David Milano

Really must cast a loud yes vote for cows, though with one seriously important caveat: the circumstance has to match the animals or the farmer/homesteader will quickly be overwhelmed.

We kept a family milk cow while the kids were home. Carmen came to us as an older 3-cylinder Jersey (lost one teat to mastitis at some point long before we owned her). Because her age and relatively low milk production made here unsuitable for commercial farming but a good fit for us, we got her cheap.

Carmen is pictured below, there in our milking room. For years she gave us lots of fine, high quality (high cream!) milk, calves for steering (never once gave us a heifer) and plenty of hard work. Notably, she also transformed our pasture, and especially our barnyard, into rich, thick grass. (Properly managed ruminants eating grass and trampling and fertilizing the ground naturally create strong, high quality grasses. Even now, 15 years after the cows have gone, our barnyard grass is still full and healthy and in far better shape than any other grass on our property.)

By the way, “low” milk production was in the neighborhood of 2-3 gallons/day—more in the springtime after freshening—truthfully, too much milk for a single family. We drank some, separated some for cream, made fresh cheeses, and sent the remainder to friends who raised a pig for us every year (that milk-fed pork was the best we’ve ever had). At some point we decided to change over to a smaller breed (Dexters—also pictured below) to decrease the amount of milk and beef we were producing, which alas, turned out to be less successful. The Dexters were just not the best for hand milking. Handles too short and temperaments too flighty. That was about the time the kids left, makling any sort of family cow too much, so after a couple years we wrapped it all up.

For what it's worth, here is a bit of analysis and some suggestions and cautions, about family cows:

1. Be ready for a lot of work in all sorts of weather. Milking, water, fencing, barn, and gate management, pasture rotation, producing and/or transporting and storing hay for the winters, breeding (bulls can be worse than a nuisance—sometimes downright dangerous, so artificial insemination, as tricky as that can be, is best), hand-feeding calves, vetting, and of course all the myriad handling tasks, are all real jobs and require expertise, space, and equipment for safety and success.
2. As small farms decline, support for micro-operations like a 2 or 3 cow herd is harder and harder to come by. It was essentially impossible, for example, for us to find anyone to do the milking in a pinch. To solve that problem we simply stayed home all the time (can’t skip a single day when milking). We would try to dry her off around Christmas and time breeding for an April calf, which gave us three winter months of relative freedom, but getting that to work out was by no means guaranteed.
3. If I was to start it all again I’d avoid gambling on a heifer. Instead I’d find an Amishman willing to sell a proven cow that can stand still, and pay him what he asks.
4, If your own farm is diverse, all the better. Hogs and cows are a terrific match. Chickens are geniuses at picking flies from cow plops. Gathering and composting soiled cow bedding gathered from the free-stall as we did, is a great addition to the garden.
5. Notably, our health during our cow ownership period was stunningly good. Why? My opinion is that is was a combination of the labor, regular exposure to the outdoors, and most important, receipt of milk that had been customized to our farm and life. I was entirely free of infections then, including colds, and just felt great. I’ve read that milk cows sample the environment and instill biological protectors into their milk. I believe it. I guess, as the milker and handler, you are not only a recipient of the product, but a part of her sample as well.
6. A beef herd is much, much easier to manage than a single dairy cow.

That was a long post. I'm sure too much information for most. But I feel like I barely scratched the surface!

I live about half mile from a talented career welder/fabricator who has fixed everything from my kitchen colander to my hay elevator, and still I decided to learn to weld for myself. It was about wanting to get immediately to small, farm-type jobs, especially those that crept up on a weekend or evening.

Having had a small bit of stick welding and torch welding experience as a teenager doing repair and maintenance for an engineer who taught me a few things, I felt somewhat ahead of the game, but most everything I “knew” had emerged from a pure just-get-'er-done attitude 50 years earlier. Now older and wiser, I knew I needed instruction, which I happily got from YouTube University, eventually becoming competent(ish) with a small mig welder. With it I make get-by repairs on ⅛” or less steel, and am happy. Basically I’ve scratched my welding itch.

But…

It’s absolutely critical to note that welding is a complicated business, full of important details. Even the high-end hobbyist is likely to make mistakes that a professional never would, so if there’s any chance that someone can get hurt if a weld doesn’t stick, let a pro do it!

Very satisfying thread for this particular Italian boy! So very nice to hear about folks making ricotta in the orthodox manner, from whey rather than from milk.

A traditional dish and personal favorite ricotta dish in our house was Ndunderi di Minori, sometimes called Ricotta Gnocchi, in which ricotta is not an ingredient in the sauce but rather a base ingredient in the pasta.

My recipe uses 200 grams of very well-drained ricotta (allowed to drain in a sieve for about 12 hours in the refrigerator), 3 grams grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, about 150 grams flour, a large egg, salt, and a scrape of nutmeg. Mix everything together in a bowl, then transfer to a board for kneading, but not too much kneading or you’ll have to add more flour. Allow the dough to rest in the refrigerator for about 20 minutes. Remove it, take about a third and roll it into a snake 3cm-4cm in diameter. Cut the snake into pieces 3 fingers wide each, flatten the chunks a very little bit and dust them well with flour, then roll them over a ridged gnocchi board to make the pasta shape. (If you aren’t blessed with an older Italian relative who can teach gnocchi rolling, do a YouTube search.) Cook in a large pot of salted, boiling water until 2 minutes after they’ve risen to the surface. Remove with a slotted spoon.

A simple sauce cooked with olive oil (flavored with a clove of garlic and basil stems), cherry tomatoes, and basil leaves is the time-honored finish.

Hopefully the attached pictures will energize you!

Every springtime here snapping turtles venture from their usual residences in ponds and swamps to lay eggs. For some reason our vegetable garden is considered prime territory. They sneak under the gates, apparently energized, we’ve noticed, by thunder storms. Seasonal turtle-proofing has become a regular chore, but this year I forgot, and of course a couple of turtles grabbed the opportunity. They can be destructive—this time dug out our watermelon plants and some brassicas before I showed up to redirect them. I use a shovel for transport, coming at them from behind, which the turtles tolerate pretty well, although one did take offense and bit the shovel handle. Spun around quick as a gunshot!

Made this gadget from a scrap of 2X4 and a couple old broomsticks, to speed up fall garlic planting—overall size and spike pattern matched to the raised bed. One person at each end makes the job fast and easy.

Two situations at our place called for a stair that had a very short run but didn’t prevent carrying stuff in our arms. The two pictures show my solution, both of which have been in place for decades and have worked very well. They’re versions of one of the stairs Jay pictured above.

The common name for these is “ladder stairs” because they blend the two—a shortened run that approaches that of a ladder, but with steps like a staircase. A ladder stair cuts the length of the stair run in half (compared to a standard staircase) without affecting the rise of each step taken.

As you can see in my pictures and Jay’s picture, these things can be plain or fancy. I did the “fancy” design for our greenhouse, which is attached to our house and therefore needed a higher level of fit and finish. The barn stair is all about function. Basically it’s two narrow staircases that I built using plywood for stringers. The pattern is evident in the picture. The rise of each step on each side of the stairs is twice normal, which gives a normal rise for each step taken when the two are juxtaposed properly. One must always start with the proper foot, but other than that, they’re very comfortable, and unlike a ladder, they leave the arms free for carrying.

For anyone used to a standard staircase (i.e. everyone) there’s an odd sense of not making much forward progress when ascending or descending. Also, notably, brand new users tend to think for a second and watch their feet!

This is a great topic—one that just begs for shared experience.

It’s easy to fall into the trap that goats are a perfect solution for brush clearing. Bonnie’s, Estelle’s, and others’ previously posted suggestions are all worth reading.

My experience is as follows:

Mowing our berms and banks is very work intensive (they cannot be left to nature as they quickly become overwhelmed with problematic woody brush). Somebody floated the idea of goats, which sounded perfect, even with knowledge of the potential problems. We procured 2 lovely Boer goats from a friend.

Fencing them in on the bank areas was impractical to say the least, so I opted instead (with eyes wide open) for tethering. For each of the two goats I set up a heavy weight with a 6” tall rod in the middle, to which I secured a cable, and then put cable swivels at the weight, midway along the cable, and at the goats’ collars. I placed everything where there was no thick, tall growth from the goats to wrap around, and made sure I was available to check them every half hour. This was pretty much the limit for my goat investment.

The first half-hour check found both goats completely wazzled up around the 6” posts on their tether weights. (It was actually kinda funny… when stuck they hollered out what sounded like “NO GOOOOD! NO GOOOOD!) So… I removed the 6” post so the cable could swivel freely around the weight. Next half hour check found the same thing. Both goats wazzled up, this time with their cables stuck under the tether weights.

A third try with screw-type stakes made to tether dogs didn’t work either. (This time I sat there to watch as the goats got partially wound up, then pulled hard enough to begin loosening the stakes.) By then I was actually relieved to get back to scything.

One last thing… I couldn’t attribute this to an intelligence deficit (on the part of the goats I mean… my own was judgement was clearly in question). The goats seemed to me—admittedly a non-goat person—to be smart, interesting, and most of all, interested, in us and in their surroundings. They always looked me in the eye—charming!

Tap rooted plants attract worms. I can’t say why with certainty—probably nutrients brought up to the surface by deep roots creating a worm-friendly environment. Congenial food sources, and perhaps also some welcome loosening of compacted soil. The correlation first became evident to me when I got tired of being poked by bull thistles in our barnyard, and decided to dig out the ones that were in sensitive locations (they're potent soil improvers so wholesale removal would be unwise). I found worms, often fat ones, tied into each root ball. Curiosity got me digging up other tap root plants and sure enough, the more developed the root mass, the more earthworms.

The old, “abandoned” (ownership is never abandoned) buildings in my neck of the woods are mostly  dairy barns. They tell a sad story of lost economies and, at least in my opinion, lives changed for the worse.

We were once a very active dairy farming region. Just a couple or three generations ago, small family farms were very common, and very solvent with 20-40 cows plus some other farm endeavors—cropping and beef/pork/chickens/goats for home use plus whatever bits of commerce they could bring in. Nowadays though, the story is vastly different. Now if you need, say, a gallon of milk, and drive from the countryside to the grocery store to get it, you’re unlikely to pass an active dairy farm, but will certainly pass several former dairy farms, pastures overgrown, barns empty and gradually collapsing to the ground. Arrive at the store and buy… what exactly? Fractionated, reconstituted, “fortified,” pulverized, overheated milk that came from hundreds of miles away. One can’t help but wonder how we could have gotten here.

I included the pictured barn because when I saw it, hope arose that it would not require a miracle to salvage. But like they say, don’t judge a book by its cover. This barn is actually close to ruin. Close enough that a good windstorm will probably finish it.

The interior photo of the old Ford parked inside the better-preserved end of the barn (the other end is not safe to be in) tells its own sub-story. By all appearances it was simply driven into the barn one miserable day when it could no longer justify its existence on the farm and promptly forgotten. I looked it over pretty well, and figured it could probably be started and driven with a bit of tinkering. (I once resurrected a long—30 years long—abandoned field truck that the farmer gave to a friend and myself for free, just for the effort of getting it out of his hedgerow. The rugged old flathead V8 coughed up and the leaky tires held enough air to get it out of the field and into a trailer.) But this truck revival wasn’t to be. The owner (two generations along from the truck’s use-by date) wasn’t interested, and really neither was I, being already overloaded with projects.

I guess the old Ford sits there still. The very likely outcome? Falling timbers will one day finish it off for good.

In their small way, the barn and the truck tell the story of the rise of colossal, centralized systems, and the fall of tiny local ones.

Used to be amazed at the “problem” of kids having to travel to school in the dark… I mean, really, is it so hard to simply adapt by changing school day start and end times?? But then I realized, yes, it’s extremely hard to adapt, because the school schedule is tied to the parents’ work schedules, which are in turn tied to the entirety of commerce/business/production/etc. cycles. A one-hour change in the school schedule can throw a massive wrench into the machinery, especially when both parents work outside the home (which seems to be the current norm). So many competitive interests, so many schedules embedded into non-natural cycles.

Jay Angler wrote:

“I'm told that anyone with cows will find that they don't pay *any* attention to clocks.”

That statement gave me a rather wan smile. When we kept a family cow I was forced to integrate farm duties with my day job at the local hospital, and man oh man, what a pain! The interplay of human and animal diurnal cycles, job work schedules, and the necessity of routine for both health and predictable behaviors (animal and human!) was burden enough… the biannual imposition of a time change seemed a cruel and unusual punishment.

There’s no diplomatic solution. Far too many tangles. I guess I’ve become hopeful of a miracle. Interestingly I said as much recently and was told that government force is the miracle I’m waiting for. What a sorry insight.