This is a record week at the Haven. We got our first milk cow this week! I can’t even tell you how excited I am for this step in our journey. A milk cow has been my dream for a long time now. Let’s dive into how it happened (quite unexpectedly) and how we handled it (last minute trailer buy and stanchion build anyone?).
We’d mostly decided on beef cows or pigs for 2025, not milk cows. I’d mostly stopped looking for a milk cow.
Enter Dolly. She lived in South Carolina (about 2.5 hours from us), she was listed as A2A2, she had a calf with her, she was stated to have an easy temperament, she was used to hand milking. And best of all, she was COMPLETELY grass fed!
Bryan and I had a confab meeting that day, and decided to make the jump. We reached out, and asked a few questions and worked out details with her owner. And woohoo, we were getting a cow that very weekend…
Except, how were we to get her to our house? Bryan called everyone we knew to get recommendations of a hauler, a trailer we could rent or borrow, anything. Nothing we could work out for the timing we needed. Facebook Marketplace to the rescue, and we bought an old trailer for a decent price. It’s pretty rough, but it worked for what we needed. And now we have it for future livestock needs.
The first morning we had her on property, we chased her around her paddock trying to milk. That wasn’t sustainable, and we didn’t get good milk in our bucket. And it took over an hour.
Emergency, last minute stanchion build, coming up.
I’ll write another post on that, but we built a stanchion in a day. It was pretty crazy. But we milked again this morning (still had some hiccups to work through), and it was much better! Still have sore hands though… I have some muscle development to work on.
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