Anyone who has ever owned a milk cow knows that you run on her schedule. There are times when her schedule will collide with yours. Maybe you’re not a full-time rancher and have off-farm responsibilities such as a job. It’s just possible you might even want to take a vacation once in a while. As a ranch wife who’s been juggling cow and human schedules for many years, I’m here to tell you about a couple of helpful strategies. The first is once a day (OAD) milking and the second is calf share milking.
Traditional Milking Schedules
Tradition holds that cows must be milked twice a day. Many traditionalists also hold you have to milk at dawn. I suspect the latter tradition grew out of the need to have daylight hours for fieldwork. You could take a lantern to the barn to milk the cow, but in the days when horse power reigned, you worked fields when you could actually see something. I suspect the other reason was so the ranch wife could get started first thing on making butter and cheese. The tradition was reinforced for those dairies that shipped their milk by rail, as those milk cans had to be on the siding early to get to the town during business hours.
Once a Day Milking
I’ve talked about OAD milking in more detail in this post, but here’s a quick recap. Cows typically stay healthier on OAD milking and can often produce without grain supplementation. The milk has less water in it, but the same amount of milk solids and butterfat. Once cows get used to OAD milking, their total production is typically only about 10% less compared to the traditional twice a day. Conception rates improve and the cows stay in better condition. If she doesn’t have adequate body fat, you have less cream for things like home-made butter and cream cheese. You can milk any time of day as long as you are consistent.
Calf Share Milking
Calf share milking is just what it sounds like – you and the calf share the cow’s output. What we usually do is let the calf run with mama full-time for the first couple of weeks. This helps establish their bond and gets the cow settled into her lactation. Then we pen the calf right next to mama for a few hours. After we milk, Junior goes back with mom until the next day. If we have a real high production cow, we may just leave them together and milk her completely out once a day. Within a couple of hours she’ll have enough milk for the calf again. As the calf gets older, time on his own increases to about 12 hours. We milk in the morning, then let them run together and separate the calf at night.
As with so many other things in this world, there are some traditions that are truly valuable and should be continued. There are others in which “we’ve always done it this way” could be making life more difficult or may even have a negative effect on animal health and time management. I suggest you experiment and decide what works best for you.
