Milking a Cow in the Dark OR Charlotte’s Web with an Attitude
November will forever be known as the month we got our first family cow. “Family cow” has an idyllic ring to it, a little romantic and probably connotes an idealized version of the life of a homesteader. I’m not sure our family cow is idyllic but she IS incredibly stubborn and prefers to eat the most expensive food instead of the bales of alfalfa and hay we got for her.
Our family cow (ROSE) arrived in a horse trailer at 4:30pm on a Monday evening. We are in that time of the year now where the sun goes down around 5pm so we had 30 minutes to milk her for the first time and get her into her stall before the dark settled in around us. Getting Rose into her stall took three of us — one to “lead” her by the halter and two to hold a rope around her back legs and firmly usher her toward her pen. Moving a 1,000 pound animal is not easy but it is really challenging when she does not want to move. Even with three of us working to move her, we came in at 1/3 of her weight. Rose stubbornly tiptoed into her stall after about 45 minutes of us pulling her and encouraging her with loving clucks which did not interest her in the least.
Of course, our first milking of Rose began entirely in the dark. We don’t have a light in the barn yet and so we navigated clumsily and awkwardly, fumbling with her tiny teats and her full udders. We got around 2 gallons of milk in that first milking and (with the help of our friend Steve who picked up Rose for us in Oklahoma) learned how to milk her by hand and with our handy dandy milking machine. I know, when the grid goes down, we will need to know how to milk her by hand but for now, we are rocking that milking machine and can milk her in about 4 minutes. Thank you electricity.
Rose’s milk is angelically white and it feels like pouring gold into a bucket. Honestly, it’s really freaking good. Not any of us at Ojo Conejo had EVER milked a cow before and I am, once again, proud of us. If you don’t already know this about us, we jump into things before really researching them and then learn as we go. I have called our local vet four times so far to pick his brain about cows and each time he has a good laugh and says to me, “Okay kid, good luck.”
It took Rose about a week to warm up to us. She loves to be scratched behind the knob on her head and on the sides of her neck. To me, she looks like a camel and smells strongly of a small child who has vomited up grass. She has taken to licking us when we are around. I’m not sure if it is a sign of affection or of her needing more minerals (her salt lick is on the way) but either way, her tongue is long and green (from all the alfalfa she eats) and incredibly rough. She licks our hands and pants, our jackets and gloves. She licks our faces and the small of our backs when we bend down to milk her. She also MOO’S loudly whenever we walk away from her, sounding like a prehistoric dinosaur. She moans and moo’s, over and over again until we come back down and sit with her, hand feed her carrots and play Christmas carols for her on the car radio. I know, cows are herd animals and we are trying to remedy her need for companionship. She needs a friend and our pigs and not really good company. Even though Rose and the pigs are only separated by a fence with large holes in it, the pigs mostly ignore her mooing and lay in the sun listlessly, turning their head from time to time in her direction, feigning interest. It is very Charlotte’s Web with an attitude around here. People have recommended that we get goats, donkeys and miniature cows to companion Rose. We will see what animal shows up next.
Rose has been producing so much milk that we have quickly been trying to find a way to turn the milk into a resource for our community: milk, cream and yogurt have to be moved quickly. I am now beginning to understand the questions we will be faced with as a small farm. How much do we sell our products for? How can we make our food accessible to our community AND make money to support the farm? The business of becoming a small farm is starting to make itself more and more relevant. And of course, there is no separation between being a small farm and our community. What does our community need? Who makes up our community? What are their lives and livelihoods like? What does having a small, rural farm in the mountains of New Mexico mean?
I see that Rose is connecting us to the pulse of our community — the needs of our community — and I am having to listen in a different way. Exchanging money in a community now means that we begin to understand what people value in new ways, why they value it and what they don’t value. Becoming a working farm in our community means that we are immersed in a web of commerce, resources, values and connection. It is a complicated web and one I am just starting to get to know. Becoming a resource in this mountain community, while sustaining a small working farm, is going to be a Work of Art.
If you have not yet tried Rose’s milk or yogurt, get yourself some. Yes, this is for locals only right now because we are not into the whole shipping game yet BUT, Ojo Conejo has opened its farm store doors and we are ready for ya. And if you’re not local, we have organic lard and leaf lard ready to ship out to you from our pasture-raised pigs. PLUS, Ojo Conejo hats are now for sale which we are very, very excited about.
You can click right here to go to our farm store and see what we’re up to.
Our chickens love the milk, our kittens love the milk and our pigs can attest to the greatness of Rose’s milk even though they do so stubbornly.
Votes are in — the milk is here to stay.
