Chapter 19

Your Cow Economy

Does it pay to keep a cow? For the last fifteen thousand years and more the answer was too obvious to bother asking. Cattle, more than anything else, were synonymous with wealth. Is the world so different now? We certainly do our cost accounting differently today. Once you have your own cow you will modify the following numbers to fit your circumstances. This chapter can get you started. In the following example I am assuming 165 days of grazing and 200 days of hay feeding.

Item

Cost

Cow

$1,000

Hay, 300 bales @ $5 each

$1,500

Grain, 1,200 pounds/year

$372

Minerals

$50

Loose salt

$50

Kelp

$53

Total for year

$3,025

Additional costs for trucking, fencing, housing, veterinary expenses, pitchforks, and so on are important to keep track of, but you will get a clearer sense of your cow economy if you log them separately.

If the cow is on a no-grain regimen you can deduct the cost of the grain, but you will then need to deduct 20 percent of the milk production.

If the cow freshens at five gallons a day, you dry her off after 290 days, at which point she was giving two gallons a day, that’s an average of about 3.5 gallons per day or 1,015 gallons per year. Cows in commercial herds do a lot better than this and yours may too. But at $4 a gallon that’s $4,060 worth of milk. Deducting the costs of the cow and her feed, you are, in theory, $1,035 ahead. In the second year, when the cow is already paid for, your costs are only $2,025. If you have a $600 heifer calf to sell, you may consider yourself $2,635 ahead.

If you are raising a steer you won’t want to butcher before eighteen months. Both butchering costs and what he may bring at auction vary greatly, but you ought to be able to count on 450 pounds of meat if you choose to butcher.

If a family of four uses a gallon of milk a day, there is an average of two and a half gallons a day to sell, make into value-added products, or feed to other livestock. At this point, if you consider value-added products, the cost accounting can get quite interesting.

If raw milk sales are legal in your area, the two and a half gallons can be sold at the farm gate for at least $6 a gallon. Or you can skim the cream and sell it either as cream or as butter, making from $10 to $20. You can make cheese from either skim or whole milk. Skim milk or excess whole milk can be used as a significant part of the diet of chickens, pigs, or calves, or as fertilizer. Clearly butter is what you do with cream that doesn’t sell. But I would never sell much butter. It is too valuable in the family diet. I like to know what my dairy products are worth, but I keep a cow so that we can have all the high-quality dairy products we want.

Don’t forget that the cow’s manure is also valuable, either as fertilizer on your fields or to sell. Where I live, dried cow manure sells for $7 for a twenty-five-pound bag. But as with butter, I consider the manure to be too valuable to sell.

Note: Calves need whole milk at least until they are grazing well. Many people wean the calf at four months. Other folks prefer to keep the calf on milk for the freedom of once-a-day milking.

My friend who makes cheese every day has two cows. They are on pasture alone and receive no grain, and he milks only once a day and dries them off in winter. In winter they get only hay. He gets about five gallons a day from the two of them in summer and is able to make this into a cheese weighing about two and a half pounds. He sells these for $18 each. These cheeses represent pure profit. We are not counting labor in these examples. He owns the fields, which would be idle and unproductive if he did not have cows. With different management (twice-daily milking, augmented feed) he could of course be making twice as many cheeses.

As explained in chapter 9, “Feeding Your Cow,” under some circumstances it is feasible to keep a cow on grazing and hay with no grain. And it is also well within the scope of a small family to grow a half acre of corn or small grain to provide energy for a cow. Purchased inputs can be greatly lowered with either of these feeding modes, although on most grazing programs production goes down pretty sharply.

These examples suggest ways of rationalizing the income and outgo from a cow. Over the years I have received wonderful reports from cow owners in amazingly varied circumstances detailing their experiences. It is hard to lose money on a cow. But these examples do not begin to encompass the possibilities inherent in a dairy cow. If you sell nothing, not even the calf, you can easily use up her full production feeding pigs and chickens. Pigs and chickens can be fed at almost no expense if you have some land they can run on and they have access to cow manure; they will turn it over to find undigested grain or bugs already at work. Weeds from the garden, fall apples, bread crusts, and much other free food will do as basic diet for pigs and chickens and will keep them going. Muscle growth, egg laying, and reproduction are dependent on a source of animal protein. This your cow can provide. Buttermilk, skim milk, and whey in their diet make success possible with pigs and chickens at virtually no cost. You’ll get pigs with both muscle and fat, and sows capable of large litters, should you wish to breed your own. You’ll get hens that actually lay, not just take up space on the perch, and cockerels that make meaty dinners. With access to summer cow pasture, both chickens and pigs will get a significant part of their protein from bugs.

Ruminants make milk and meat on a diet of plant products. On a similar diet, other animals only fatten and make poor growth; they need a true protein source such as milk before they can build muscle and reproduce. The cow is thus an engine capable of driving the entire nutritional economy of a household. She is the ultimate sustainable-energy vehicle.

The cow does not just provide protein for the other critters on the place. The effect of cow manure on the garden is magical. I go to very little trouble with composting, just starting a new pile occasionally and using up the old one. My garden soil is dark and friable and grows strong, healthy plants with a minimum of effort.

Can you put a price on all this? Maybe. I often read articles, books, and newsletters with suggestions on how to spend less on “lifestyle” so couples can get along on one income. Would home production of virtually all of your food make this possible for you? It will certainly keep you all radiantly healthy.

And another thing. Thrift is my middle name, but those suggestions for feeding the family on day-old bread and making bulk purchases of dry cereal I find depressing. Keeping a cow is more satisfying. One popular writer encourages frugality so that there can be savings in readiness for the children’s orthodontia. I do not find this to be an incentive. If your children are young when you get a cow and they grow up with fresh milk, their teeth will be straight, just as all teeth were meant to be. How much we personally have saved on dental or medical bills would be difficult to state because health insurance costs vary. My emphasis has always been on prevention, not cure. Consequently cure has seldom come into it, but when it does it has a better chance in an already strong constitution built on real food.

• • • •

Anybody Can Do This

Building family health affordably in an urban or suburban setting by shopping at whole-foods stores and farmers’ markets and exercising iron self-control when surrounded by arrays of shining products should in theory be possible. I don’t happen to have seen it done without at least keeping chickens and a vegetable garden. It can certainly be done with goats as the ruminant of choice, although goats offer fewer value-added options and often are more work than a cow. The cow is the most bountiful provider.

If you build family health on the basis of your own soil and animals, you need not worry overly much about the twenty-first-century degenerative diseases. You and your family can have the long-lasting health and good looks you deserve.

Restrictive diets stunt the growth of children and take the satisfactions out of old age. Advocates of restricted diets foster the impression that if you will cut out enough protein and fat and take enough of the vitamin-of-the-week you’ll live forever. So far this has not occurred. What we have achieved is sickly old people and flabby youth. This outcome has not come about from a diet of milk, cream, butter, eggs, and meat, consumption of which has been declining steadily since around 1880. What has increased is consumption of manufactured fats, sugar, and refined carbohydrates. The people who built the stone walls and huge barns of America’s farms did not do it on white bread and margarine. Nor were they assisted by vitamin tablets and capsules. Those vital constituents were found in their food, and they remain in the food of people who produce their own.

I cannot discuss the cost and work of keeping a cow without also considering the true long-term investment in the health and appearance of my family. The cost of my labor cannot be counted in this domestic economy. Nothing else I might have done with my time could have matched the rewards I see.

Cows and grass are recession-proof and inflation-proof. In difficult times, the family with a cow is not poor.