How home dairying can transform the homestead

I wrote a short blog post about home dairying and thought I’d share it here too.

What are your thoughts on home dairying?

Is it a central part of how you homestead?


How Homemade Dairy can Transform your Homestead

Self reliance
I sometimes get asked “how do you live without a fridge”, or “how do you get by without having to go grocery shopping all the time” and my answer every time is the same thing: We raise dairy animals and make the most of the milk they produce. When we have dairy, we have the key to self reliance.

When you have milk coming into the kitchen fresh every day, there is no need for refrigeration. Milk is often the most common item people will regularly rush out to the grocery store for, and home-produced dairy, especially when combined with cooking from scratch, gardening, chickens, and bulk good storage gives us much more resilience in the face of any crazy stuff that might happen.

Frugality
Keeping to a budget and noting down everything we spend, I can clearly see that the months with fewer shopping trips are the months when it’s been easiest to stay within budget. Going out frequently for milk, yoghurt, cheese, and other dairy products not only means we’re exposed to a bunch of tempting foods on the shelves at the same time, but also means more fuel costs for the car, more of a sense of our food coming from the grocery store rather than our own land, and more time away from our home, when we could have been working in the garden or doing something else productive.

If you have a taste for high quality cheeses, these can drain the food budget very quickly. When you make your own cheese, even if its not from your own dairy animals, you can create fantastic cheeses that will make you ignore the expensive gourmet cheeses on store shelves.

Homemade yoghurt and other cultured milks are even more affordable to make at home - yoghurt is often around four times more expensive than milk, but can be made very easily at home with nothing more than milk and some leftover yoghurt to use as culture.

Focus
Dairy animals need care every day, and once you’re outside caring for them, it’s easy to fit in other homestead chores, feel more like “real” homesteading, and have a more productive homestead overall. There is nothing like the feeling of bringing in fresh milk every day, and I like the rhythm and stability that dairy animals give to our lives: No matter what is happening around us, I know that every morning begins with milking.

Food and health
Dairy foods are simply delicious. The cheeses I make are tastier and healthier than any cheeses that I can buy, and we can eat as much of them as we like. There is not much that gives a feeling of abundance than having shelves full of many varieties of delicious homemade cheeses at varying stages of aging - some are food for now, others are food for later, all are absolutely delicious and truly make a meal. Cheese is a staple food in my house and can easily become a staple food in your home too.

Adding to the benefits of home dairy, surplus milk, whey, failed cheeses, etc., can all be used to supplement the feed of your other animals, too.  If you can give your egg-layers a little milk every day, they won't need so much expensive store-bought feed.  And a milk supplement will allow them to lay well on free-range, and/or kitchen scraps, where otherwise the number of eggs would drop off.  The calcium in the milk is good for the egg shells, too.  (Layers can be ducks, as well as chickens.)

Milk is commonly used to supplement pigs, and can also be given to your farm dogs (start with small amounts to see how they tolerate it, but most breeds bred for farm work should be able to handle some milk in their diet).  I've even heard of rabbits being supplemented with milk.

Surplus milk is also ideal for raising bottle calves or lambs or goat kids for adding to your meat supply.  A good milk cow should be able to raise her own calf, plus one or two extras, and still supply milk for the household.

Our home goat dairy became the hub of our homestead profit wheel.  We had an abundance of resources, Deep garden soil fed by the manure pile at the end of the dairy barn above, Waterfront with oysters to harvest, Berry vines established a generation before by the original homesteaders.  However the customer base revolved around people with health challenges seeking us out for the milk and spreading the word about the abundance of healthy food we had available.

Kathleen Sanderson wrote:Adding to the benefits of home dairy, surplus milk, whey, failed cheeses, etc., can all be used to supplement the feed of your other animals, too.  If you can give your egg-layers a little milk every day, they won't need so much expensive store-bought feed.  And a milk supplement will allow them to lay well on free-range, and/or kitchen scraps, where otherwise the number of eggs would drop off.  The calcium in the milk is good for the egg shells, too.  (Layers can be ducks, as well as chickens.)

Milk is commonly used to supplement pigs, and can also be given to your farm dogs (start with small amounts to see how they tolerate it, but most breeds bred for farm work should be able to handle some milk in their diet).  I've even heard of rabbits being supplemented with milk.

Surplus milk is also ideal for raising bottle calves or lambs or goat kids for adding to your meat supply.  A good milk cow should be able to raise her own calf, plus one or two extras, and still supply milk for the household.

I agree! We are working towards getting a house cow our homestead, not just for the butter and cream, but because the skim milk and other "waste" products are excellent feed for pigs and poultry. Milk is so good to have on the homestead.

I've had dairy goats most of the last forty years.  I have a couple of Nigerian Dwarfs right now, that I'm not milking, but I'm also raising a couple of heifers.  They were sale barn bottle calves, so I don't really know what I've got, other than that Dulcie is purebred Jersey, and Toffee is probably half Jersey and half Angus.  Dulcie is about six months old; I'll have to think about getting her bred in another six months or so.  Toffee is about five or six weeks old.  We only have about two acres of pasture, so I'll have to make a decision on which one of them to keep (we are in south-central KY; two acres is about right for one cow-calf pair).  I'd like to breed to a Dexter bull, whichever heifer I end up keeping, but don't know of any locally so that will have to be AI.

This thread is SO encouraging!!!

I didn't go about adding dairy to our micro farm in the smartest way possible for our area.
I'm in goat territory and should have investigated that further but nooooo,
I wanted a cow.

So I found a ranch about 90 miles away that had mid sized Jerseys.
Oh, just what I wanted. But so expensive. Hubby had plenty of work at the time and
indulged me. Of course, he never fails to tell anyone that comes to the place how
much I paid for her. He has just about got his money's worth. lol
She is the only thing on the place that is insured.

We sent her back to the ranch to get bred. I looked into AI but I was
somehow dissuaded from doing it myself and there is no such thing as someone
here that will come do one cow AI. I don't even have a large animal vet.
I pray a lot.

So I had gotten her a little fat. I have no pasture so she is fed hay and
alfalfa pellets and 20% cattle cubes. She had to stay at the farm for 5 months
until the rancher felt there was a good chance she was bred. Well, she
must have gotten knocked up like the day before she came home in January.
She is bagging up (August) and is lopsidedly rounder but not looking like
delivery is imminent.

One of my specific prayers is that she will Please God just drop the calf like cows usually do
and I will come out one morning to find the cutest thing already there. I do have
a little experience having to pull a calf but hoping that is not needed.

I have been reading a lot but I haven't totally prepared for the whole milking thing.
My current plan is to let the calf have it all for 10 - 14 days keeping an eye on if she needs
to be milked out. Then calf sharing by restraining the calf at night in a pen. Even
typing this out makes me feel like I'm just being dumb about the whole thing.
Like I should be more prepared.

Feel free to tell me the things I'm not doing that I ought to be but please
keep it to the most critical. The cow is very tame. I was able to lead her into
the trailer. I regularly "feel her up" while she is eating.

It's funny to me that she changes color during the year. She is really dark right now,
she gets red in the fall and she is nearly white after shedding in the spring.

It feels like our journey to our own milk has been long. In the meantime, we have
successfully transitioned to eating all our own meat - mostly pork, some rabbit and
there was the steer that they practically threw in gratis with the heifer.
Reading this thread make me look forward to having our own milk even more.

And I just noticed that this is in the goats and sheep forum. So like me.
Going to post it anyway.