I'm falling in love with cows

We have dogs, chickens, turkeys, sheep, oh and flies.  But of all of our animals there seems to be something special about cows.  Perhaps it’s a subjective thing and what I resonate with, and maybe this is objective fact – but either way cows are something special.

We have some great friends nearby who have joined us on our milk cow operation.  So we expanded quicker than I was planning and it’s turned out pretty decently in my view.  They brought in three cows so they could ramp up milk production quickly.  The oldest of their cows had a baby pretty quickly because she came in pregnant, which was great for milk production, and the baby was a female too – which is great!  So they had four female cows in their first year of raising milk cows.  They went from zero to four pretty much the speed of light, at least in terms of human perception, and it became overwhelming quickly.

Over at our homestead we had two females and a newborn baby.  We also have two bulls to help with the whole reproductive and milk cycle, but the females are the main point to all of this.  I think women deep down know they are the main point to all of this.  One of our oldest cows is my favorite, she was our first and I’ve really bonded to her.  She’s my friend.  We don’t really speak the same language with our lungs, diaphragms (do cows have diaphragms?), tongues, and faces.  But we do speak quite a bit one to another in other ways.  I can mimic some of their sounds and it does seem to soothe.  I can also stand my ground and show I’m tough if needed.  But there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of micro actions that seem to be part of communication.  And as we spend time together these things sparkle about.

Well my favorite cow and best friend in the cow world turns out to be pretty broken.  We are pretty sure she cannot reproduce.  The lady we bought her from thinks she might with some surgery – but we don’t even like surgery on ourselves, why would we do that for a cow?  And I am pretty sure it’s well beyond cysts as she thinks, there are many things off with my friend.  We can actually milk her, and she hasn’t had a child.  But that milk isn’t milk at all, it’s a mildly bloody mucous.  One of her pelvic bones is sunken in; that isn’t right.  She is about 30% larger than any of the other cows of her breed.  Her heat cycles aren’t very noticeable to her, the bulls can tell but she can’t.  So my view is that she is hormonally and physiologically broken.  And I love her.  Not in any sort of gross way you perverts out there may be thinking, just in a great friendship happy sort of way.

But I am a very practical person.  We have very clear intents, and raising a bunch of cows for friendship really isn’t the goal here.  We also have a neighboring household who happens to be one of our best friends who are also human.  They are getting older, are homesteaders, and eat a decent amount of beef.  So we are turning the problem of my friend who cannot be milked (at least for useable milk) or have children into the solution of creating beef for our human friends.

We tried one last time to breed her for several months so there is a small chance she will have a baby this fall.  If she does then that whole killing thing will be derailed which is great for my cow friendship but bad for meat and the logistics of us having too many cows.  So the plan is that if she has a child we will keep her and milk her and I can keep my friend.  And if she does not have a baby we will truck her off to another human friend nearby with no attachments to her to do the whole killing and cutting up type of thing.

Back to our friends mentioned in the beginning who bought some cows and got up to four too quickly.  Well they were stressing out and we love them and wanted to help out.  So we adopted all of their young cows and are starting to train them.  They are keeping the oldest milker only right now. This is what spurred this post.  I was just out there trying to calm the craziest one that moved here and get her more comfortable with me being around.  We have taken in three of their cows for now.  We hope they will take at least one back when they are ready.  The cows coming to our place have gone in waves, we didn’t take them all in at once.  First came R (don’t want to disclose her full name, you may know her ), she was wild and crazy when we got her.  But over the last month or so she’s calmed down and is leadable a this point.  We had her and my best cow friend near one another and now R is pretty calm and easy for a young heifer.  We just recently received M who is fairly insane.  The same time M came up here we brought my best friend cow A down to their place.  My best friend cow is outside their immediate homestead and out in the more wild perimeter fence.  So they don’t have to do much with her, she can go have a lot of fun on roughly 160 acres of woods and pasture.  I’m sure she is loving it, if she doesn’t give birth it will be a great end of life adventure.  If she does give birth then meat is called off and she can come back home.

I saw her today.  I was visiting my human friends and saw my cow friend A outside the fence.  I wanted to go give her scratches and hugs but I didn’t.  It’s sad to me and I am trying to create distance before this potential end coming up.  I’m feeding my best friend cow to my best friend humans.  It’s kinda disgusting, but kinda beautiful.  Depends on how you want to look at it.  I like to look at the whole spectrum I can see, which makes it disgustingly beautiful.

Well then.  We now have two babies we are training up.  Two heifers about old enough to breed.  One best friend cow who is away on vacation ready to die.  One milking cow who I just finished milking – she is a gem as well.  And two bulls to help keep the breeding going for a while.  It’s a pretty fun and exciting situation in my view.  They are curious, intelligent, stubborn, and lovely animals.  Many people I’ve met aren’t nearly as pleasant to be around.  In the animal world I find them pretty top tier.  Seems to me more people should have cows instead of buy cow products – it is a completely different experience.  It’s like the difference of eating a tomato versus tending to a garden.  Or the difference in playing the recorder versus playing in an orchestra, or even listening to a live orchestra.

Anyways I’m already mourning for my potential beef cow while at the same time celebrating the new cow personalities coming in.  Life and death is always present at the homestead.

Welcome to the forum!

Cows are easy to fall in love with, especially the babies.

You are not alone in your love of cows. I rate them highly.
  When a dear friend was heading out on his honeymoon,  I offered to feed the dogs and milk his herd for a week.  I learned so much, and I began to understand why Hindu culture considers the cow holy, and they revere them as sacred.   Other cultures too,
Zeus was smitten by Hera, if we care to remember....
To ancient Greeks, the large, luminous, gentle eyes of a cow were a standard of majestic and noble physical beauty for a goddess.

You could say, cows are udder-ly gorgeous

Trying to give this homage to beeves a boost , as they inspire admiration in much of the Permaculture World.  

Surely there are fans here of the Iliad ,the Odyssey???
Remember those multiple references the kine-eyed Hera? All those centuries past, in which cows were valued as calm, regal and solemn?
In fact many cultures in the Indo-European tradition considered this amazing creature sacred.  

Let's hear from others, please! Any adoring stories about cows? We don't want to offend Hera, the queen of heaven

Instead of reading Chairman Mao
I think I'll go and milk my cow.  
              --Wendell Berry

Our world lost a legendary poet and agrarian activist recently, and many of his essays dealt with using cows and plowing with horses.  These were two retro practices as seen by industrial farming.  But the Permaculture Way knows better

Rest in peace, Wendell

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 grew up as a conventional dairy farmer of about 100 head.  They had numbers, not names, but I knew them as individuals, and have bored many a person with my tales.

Should I tell you of my all-time favorite, 150, who for an entire year would come in as the 4th cow to be milked, while cow 240 always came in first.  After they were done being milked and the gates were opened, 150 would back up, wait for 240 to make it nearly out, and 150 would take a shortcut to jump in front of 240 to get out slightly earlier.  I don't know if they had a tiff, or if 150 just thought of it as a practical joke -- which she did twice a day -- or what it was about, but I found it funny.

Or should I tell you that 150 loved being scratched under the neck, more than other cows, and I was off at college, so hadn't tamed her granddaughter, until I caught her in a stall one day, scratched under her neck, and she stretched it out in a mimic of her grandmother, and became my pet from that day on.

Or 32, who I called the "President" of the herd.  The cows (aside from a few 'rebels') wouldn't leave the barnyard until 32 led the way.  Sometimes, 32 would follow me to the second gate of a field they'd been in for several days, stop and look at the next field of nicer grass, Moo several times, look at me, and THEN walk into the field.  She was usually 3 days ahead of my dad for deciding they should change fields.  32 was neither friendly nor scared...she treated me like her servant.  One time she wasn't at the front, so I called out "Calling cow 32, Cow 32 to the front of the barnyard, please!"  I was joking...but the cows in the loafing shed all moved aside, and 32 came walking through the middle of her entourage, and came and stood before me, as if "OK, I'm here, let's go!".  I SOOO wish I had a video to prove this!

Or 41, who tried to squeeze me to death against a wall when I was maybe 10 or 12.  Years later, she was in the same stantion, and somehow popped it open.  Other cows could open them -- 123 had a single horn she used.  21 stretched her long neck to avoid locking them.  But 41 just shock her head and popped it open at will.  Then she looked back as if "don't you want to come between me and the wall to try to lock me in?  DON'T YOU?!"  THEN she used her mouth to unlock all four. looked back again...and put her head down in a 'locked' position, but the top bar was 'unlocked'.  She looked back again.  She *really* wanted another chance to squeeze me to death!  I just laughed at her antics.

I know 150 could count to 4, so could 40.  Our milking parlor had 3 sides of 4, and 40 wanted -- I don't know why -- to be in the last set of 4.  40 didn't mind being milked -- if there were only 4 cows out there, she'd be the first one in.  But if there were 5, she would scoot around and avoid going in.  Then, when we opened up for the last cow, my dad would tell me to go get the last one in, assuming it was someone who didn't want to come in.  I'd tell him that it was #40, and she'd be right there.  Time after time he'd get exasperated at my disobedience, start to go get her himself...and she would saunter in.

41 wasn't the only cow who respectfully disliked me.  I had always found 93 ugly and ornery, and I think she thought the same of me.  Late in her life, she would come up to me, reaching out her neck and sniffing at me as if she was curious and wanted to be a friend.  I'd reach out to her, she'd sniff, then snort and shake her head wildly, stomping off.  I don't know if she was getting old and blind, and remembered when smelling me, or if she was pulling a joke on me.

Or 65.  Nicely built, but sorta plain.  Not as pretty as her half sister 60.  But 60 flamed out young.  Somewhere along the line, we realized that 65 was getting prettier as she got older, that she was producing more milk every year, and that she *never* got sick.  She also, was neither friendly nor scared -- she didn't care that I existed.  Before her, we'd had 2 cows barely reach 10 years old...65 was 12 when we sold the farm, and by this point she was producing in the top 5 of any of our cows ever.  The day we sold the farm, she got sick!  It was as if she didn't want to leave.  They buyers came for her a couple of weeks later, needing an older cow to help settle down the herd, but gave us 1/2 what they would have on the main day...dad was not happy.  I really wish I knew how long she'd lived!

Or dare I tell you about 245?  She was one of the prettiest ever, and I *might* have mentioned her a few times.  A female friend came to visit, and 245, who had never been friendly, came walking over from the far end of the barnyard to say Hi.  I introduced her to my friend, who turned to 245 and said "Oh, so *you're* my competition!"  

OK, are you bored, yet?!

Here in Texas, cattle are mostly for meat.  I am sure there are some for dairy though I am not familiar with those.

We usually had what the local auction had.  Then we started buying at a place called the "Fatted Calf".

I never knew what breed they were so I assumed mixed.

While staying on a friend's property we came to know their Highland cows. Most of the herd was moved into the summer mountain pasture, but the vagaries of life and logistics meant one young bull stayed behind, alone. Loneliness isn't any better for cattle than for people, and this bull, dubbed Peanut Butter, wanted friends. Our two year old son obliged, toddling over with a handful of leaves to augment the meager hay available, to stand at the fence next keeping company with his enormous friend. Our visit there ended, but the bull seemed to remember his young friend, grown now to a precocious for year old boy,  the next time we came to the property.

I dream of getting back into milking by hand, if we can make our steep Ozark woodland into something that could support cows. It's well-suited for goats, and our milking Nubian is lovely, but I miss cows.