PLANS AND PROGRESS II

[Sololeum]

G'Day All,

We've been a quiet bunch of little vegimites eh!!

Now we are milking two cows, I'd like to update some thoughts that were scattered in Daves time...

We live in grazing country - definitely not arable - the soils are too fragile and the landscape is hilly - often quite steep. Howver we have such an abundance of milk we are giving it away - gallons at a time - some to chooks and some to pigs, while the calves are growing like the fabled beanstalk - as their Dad is an AIS they will make good beefy little eaters!
We have one pure jersey and a jersey friesian or swiss brown cross.. The jersey has smaller teats, she still milks well with a stripping action (and vaseline!)

The point is that each cow is producing ten litres (a bucket) per day and the calves are growing astronomically - we will have to shut the calves up soon or we will get no milk at all.

The point of this is in times of scarcity - we should get rid of our beef herd from places like this and dairy - still producing beef but at least 3000kg of milk from each cow, which if killed would only dress out at 300 kg or under..

It is part of the natural law that humans need Vitamin B12 and we need around but less than 2 micro milligrams per day' while a kg of beef has an average of 8 micromilligrams of B12, a litre of fresh milk has 6.5 - so a dairy type cow produces 19,500 micro milligrams of B12 while she lives, yet only 2400 or under dead...

Yields much greater than ours would be achieved if you took the calves off the cows and fed them from a bottle - 4 litres only per day!!!

So an important part of a sustainable, local society is a dairy industry and I would advocate a return to small 10 to 12 cows being milked per day - by hand - happy and contented cows and happy and contented dairypersons!!!

Shit of a year for veggies though - apart from the corn which is great...

Cheers,

[langdons]

Nice post thanks Sol. Very interesting to hear about your success with the dairy cows. Have you experimented with cheese yet? We have been talking about dairy goats in recent times (given our limited amount of land here).

We have been busy with our building project for the last four months (and little else other than work), so I haven't been keeping track of SPO.

Since corn is in season at the moment we have been experimenting with drying and freezing it. The drying has yielded better results so far than we had expected. It's all good to know.

[Sololeum]

We got rid of our small herd of British Alpines late last year - Why?
1. This is grazing not browsing country, and so their health is impinged
2. British Alpines as a type come spontaneously into milk and are almost impossible to dry off - therefore difficult to manage.

Cheese? at the moment no - maybe something for the future.

Because of time constraints it became impossible to milk twice per day so our milk production has gone down, although we still supply people down the road with up to ten litres per day plus our own usage!

Milking is a form of meditation - one where you have intimate contact with the natural..