One-cow Family Meets the One-family Cow
(Page 3 of 14)
May/June 1972
By Hank Rate
The second consideration to bear in mind when buying a cow is your own mental makeup. You must have a sensitivity for animals and be able to identify with them to the point that you can feel their needs.
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Then again, you can't be too soft-hearted or old Bossy will wind up owning you. There's that cute little calf (usually the difference between profit and loss for the year) that you've got to be tough enough to sell annually . . . and the fall will come when Bossy herself is too stiff and sore and short of teeth to make it through the winter. When that happens you'll have to load her up and take her to market too. The $200 she'll bring at that time is an important part of her total production, and may be needed to replace her. Moreover, some areas don't have rendering works (most now charge for pickups anyway) . . . and imagine the size hole (usually chipped through frozen ground) it takes to plant a cow! As a clincher, it's downright ecologically immoral not to keep that 2/3-ton of meat in the food cycle.
You must really want to learn animal husbandry when you keep a single cow because, to do right by her, you'll need to know almost as much as if you were caring for a hundred. If you can't look upon the necessary learning process as a form of recreation, your time won't be worth much to you.
Remember, too, that a homestead cow will demand your attention twice a day for 90% of the year. The whole family must be willing to milk on occasion . . . and a good neighbor who'll sometimes handle the chores in exchange for some of the produce can be a big help in relieving the monotony of the whole situation.
On the other hand, it's more important to retain your sanity and flexibility than to be as religious in the 12-and-12-hour habits of milking as the commercial dairyman down the road or those early extension circulars make out. Sure, a cow is a creature of habit, and you'll get a little more production out of yours if you milk her "by the book" . . . but even the experts now agree that a cow's output won't drop off that much if you milk her on, say, a 10-and-14 schedule (7 AM and 5 PM, for instance). We try to milk at the same time each day, all else being equal, but we don't rush home from a visit to town or deny ourselves an extra hour of sleep when it's needed. If a man's going to let his cow set his schedule, he might as well go to dairying professionally.
HANDY ACCESSORIES AND COW-CARE TOOLS
My list of cowkeeping gear includes a milk stool, pitch fork, manure fork, hay bale hook and wheelbarrow at the barn. A milk pail, small bucket and rags for,washing Ole Yeller's bag before milking, large coffee cans for storing dairy produce and a strainer makeup my milking equipment. The only expendable supplies are milk filter discs for the strainer.
Old hand-crank separators are practically given away at farm sales in our area and used table-top electric models run about $25. If you don't want to fool with a separator, you can skim the cream off your chilled surplus milk . . . but in that case, you might want to consider a small used refrigerator (or a good springhouse or box) in which the milk can be stored until the cream rises.
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