Keep a Family Cow and Enjoy Delicious Milk, Cream, Cheese and More

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Dominic Palumbo leads his cows (a Normande and a Jersey-Angus cross) to pasture near Sheffield, Mass. PHOTO: JASON HOUSTON

A dairy cow provides lots of practical benefits. Perhaps the most notable is that cows eating a grass-based diet can provide great-tasting dairy products that are more nutritious and flavorful than those you can buy in most grocery stores. Raising a family dairy cow is a fun experience, plus it’s a great step toward self-sufficiency and food security. Surplus dairy products from the cow and meat from calves could even bring in extra income for your family. Keeping a homestead dairy cow is a big commitment though, so you’ll want to prepare carefully.

The Daily Dairy Cow Routine

A cow produces milk in order to feed her calf. After the cow has given birth, she must be milked (or her calf allowed to nurse) at least twice daily or the milk will stop flowing. Count on about nine to 10 months of milk production, allowing the cow to rest at least two months before a new calf is born. Your daily routine will consist of feeding, milking twice a day or milking once a day and separating the calf from the cow eight to 12 hours before you milk. (Keep reading for more details.) You will also need to muck out the milking area frequently and move fences for rotational grazing as needed.

Feeding. A dairy cow needs two principal components in her diet to be healthy: roughage and protein. Roughage mainly consists of cellulose and can be supplied by pasture and various forms of hay. Good grass hay and grass pasture can contain sufficient protein for animal maintenance, but for a lactating dairy cow, higher protein feeds such as alfalfa hay, grass-legume pasture or protein supplements will increase milk production. She’ll also need a mineral supplement and salt, and a lactating cow can drink up to 30 gallons of water per day, so you’ll need to provide plenty of fresh water.

In winter when the pasture is sparse, good hay — and possibly additional grain or premixed feed — will be necessary. If you can feed leafy alfalfa hay (2 to 3 pounds per 100 pounds of body weight), this will be all she needs. However, if you want to increase the cow’s milk production, feed a grain supplement in the form of chopped or ground oats, barley, corn or wheat every day, regardless of season.

During the summer, the cow can get all the nutrients and protein she needs from grazing a lush pasture consisting of legumes and grasses. In many regions, a cow and calf will need at least an acre of good pasture. In regions with poor soil or little rain, 10 acres or more may be necessary to support the pair.

Milking. Ideally, milking should be timed at 12-hour intervals. A cow with a full, distended udder is not a happy cow; don’t inflict this on her by milking erratically. With the family cow, you have the option of milking just once a day by letting the calf help you out. Leave the calf with the cow overnight. Separate them in the morning, and by evening, the cow will be ready for milking (this approach lets you avoid early morning milkings if you have an 8-to-5 job). Using this system, the calf may nurse beyond normal weaning periods (about eight weeks for most dairy calves), and you won’t need to mess around with the bottle feeding that would be required if you were milking twice a day and feeding some to the calf.