the farm, with the family, who are my rocks.

There is this star I see every night. It is bright and steady and in the southern sky moving west but I don't know what it is. There is a very red, smaller star directly under it, and I can see them both early. After milking I stop and look. And in the looking that part of the sky breaks up, every night, and shows an even pattern behind those stars, like you held up a black piece of cloth with a light behind it, and the light was coming through the weave. I keep wondering if I can step through it, like Alice in Wonderland. I do believe it is the solidity of the daily chores that allows that kind of intimacy with the otherworld.

oh come on, this is fun

What does your handwriting say about YOU?

The results of your analysis say:

You plan ahead, and are interested in beauty, design, outward appearance, and symmetry.
You are a shy, idealistic person who does not find it easy to have relationships, especially intimate ones.
You are diplomatic, objective, and live in the present.
You are a talkative person, maybe even a busybody!
You enjoy life in your own way and do not depend on the opinions of others.

I got it from Madcap . And she's right -- it is amazingly hard to write with a mouse. But then, I don't even write checks anymore.

While we are at it, check this one out:
Why is unprocessed milk the only illegal food in North Carolina?
I was amused at some of the objections as to why raw milk is dangerous. But we can buy RAW CHICKEN with feces all over it! Not from the farm though. No, that would no doubt be too dangerous too. NC is only a few miles from here, just so you know the geography -- a couple mountains over.

Now I gotta go milk!

The New Milk Goats

Yes, we are now milking the goats who had babies last month. Our very first milk goat was a big grey mostly Nubian that we bought off a man who said she would “save” some of the milk in one of her udders for him. She was a good goat. We have her daughter, who is now getting some age on her. The two we are milking are her grand daughter and her great-grand daughter, although it is the first time I’ve milked either one. Grand daughter has had a lactation before, but this is the first lactation for great-grand.

I pretty much think babies need mommas and mommas need babies, so I’m not one of those goat people who takes the babies away from the momma and pasteurizes their colostrum and gives it back to the babies. I think the whole thing of over-management is just ludicrous. Let the goats be goats. I also don’t like to overly tame any goat because it has been my experience that animals that have a slightly wild streak are just flat out better mothers. So these two goats have not been handled a lot before coming in to be milked for the first time. I consider a goat to be tame enough when it will come to a bucket of corn.

Truth be told, the younger goat is fairly tame -- she was the one who I thought was going to die this winter, who lived in our kitchen floor for nearly an entire week. Her mother, though, is pretty darn wild.

To milk, the first thing you have to accomplish is to separate the babies from the mommas. Every night, when I milk the cow, the kids go and find the goat herd, catch the babies, and carry them to the barn (and now lead them, the babies are getting so big) where they are put, all together, in a humongous dog carrier. They were a little upset by this the first night but have the routine down now. It is handy that we have four of each sort of kid.

The next morning, as soon as I’ve milked the cow, a child helper and I go out to get the goats. They do not come before being called, the way the cow does. And it still takes a bucket of corn to persuade them. And none of them will come if the herd queen won’t come, and she’s getting a touch deaf it seems. When I get all the goats near the gate, I just catch the one I want to milk. I always milk the younger one first -- she’s easier to catch.


Udder
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

You can see also that she has a terrific bag. And she is easy to milk and has a real good supply (about three quarts of milk per day and keep in mind, that’s on first lactation which is almost always lower than subsequent lactations -- obviously, I’m only getting half of this since I’m only milking her once a day). After she’s milked, a child helper gets her babies and I lead her (or she leads me) back to the field, where we go about catching the other one.

Now, “the other one” is an interesting one. You might remember that we had an earlier kidding where the momma had a real problem with one of her teats and it didn’t express anything. Nothing, nada came out of that teat. Well, this one has a different “thing”. I noticed when the babies were very young that when they tried to nurse her right side that she kicked. She’d had a successful lactation before, I could express milk from both sides, so I just assumed it would resolve itself. Well, it did, just not in the way I would have preferred. The kids evidently continued to nurse only the one side, and the other side quit producing as much. I can still express milk out of it, there is nothing wrong with it, but it just isn’t in full production this lactation. I thought having only one teat would affect milk quantity but I thought wrong. It just takes longer to get it out with only one spigot. We’ll keep her as a milk goat because she has every prospect of normally lactating from both teats next freshening, and this milking cycle it will just take me longer to milk her out.


Milking One Teat
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

As you can see, I just milk one and let her baby girl do what she can to increase the supply in the other one (milk is a supply equals demand thing but truthfully, not much seems to be changing here). Never before, in more than fifteen years of milking and kidding goats, have we ever had one udder incident, and now, this year, two.

What do I do with this milk? Especially since I am already awash with milk from the cow’s summer production (3 gallons/day more than three years past freshening)? I make feta. It keeps very nicely for more than a year refrigerated in brine. On the wonderfully green fresh from the garden salads that we are feasting on now (and hopefully will for most of the year), nothing is better than a few crumbles of feta.

A few further notes. When milking a goat for the first time, the first day you would swear this is not a thing that can be done. Our first day milking these goats, they kicked, they stepped in the bucket, I spilled the bucket being jostled by the goats, the milk was dirty, I was irritated and tired, etc. I call it a rodeo. The cats got all that day's milk. But by the second day it was better -- still a rodeo but better. In a week's time, it is actually doable. Still somewhat difficult at times but doable. Three weeks later and there is still improvement in that they get used to the routine.

Also, last month when these had their babies, I looked at the herd queen and said, she'll kid next month -- she just didn't catch the first month we had the billy. Sure enough, she had one doe kid the other day. I'm just as glad she had one as she (and her momma) often had three, and once she had four, and frankly, it is hard on them to have more than two. So for the year we have three boys and two girls, and the herd now numbers 13. Which we do not need 13 goats!

February Evening Chores

Mine are almost the last chores. It is dark and with the moon waning half full, it hasn’t risen when I head outside. I have two coats, boots, gloves, the omnipresent hat, a milking bucket and a grain bucket. I stop by and put four scoops of beef mix in the one.

She’s standing by the fence, near the gate. The stars shine and twinkle, the planes stand out. The gate is held shut with a bunge cord that I pop loose. She has walked up to the gate now, almost but not quite in my way. I rub her shoulder and she moves on, slowly, to the shed. Her bell rings with her movements. I set the milk bucket down, make sure the stool isn’t covered with snow (and if it is, I brush it off -- nothing colder than a wet frozen butt), pick up her fortex bucket and put the rocks in it, then half the grain. She sticks her nose in as I take off my gloves and lay them, palms down, on the stool. Insulation. Then I take the rope and hook it to her halter. The snap is broken but sorta kinda works without actually snapping. Works good enough anyway.

I arrange the stool and sit down on the flashlight in one motion, noting how hard the ground is, how I will place the bucket. I brush her teats off and squirt the first few squirts from each on the ground to clear any bacteria that might be hiding near the opening of the ducts. Then I put the bucket under her and go to town squirting. How fast her milk comes down depends on many things -- how full she is, how relaxed she is, if she is mad at me for something or not. Usually it is after 100 squirts and before 200. I work the front teats first, then the back, then the front again, then the back again.

Usually about here she needs her seconds of grain. With her seconds she moves over, always does. I move over and milk alternating pairs of teats until there is no more. Then I pat some roast part of her, stand up, put my teat warmed hands into my sat on gloves, release her halter from the snap, pat her head, tell her I love her, pick up the buckets, look for the dog and head back to the house. She mostly ignores me as she finishes up her grain.

At the house I say, “If you will drain the milk, I’ll get the other animals.” The horse and donkey are turned out and then put back in our field at night. It makes me feel better. They could get out of the other one, given enough time and a full belly. One afternoon the donkey got a full belly and did get out, discovering the pig and bellowing heartily that he did not approve of this pig thing. I pick up the pig bucket that has somewhere around a gallon or so of liquid plus any scraps from the day, and an empty bucket and head back out. It is so quiet in the cold. I get a couple scoops of corn for the equines, a couple scoops of pig feed for the as yet unsalted pig. If it is really cold, he’ll get a scoop of corn too.

The dog, knowing the routine, is off barking the pig. The pig, knowing the routine, is oinking and squealing. I pour a little in the trough so that the pig positions himself and I can figure out how to get the rest in there without spilling it all. I pat the pig and head on down the hill.

At the wide gate I stop. The moon has risen but I can’t see any sign of anything, just grass rising on the hill to the woods. No movement. No nothing. I whistle the distinctive horse whistle then call the horse’s name in a certain way. Then silence once more. Only after a few seconds there is a rustle of grass. Then the sound of mass softly hitting the earth. Usually after than I can detect his movement, see his light mane and white blaze moving through the darkness, catching the moonlight. The donkey is invisible but I can hear him. I go in their field and put their corn down, look them over always watching for any lameness or sign of sickness, and go shut the wide gate.

I cover the germinating plants in the greenhouse and walk back up the hill to huddle in the warmth of the stoves. It is a movie night, the popcorn is popped, and they are waiting for me.

Mean People Suck

Sometimes when I milk, the cow beats me up with her tail. In the summer when she did it I could count on their being a big ole gigantic horse fly trying to land on her somewhere and if I killed that, she'd stop. But we're out of fly season. The season is so advanced that I'm milking in the flashlight's glow a lot of the time.

So maybe last night she was just in a bad mood. Or mad at me for something (I was a little late milking). But she would flick her tail and whip me with with those long hairs, alternating with bonking me on my skull with the bone of her tail. Flick flip flick flip, bonk bonk bonk bonk. Then she'd stop for awhile. Then bonk bonk.

I just brace myself and endure, squirting milk as fast as I can.

Sometimes I swear life is exactly like milking the cow. Except I totally prefer milking the cow.