WHETHER OR NOT YOU MILK a miniature cow, doe, or ewe for your own consumption, if you’re interested in raising miniature livestock, this chapter should interest you. That’s because pure, raw milk, especially goat’s milk, is the ideal milk to feed young livestock raised on a bottle. Goat’s milk is readily digestible by most species, even human babies.
There are countless milk replacers designed for baby livestock, both species-specific and generic, and some are infinitely better than others. But the bottom line is that even the best milk replacers don’t agree with a surprising number of neonatal animals. When on milk replacer, these youngsters struggle with scours and bloat and often fail to thrive. That doesn’t happen when they’re given real, wholesome milk. Full-size and miniature cows and goats provide high-quality nourishment for the young of every species listed in this book. Why not add a milk-maker to your farm? A bonus: Your family can reap the benefits of real milk, too.
Some people keep dairy animals because they prefer to put unpasteurized, non-homogenized, raw milk on the family dinner table. Those who drink it praise raw milk; opponents claim it’s unsafe to consume, even in end products such as butter and cheese. You’ll have to reach your own informed decision, but like millions of other dairy consumers around the globe, at our house we drink it raw.
Others keep dairy livestock for peace of mind. They know the health status and medical history of the animals that produce the milk they serve to their families. They know how the milk was handled and stored and how and when it was worked into butter, yogurt, and cheese.
But if you don’t have a very large family and have no plans to sell your milk, a full-size dairy cow will give you more milk than you need. An average full-size Jersey, one of the smallest of the full-size breeds, produces five to six gallons a day. That’s a lot of milk! What’s a health-conscious, do-it-yourself dairy lover to do? Enter miniature dairy cattle such as Miniature Jerseys, Belfairs, and Dexters. Their output is ideal for a small family’s needs. If it’s sheep or goat milk you prefer, the full-size versions usually meet a family’s needs.
Miniature cows, goats, and sheep all furnish luscious, homegrown milk.
No matter what type of dairy stock you choose, certain facts apply across the board:
To begin producing milk and keep producing it, an animal must periodically give birth. Ordinarily, dairy livestock deliver offspring once a year.
Some individuals “milk through,” meaning they’re capable of milking for a longer time than the norm (sometimes for two to three years and longer) before being rebred, but eventually they will have to be bred and you’ll have to deal with the logistics of raising or selling the resulting offspring.
Dairy animals must be milked every day at the same time(s), in the same place, preferably by the same milker; animals never take long weekends or sleep in.
That said, let me qualify the statement slightly. For maximum output, dairy livestock is milked every day, twice a day, at 12-hour intervals. If this doesn’t suit your lifestyle, however, you may allow your dairy provider to raise her babies (instead of separating them and feeding them by bottle), and milk her just once a day. The usual protocol for milking once a day is to pen the offspring separately at night and milk the mother first thing in the morning. After milking, her young rejoin her and nurse until evening, when they’re shuttled off to their separate quarters again.
Is this cruel? Not at all. Modern dairy animals are bred to give considerably more milk than their natural offspring require. Babies can be fed quality feed in their own hideaway, and in many cases they will grow faster and bigger than if they were raised solely on mother’s milk.
No cow, doe, or ewe provides maximum output year-round; her milk volume will decrease as her lactation progresses. She’ll also require a period of downtime between lactations when she won’t be milking at all. So to count on a continual supply of fresh milk, you’ll need more than one dairy animal.
To milk them you will need proper equipment (see page 215) and a milking area separate from their living quarters. You can’t cut corners to produce quality milk.
For all of their appealing qualities, such as beauty, personality, and the ability to give a lot of milk, cows also have their drawbacks. Even a miniature cow is relatively large and bulky, and when cows are feeling cantankerous, they can be a lot more beef than you care to wrestle with.
Cows also produce a lot of loose, fly-attracting manure. Their large hooves quickly sink deep pocks in damp pastures and turn small enclosures into stinky, mired messes. Unless you practice impeccable sanitation, close neighbors may object to a cow.
Miniature cows are relatively expensive to purchase and feed, they require more room and better pasture than goats and sheep, and relatively few mature cows are accustomed to hand milking, so if you’re a first-time milker, expect to conduct a lengthy search for a trained house cow (or choose something smaller like sheep or goats).
A small cow like this cute Dexter provides enough milk for a typical family of three or four.
Milk and dairy products from healthy, well-fed goats are delicious. Contrary to popular opinion, properly handled goat milk neither smells nor tastes “goaty”; in fact, it tastes like full-cream, home-processed cow milk.
The nutritional differences between cow and goat milk are negligible. Goat milk is slightly higher in calcium, milk solids, and a few vitamins and minerals, but their protein and carbohydrate counts are practically the same.
Smaller fat globules make goat milk easier to digest. And goat milk is whiter because it lacks the carotene that turns the fat in cow’s milk a pale, creamy yellow (goats convert carotene to vitamin A).
A miniature doe can provide enough milk for two people, but because goats are social animals and pine without company, it’s better to keep more than one goat. Excess milk can be made into wonderful goat milk cheeses. Some, like chèvre and goat queso blanco, are so easy that anyone can make them.
Because of miniature goats’ general joie de vivre and all-out affection for their caretakers; their compact, manageable size; low space requirements; and ease of milking, they are arguably the beginner’s best choice for efficient, user-friendly, home dairy animals.
Goats produce far less manure than cows, they don’t attract flies, and their hooves don’t stir up a mess. Because they are browsers rather than true grazers, they thrive on pasture where cows would starve, ridding fields of brush, briars, brambles, and hard-to-rout noxious weeds such as star thistle, leafy spurge, and multiflora rose.
However, intelligent, ingenious goats require secure fencing to contain them. For their safety, never tether any animal in lieu of proper fencing!
A milking stand makes milking goats and sheep a whole lot easier.
Cows have four teats; most sheep and goats have only two.
Cows and goats are generally milked from the side, but sheep are milked from the rear. Goats are traditionally milked from behind in parts of Europe.
Between milkings, milk accumulates within the udder in structures called alveoli before passing through a series of ducts into the gland cistern, the udder’s largest collecting point.
The gland cistern is connected to the teat cistern, a cavity within the teat where milk pools until milking time.
A group of circular sphincter muscles surrounds the orifice at the tip of each teat. When an external force (a calf’s mouth or a milker’s hands) overcomes the strength of the sphincter muscles, they open and stored milk begins to flow.
Producers in the United States rarely think of milking sheep, yet many of the world’s greatest cheeses are crafted of sheep’s milk. Sheep give less milk than cows or goats do, but what they give is marvelously rich, nourishing, and ideally suited for making cheese and ultra-creamy yogurt. High-protein, calcium-rich ewes’ milk contains 6.7 percent fat and 18.3 percent solids, compared with 3.5 percent and 12.1 percent for cows’ milk and 3.9 percent and 11.2 percent for goats’ milk. It takes 10 pounds of cows’ milk and only 6 pounds of sheep’s milk to craft a 1-pound brick of cheese. And a bonus with sheep: You can harvest a wool crop, too.
Because their udders are situated farther back than modern dairy goats’ udders, sheep are traditionally milked from the rear.
Hand milking is a team effort between a milker and the animal he milks. When the milker preps his animal by washing her udder, the hypothalamus in her brain signals her posterior pituitary gland to release a hormone called oxytocin into her bloodstream, causing tiny muscles around milk-holding alveoli (hollow structures in her udder) to contract. In other words, she “lets down her milk.”
If the animal becomes excited or frightened or experiences pain, her adrenal gland secretes adrenaline, which constricts blood vessels and capillaries in her udder and blocks the flow of oxytocin needed for effective milk letdown. Good hand milkers are efficient and patient. They approach milking in a low-key manner, and they practice good milking techniques.
Let’s imagine you’re milking a goat, but whatever the species, the same basic protocol applies. You will need:
Freshly washed hands with short fingernails
A recently sterilized, seamless, stainless steel milking pail
Udder wash and paper towels (or unscented baby wipes work just fine)
Teat dip or an aerosol product such as Fight Bac
A teat dip cup or a pair of disposable 3-ounce paper cups (not needed if you use Fight Bac)
A strip cup with a dark, perforated insert
A milking stand set up in your milking area with grain waiting in the feed cup
It is a good idea to practice before the fact. Collect a strong latex glove, and follow these steps adapted from my favorite foaling book, The Complete Book of Foaling: An Illustrated Guide for the Foaling Attendant, by Karen E. N. Hayes, DVM, MS (see Resources): Poke a tiny hole into one of the glove’s fingertips (this is your makeshift teat), and then pour in 6 ounces of water. Hold the latex “udder” with your free hand. Now, follow the protocol listed below. That’s it! Continue milking till the glove runs dry.
1. Lead the doe to the milking stand, ask her to hop up, and secure her head in the stanchion.
2. Cleanse her udder using your favorite prepping product. Dry each half using a paper towel (omit this step if you’re using baby wipes), then massage her udder for 30 seconds to facilitate milk letdown.
3. Squirt the first few streams of milk from each teat into the strip cup, and examine it for strings, lumps, or a watery consistency that might indicate mastitis (an inflammation of the udder usually caused by infection [see page 136]).
4. Place the milking pail slightly in front of the goat’s udder, sit down next to her, and grasp a teat in each hand (when milking a cow, most people milk the nearest teats first).
5. Trap milk in each teat by loosely wrapping your thumb and forefinger around its base (see illustration 5a). If the teat is larger than a handful, grasp it closer to the orifice end, taking care not to catch the animal’s bag. Gently nudge the doe’s udder with the upper edge of the same hand, and then close off the teat with thumb and forefinger (never allow milk to backflow into the udder). Now, still holding the teat closed, squeeze with your middle finger (see illustration 5b), then your ring finger, and then (if you haven’t run out of teat) your pinkie, in one smooth motion, to force milk trapped in the teat down into your pail (illustration 5c; never pull on an animal’s teats). Relax your grip to allow the cistern to refill and do it again.
6. Alternate teats, squeezing one teat while the other refills.
7. As her teats deflate and become increasingly more flaccid, gently bump or massage the goat’s udder to encourage additional milk letdown. Don’t finish by stripping the teats between your thumb and first two fingers; this hurts and annoys the goat.
8. Pour enough teat dip into the teat cup (or paper cups) to dip each teat in fresh solution and allow the teats to air dry. Alternately, spray the end of each teat with aerosol product until a bead of fluid forms on each tip. Then release the goat and let her jump down.
NEVER pull on an animal’s teat.
If you have more than one cow, doe, or ewe to milk, pour the milk from each into a covered stainless steel milk tote, proceeding through the group until you’re done. Then go straight to wherever you process your milk and get started.
Pour the milk through a stainless steel strainer lined with a milk filter (you can use coffee filters, but they cost more and don’t work nearly as well) into sparkling clean, covered glass containers (lidded canning jars work well), then cool the milk as quickly as you can. Some folks place containers in the freezer for 10 minutes and then transfer them to the refrigerator. Others immerse them in a sink or bathtub of ice water. Secondhand plastic food containers that have been filled with water and frozen make dandy large ice cubes for this purpose. Handled in this manner, raw milk should stay good in the fridge at 40°F (4°C) or cooler for five or six days.
If you’ve ever tasted nasty, “goaty”-flavored goat milk or punky-tasting raw cow’s milk, you’re probably thinking, “Why would I go to a lot of bother for that?”
Rest assured, properly handled raw milk is so fresh and rich tasting that once you’ve tried it you’ll never want store-bought milk again. The key words are: properly handled.
Everything that comes in contact with milk must be squeaky clean. The animal’s belly should be brushed and her udder wiped before milking. The stainless steel bucket into which you milk and the items used to process fresh milk must be sanitized in 10 parts water to 1 part bleach solution after every use.
Milk should be processed as quickly as possible. Milk, go directly to the kitchen, and set to work. Strain the milk and cool it down fast.
The forage and feed a cow, doe, or ewe eats and the scents she inhales can flavor the milk she gives you. Keep a buck in rut with your doe and she’ll give nasty milk; housing her in a stinky barn will produce the same effect. According to the University of California Cooperative Extension’s bulletin “Milk Quality and Flavor,” 80 percent of the off-flavors in goat milk are feed related. This is true for cow’s milk, too.
The best way to avoid off-flavors is to eliminate suspect plants from your milk producer’s diet, and don’t give feedstuffs that are known to sometimes flavor milk (such as alfalfa, soybeans, rye, rape, turnips, cabbage and kale, and clover) within five hours of milking. Plants to avoid entirely include bitterweed, buckthorn, buttercups, chamomile, cocklebur, cress, daisies, fennel, flax, horse-radish, marigolds, mustards, onions, pepperwort, ragweed, sneezeweed, wild carrot, wild garlic, wild lettuce, and yarrow.
And keep in mind that when milk cows, goats, and sheep ingest certain plants that are poisonous to us but not to them, residues end up in your milk supply. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died after drinking cow’s milk tainted with white snakeroot. It can still happen, so be careful.
All milk and the products made from it have the potential to transmit disease-causing organisms to humans, among them pathogens that cause diseases such as tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, listeriosis, E. coli, and salmonella.
Yet millions of people around the world consume raw milk every day without dire consequences. Visit some Web sites or read books on both sides of the raw-versus-pasteurized milk controversy before you decide.
If you choose in favor of pasteurized milk, buy a pasteurizer; if you follow the manufacturer’s instructions, you’ll have properly processed milk every time. Companies like Hoegger Goat Supply, Caprine Supply, and Hamby Dairy Supply sell good ones (see Resources under Miniature Goats).
Barring that, there are several ways to pasteurize milk using everyday kitchen equipment. According to Michigan State University Extension’s publication “Milk Pasteurization,” the safest method is this:
Heat the milk to 165°F (74°C) in a double boiler, and hold at this temperature for 15 seconds while stirring constantly.
Then cool it very quickly. Set the top of the double boiler in cold water, and stir until it reaches 145°F (63°C).
Add ice to the cooling water to cool the milk further, stirring occasionally, until the temperature of the milk falls below 40°F (4°C).
Store the cooled milk in clean, covered containers at a temperature below 40°F (4°C) until used.
When your dairy animal produces more milk than your family or bottle babies can use, freeze some for later. Raw milk freezes better than pasteurized milk, and sheep and goat milk freeze better than the milk from cows. But all milk can be safely frozen with minimal loss in quality — if the milk is handled right.
While we don’t usually endorse storing milk in plastic (it is harder to clean, and some plastics flavor milk stored in the refrigerator), glass containers and freezers don’t necessarily mix. We freeze our surplus milk in secondhand 20-ounce drinking water bottles for several good reasons:
They are readily available (we drink bottled water anyway).
They can be rinsed and recycled after a single use.
They store well in the freezer.
The bottles are the perfect size for our two-person family or for feeding young lambs and kids.
When using plastic water or soda bottles, briefly immerse them in bleach solution, then thoroughly rinse and allow them to dry, upended, in a clean dish strainer for 30 minutes to an hour before filling.
If you freeze milk as soon as it’s cooled and you thaw it slowly in the refrigerator, little or no separation of solids and whey will occur. Don’t freeze milk that’s been sitting in the refrigerator for more than a few hours, and never thaw milk in hot tap water! If you do and the milk separates, it’s still safe to drink but it will look somewhat disgusting.
